TL;DR - Yes, Ancient Roman cities had fast food outlets; No, they didn’t have drive-throughs because most vehicles were prohibited except when making deliveries at set times .
You just tagged me, and it pushed so many buttons, because our research for “Games” (optioned twice so far, though not produced either time) showed us that when it comes to comparing Ancient Roman eating habits with now - and particularly the US - the similarities are remarkable.
The usual name (though see below) was a “thermopolium”, meaning “Hot Food Here”, and archaeologists estimate there were about 300 thermopolia in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
This sounds like a lot, but lower-class Roman tenement dwellings (”insulae”) were usually just somewhere to sleep; there was no bathroom, no toilet and no kitchen. So besides their work all other parts of citizens’ lives, from bathing and eating to peeing and pooping, also happened away from home, in non-domestic facilities like public baths, public latrines (the Guilds of Fullers and Tanners thank you for your contributions) and eating-houses like thermopolia, tabernae and popinae.
The archaeologists think these three words may have been interchangeable, or subject to dialect variations, but saying that Ancient Rome had Diners, Drive-ins and Dives is as close to true as makes no never-mind. There were no Roman “fine dining” restaurants, since meals of that category would be eaten at home with invited guests as part of social networking, but though upper-class Romans looked down on the D, D-I & D establishments, there’s written evidence that they ate from them regardless.
Think of them as a cross between fast-food outlets, gastropubs and tapas bars.
Here are a few examples of real ones, all similar but each different:
Pots of prepared food were set in those counter recesses. I haven’t found out if there was a way to keep it hot, but the design looks like there might have been a charcoal brazier at one end sending hot air through the counter-space on the same principal as a hypocaust (Roman under-floor central heating), otherwise why make the counter of stone rather than wood?
@dduane suggests it may be because old bricks and broken rubble were easier to find, but IMO these were built with more care than just “because it’s cheap”.
The second two have a side that obviously faces the street (they would all have done, it’s just more obvious in those pics) which is where takeaway would have happened. Customers wanting to eat in would have moved along the indoor side of the L-shaped counter.
As for takeaway, it didn’t include Drive-In or Drive-Through as we’d know it. Roman cities were almost entirely pedestrian so Walk-In or Walk-Through was more likely, but there might be a certain amount of Stop-In-Front-For-Takeaway by hungry deliverymen, ignoring vulgar cries in Vulgar Latin along the lines of “get that bloody cart out of the bloody way!”
Even then it wouldn’t happen at peak times since, except for unusual circumstances, deliveries were restricted to and had to be completed within set hours before and after the business day. Roman writers including Martial and Pliny bitch about being woken at early o’clock by squeaky axles, braying mules and swearing drivers as fresh provisions arrived for sale.
This reconstruction shows the ruts in the road for cart-wheels…
…and these are the real thing, which along with the frequent crossing-stones restricted what size of vehicle could enter the city: local delivery wagons drawn by a single mule, yes, out-of-town heavy freight drawn by a yoke of oxen, no.
There’s a longstanding chicken-and-egg argument over what came first, carts making ruts in soft lava rock, or ruts cut into rock to control carts. Since ruts of the same size (supposedly recycled in the Industrial Revolution as the size of Standard Gauge railway track, YMMV on that) appear on roads in other parts of the Empire which aren’t made of soft lava rock, my two sesterces is on deliberate cutting.
Okay, so what kind of food did these places serve? Those keep-hot pots (dolias) would have contained vegetables like onions, carrots, leeks, cabbage, etc., also stews of beans, lentils, fish and some cheap kind of meat; since this was poor or at least not-rich people’s food, that meat would have been the inner bits most modern diners don’t want to know about. Not that organ meat worried the Romans; they were nose-to-tail diners in the way that was common throughout history until about 150 years ago.
This 1st-century terracotta relief supposedly shows a basic meal of fish, bread (top left), possibly cheese (bottom left) and an egg (bottom right); there’s a knife (top) and spoon (bottom) to eat with, a cup and a pannier for drink. So far so good.
However IMO what it may show is a kitchen table in the classic cookery demo top-down view. Those two fish are about to be cut up using the knife (top centre right with a curved horn(?) handle and possibly a sheath) then cooked in the pan on the right. There’s a spoon to stir and taste (bottom right), and the egg, bread and cheese(?) are either other ingredients or meant to accompany the pieces of cooked fish when they go into the bowl at top centre left.
Okay, I’m guessing; but it’s a fair guess. :->
Fast food would also have included bread, fresh and dried figs and other fruit, olives, cheese, honey, shellfish, eggs raw and hard-boiled, dried and smoked meat and fish, olive oil and, inevitably, garum, the (in)famous Roman fish sauce to which the entire Empire was addicted. They had FACTORIES to make the stuff though like tanneries, they were built well away from human - or at least wealthy - habitation.
Internet pages delight in focussing on the “Ew, rotted fish guts!” aspect; the Romans for their part would have looked at tomato ketchup and said “hang on, tomatoes are deadly nightshade in a party frock” before falling on them with delight because Ancient Roman recipes suggest a real fondness for sweet-sour. Anyway garum’s not rotted, it’s fermented with lots of salt like Worcestershire and Tabasco.
You know how modern foodstuffs are packaged in distinctive containers so you can spot them easily? Garum did it too.
Some Roman fast-foods were surprisingly familiar: kebabs (meats grilled on spits, including more inner bits); pizza (more of a foccacia or flatbread, drizzled with oil, sprinkled with herbs, topped with cheese and / or bits of meat or smoke-cured salami); burgers (grilled chopped-meat patties using yet more inner bits) and hot-dogs (various sausages including the famous Lucanian Sausage, smoked pork with herbs and pine-nuts).
We don’t know if Roman bakers produced small loaves - what we’d know as buns - for the sausages and burgers; it’s more likely that if eaten modern-style, they’d be seasoned with pepper and a dash of garum, then rolled in a flatbread wrap or put into a split section of the standard Roman panis quadratus loaf, like these on a Pompeii fresco…
…or this actual loaf, somewhat overbaked by Mount Vesuvius.
As mentioned before, there was no ketchup, but there were several kinds of mustard from mild to pungent, including ones made with water, wine, vinegar, honey and of course garum.
The Romans didn’t have popcorn (like tomatoes, maize was still an Atlantic Ocean away) but roasted crunchy chickpeas - in new leek’n’garum flavour! - were a direct equivalent.
Some of what follows is known historical fact; some of the rest is logical extrapolation from research for our “Games” project.
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