Nostalgia Cooked
September 29, 2026
No. 15

“Hands, please”

The twenty seconds that matter more than any ticket time, why apple pie might be the most American thing that was never American and three things worth your time this week, including a Seattle spot I can't stop gazing at on Instagram.

Coffee, then read on.

- Chef Tim

You can walk into a fast food restaurant now and never talk to anyone. Order on a kiosk, pay on the screen, wait for your number and grab the bag. Or order on your phone and skip most of that. It works. I do it all the time.

A 2026 study of 753 visits to major quick-service restaurants found that more than 27 percent of customers weren't acknowledged when they entered. Nearly 22 percent left without hearing a basic thank you. At the same time, these restaurants got faster. The average order took just over four minutes, a full minute quicker than the year before.

McDonald’s is now retraining more than two million employees with a renewed focus on hospitality. Burger King is emphasizing staffed counters in its new restaurant designs. Wendy’s is reviewing how AI fits into its drive-throughs. After years of kiosks, apps, and automation, some of the biggest restaurant companies in the world are starting to pay attention to something that is difficult to measure on a ticket time report: how people feel when they walk into the restaurant.

In every good kitchen I have worked in, there is a very simple rule. When you come in, you say hello. When you leave, you say goodbye.

It sounds almost stupid to call that a rule, but it matters. Walking into the kitchen, clocking in without saying anything and rolling straight into your shift sends a message. You are here to work your station and go home. Saying hello tells everyone that you are here, you are ready to work and you are part of the team today. Saying goodbye acknowledges the people you just spent ten or twelve hours working beside.

Hospitality at a fast food restaurant doesn't need to be complicated. Someone looks up when you walk in. Someone helps the person who can't figure out the kiosk. Someone hands you your food and says thank you. These interactions might last twenty seconds during the entire visit.

I think acknowledgment is one of the easiest parts of hospitality to underestimate. You don't have to know my name or remember my order. Just recognizing that I walked into your restaurant changes the experience. I would much rather return to a place where one employee was genuinely nice to me than one where everything worked perfectly and I never spoke to another person.

This becomes more important as restaurants use more AI. McDonald’s and Wendy’s are already experimenting with AI ordering systems, and Fortune reported this summer that consumer surveys still show a strong preference for ordering from people. The useful question for restaurants isn't how many employees AI can replace. It is what those employees can do with the time the technology saves.

I use the apps. I use the kiosks. I want restaurants to get faster and more efficient. I just don't want us to confuse a successful transaction with hospitality.

You can have the best technology in the world and still look up when someone walks through the door to say hello.

Before service, the whole crew huddles up and someone tells the story behind the food. Pull up a crate, you’re on the line tonight.

Biting into a cold slice of apple pie is one of my favorite parts about living in this great country where we can pretty much do whatever the hell we want to do.

I love apple pie. I love it cold more than warm. I love it after apple picking in Upstate New York. I love it on Thanksgiving night when I am already so full I can barely move, but somehow a slice of pie still seems like a good idea.

For something so American, apple pie has a funny history. The apples aren't from here, and neither is the pie. The ancestors of the apples we eat today came from modern Kazakhstan. They made their way west into Europe, where people were baking apples and other fruits into pastry long before the United States existed. Europeans eventually brought domesticated apples across the Atlantic and planted orchards throughout the colonies.

In American Food: The Gastronomic Story, Evan Jones writes about the theory that the American fruit pie tradition may have developed with the Pennsylvania Dutch. Pie plates were being made in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s. Jones cites historian Frederick Klees, who believed soldiers traveling through Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War ate these pies and brought the idea home with them.

Then in 1796, Amelia Simmons published American Cookery, the first known cookbook written by an American and published in the United States. It contained two recipes for apple pie. Today, there are thousands of apple pie recipes on the internet. During the 230 years in between, people kept making it. One cook changed the crust. Another used the apples growing nearby. Someone added more cinnamon. Families wrote recipes on index cards and shoved them into kitchen drawers. Restaurants put their own versions on menus. Eventually we ended up with so many variations that there probably isn't one recipe we could all agree is the American apple pie.

My version came from Chef George Higgins, my professor in culinary school.

His apple pie is still the greatest I've ever tasted. More importantly, it was the first thing I made from culinary school for my family. I had spent two years away learning how to cook, and making that pie was how I showed them what I had been doing.

I don't think I'll ever forget the look on their faces when they tasted it. I couldn't believe I had learned how to make something that could have that effect on people. I made the same pie every Thanksgiving after that. George Higgins' recipe became our Thanksgiving apple pie.

That seems to be what Americans have been doing with apple pie for hundreds of years. We get a recipe from somewhere, adjust it to our kitchen and eventually somebody else learns it from us.

Apple pie keeps evolving as we do. Two recipes in 1796 became thousands. An apple from Kazakhstan became something we pick every fall in Upstate New York. A pie with roots across the Atlantic became the food we use to describe something as American.

None of it started here, which might be the most American thing about it.

Apple pie deserves better than coffee this week. I’m pairing it with Château d’Yquem, one of the great sweet wines of Bordeaux. It has all these flavors of honey, apricot, citrus and spice that feel right at home next to warm apples, cinnamon and a buttery crust.

Is a bottle of d’Yquem a ridiculous thing to open with apple pie? Probably. But I’m here for perfection and nothing less because I am the best boy.

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