By Jim Duncan CVFDude@aol.com

In my better fantasies, there are no fast food franchise restaurants. In real life, their brands have been seared on every exposed part of the communal mind. And those of you who write to us express considerable interest in them. So, by popular demand, I recently set off on a three week safari of Central Iowa joints that I normally wouldn't visit. My primary purpose was to answer the question "What are the ten best fast foods available at drive-by windows in Des Moines?" (That's coming next week.) Readers have explained that, in summertime, it's not always feasible to park the car and run indoors to pick up orders - you can't just leave small children or pets in a hot car. So, we limited our search to places that have drive-by windows.

To simulate the experience of an overworked soccer mom, I took my dog Sam along, lest I be tempted by the convenience of indoor dining. Altogether, we visited 15 different places at least twice each. All but one was a chain outlet. Because advertising and fast food are interdependent industries, we tried to order everything that had been the subject of an ad campaign in the last year. If a company invests $50 million or more to tout a new product, it must have some meaning. But what?

Most ads could be explained by economics. Now that chicken prices are incredibly low, almost everybody has a chicken campaign. Hoping to raise prices without losing customers, several places are promoting new premium coffees. Salads are the great inroad to the growing female market. But how do you explain cheap deli style sandwiches? Two of Des Moines' best chefs confided that they secretly crave such sandwiches from Arby's and Hardee's, and Iowa icon Tom Arnold is spokesman for Arby's Market Fresh line. So we needed an answer.

We found these sandwiches have two exceptional qualities. 1.) Price, particularly the "mix a melt" deal at Arby's which delivered meat & cheese sandwiches for $1.25 each. 2.) Arby's Market Fresh line has no deli competition in the metro for drive-by service. None of the Subway-genre joints we drove by offered the convenience.

Those deli style sandwiches also stuck out for their restraint. Amid all the obesity awareness, we were surprised to find that the "excessive empty calorie lover" is still a major market target. Despite lawsuits, media overload and political persuasion, the industry is still overloading dreadful sauces and strange combinations between sides of a bun. In this game, Hardee's has no peer and their "Philly Cheesesteak Monster Thick Burger" bats clean-up. Its name gets the truth in advertising award too - no confusion, no cuteness, no animated mascot. It was what it claimed to be - thick and monstrous.

There is a myth that McDonald's usually delivers better service than competitors, because it pays more. If that latter part is true, they are wasting their money at the stops we made. Service was awful over all. Each time I explained that I was a new customer and needed advice about the menu. The most common response was, "Ummmm," or nothing at all. The second most common response was to remind me that I was holding up a line. The rare exceptions - Culver's, Coney Island and Popeye's - became highlights of the safari. Service was typically so disinterested that when I visited Popeye's on Merle Hay Road, I became punch drunk just to deal with personable people who showed a knack for engaging their customers. That staff always described dishes enthusiastically and even delivered a paper menu to my car. One time, an attendant asked about Sam's sex and breed, adding "If I was a she-dog, I'd be wanting to have his babies." Coming from a dispenser of chicken, he took that as a compliment. We will both return to Popeye's simply because employees make it a good experience.

That is probably the highest compliment one can pay to fast food service.

(This week's Food Dude is the first of a two-part series about fast food.)

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