If you are a seasoned chauffeur of children, the idea of adding a drive-through window to a restaurant won’t seem like a novel one. You have already spent years of your life shouting food orders into clown faces, dropping the change from a cashier’s hand, and picking cold fries out of car seats. But what about a drive-through window at a slow-food restaurant?
Erin McKool is a mother, lawyer, and co-owner of Start Restaurant. Two years ago, she and her husband, Mike, hired Frank LaRocca, a former district manager for Einstein’s, to research ways to make slow food fast. In hindsight, adding a drive-through seems like a no-brainer. It has proven that people will wait in their cars to buy healthy food. But the move was a bold one for the McKools and LaRocca. “Being a new concept, I really didn’t know if people would get it,” McKool says. “But it’s where we do 60 percent of our business.”
