[chmod775]

> That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus.

As a rule (non fast-food) restaurants are very expensive in the US compared to most places in Europe.

Poland is on the extreme end when it comes to high quality food being extremely cheap. In Berlin it isn't terribly hard to get a healthy and large meal for 4-8 euros at a restaurant for me, but even I was surprised visiting Poland when pretty much every restaurant outdid and undercut that.

[unishark]

> As a rule (non fast-food) restaurants are very expensive in the US compared to most places in Europe.

This depends how you define fast food. Which by the way is already a massive segment in the US versus other places. There's a whole range of restaurants in the middle that serve cheap food that you stand in line to order, often serving working-class people, but aren't technically fast food. Maybe not so many in the expensive gentrified area adjacent to a big university of course.

[rndgermandude]

Speaking as another German, fast food is used synonymously with "junk food" here, referring to either fast and unhealthy food (burgers, fries, "fish and ships" in the UK, Currywurst, everything greasy/fatty, etc), or food with large amounts of problematic additives, or fast and low quality stuff.

E.g. there is a tiny Vietnamese place around here that's very fast, but also very tasty, very fresh and reasonably priced (6-10 EUR). They are fast as "fast food", but lack the other "qualities" of junk food, so nobody around here would refer to them as fast food.

Döner (kebab) shops are somewhere in the middle. They offer unhealthy stuff (tons of - depending on the shop, low grade - kebab meat on a Döner for example) as well as a range of veggies and less greasy meals.

[pyuser583]

Really!? Not my experience - was last in Europe 10 years ago - VAT tax made eating out more expensive.

I thought it was VAT tax. Everyone said it was VAT tax.

[anyfoo]

I don't understand this comment. Were you, for example, in Switzerland, Italy, or the Czech Republic, all of which have vastly different prices? (And their own autonomic tax laws, too!)

[pyuser583]

Good point - UK.

[_-___________-_]

Not sure where you were, and what restaurants you were going to, but eating out is quite normal in most of Europe and is generally inexpensive if you don't go to a fancy place. Certainly far cheaper for a non-fast-food meal than I've found the US to be.