Michael Whiteman has been thinking about how people eat lunch since the mid-1970s, when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey hired his young restaurant-consulting firm to develop the dining options for the original World Trade Center, which had recently risen on the southern tip of Manhattan. This was a part of town with little surrounding culinary infrastructure: The neighborhood had been mostly bulldozed for the towers’ construction. The authority recognized that it was about to bring 50,000 office workers—plus visitors and tourists—into the complex, and they’d all need places to eat, especially at lunch.

Whiteman and his partner, Joseph Baum, commissioned researchers to organize focus groups and survey Manhattan office workers on how they actually ate—how many packed lunch, where those who went out to eat were going, how much the average person spent, and even what percentage of workers ate no lunch at all. From this came a complex of restaurants that included both the famed Windows on the World and the country’s first major food court, the Big Kitchen, described by Alice K. Turner of New York magazine as “probably the chief reason that New Yorkers have partly forgiven the World Trade Center for existing at all.”

“It was a way of feeding a lot of people at modest prices in a very short space of time,” Whiteman explains now. It doesn’t sound like much of a revelation these days—anyone who’s been to a Whole Foods around lunchtime is all too familiar with the concept—but that shows just how revolutionary the Big Kitchen was. Like many U.S. cities of the mid-20th century, New York was a town of mom-and-pop lunch counters, corporate cafeterias, and white-tablecloth service. With a raw bar, a barbecue stall, and a design by Milton Glaser, the Big Kitchen was decidedly aspirational. Since the ’70s, of course, the idea of the food court has been corrupted by developers who’ve stuck one into every mall, airport, and stadium, but that doesn’t diminish the significance of Baum and Whiteman’s insight. The fact is, we’re only now seeing their idea come into full flower. Almost 25 years after the Big Kitchen was destroyed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the biggest idea in dining is the food hall, where a range of different vendors come together in one large, convenient space and sell simple, hearty food to a diverse range of people. Dinner may be perpetually glamorous, and breakfast might be having a fast-food moment, but if you’re looking for the real driver of innovation in cuisine today, it’s lunch.

Lunch itself was an innovation. Formalizing an official third meal between breakfast and dinner didn’t happen until the middle of the 19th century, says Rebecca Federman, a librarian for the New York Public Library’s Culinary Collections and the co-curator of Lunch Hour NYC, an exhibition the library staged in 2012. For eons, “luncheon” was a snack people took into the fields, “as much food as one’s hand can hold,” according to Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary. Lunch as we know it evolved as we migrated away from manual labor to jobs that take place in offices. You need something to break up the monotony of the workday—why not go get some food?

Childs Restaurant, opened in New York’s Financial District in 1889, introduced the self-service cafeteria and became one of the first chain restaurants in America. The automat, invented in Germany, first appeared in the U.S. in 1902 in Philadelphia. Favorites there included tuna on white bread (sliced bread itself being a recent invention), beef stew, and macaroni and cheese, washed down with coffee that was brewed fresh hourly and flowed at a consistent temperature from brass spigots shaped like dolphin heads. At the automat’s peak, more than 70 million cups a year were sold. For better or worse, the automat was about commodity food, favoring ease of distribution over variety, health, and taste. You can draw a straight line from the automat to America’s fast-food boom that’s both figurative and literal: Many of the last automat locations were converted into Burger Kings in the 1970s.

If anything has conspired to bring an end to that kind of dull, boring thinking, it’s globalization. Technology, social media, and consumer education have all conspired to bring more food, at reasonable prices, to just about anyone, anywhere, at any time. “Now, whatever you want—pizza, pho, salad, tacos, Thai—you can have it,” says Sabato Sagaria, chief restaurant officer for Union Square Hospitality Group. “I view it as never wanting to waste a meal.”

Run by celebrated restaurateur Danny Meyer, USHG is as famous for its fine dining establishments Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern as it is for Shake Shack, the “better burger” chain it started in 2004. What began as a kiosk in New York’s Madison Square Park is now its own publicly traded company with 100 locations, including ones in Moscow, Tokyo, and Abu Dhabi. At $5.29 for a single patty in the U.S., the burgers are more than twice as expensive as what you might get at McDonald’s. But they’re made with never-frozen 100 percent Angus beef prepared on-site and served on rolls made by a family-run company in Pennsylvania.

Consumers today have a “deep-rooted suspicion of manufactured food,” Whiteman says. “Especially in urban areas, people are willing to spend a little more time and a little more money to get significantly higher quality than was available before.” The average American drops $11 on lunch, according to a survey taken by Visa last year; 1 percent of respondents said they average $50 per day. Credit Chipotle for some of this: E. coli outbreaks aside, the restaurant created the blueprint for just about every “fast-casual” chain to come along after it, Shake Shack included. The idea was to offer high-quality, locally sourced food for only a little bit more than someone would pay at Taco Bell. Instead of seasoned ground beef, we got barbacoa. Ketchup and mustard weren’t enough anymore: We had to put guacamole on everything.

Above all, the post-Chipotle consumer wants to “be connected to their food,” says Nicolas Jammet, one of the three founders of the salad chain Sweetgreen. He and his partners were still undergrad business majors at Georgetown when they started the company in 2007. “We wanted a place to eat every day that made us feel good,” Jammet says. “So you feel like you can go out and make a great decision with your dollars—for the community, for farmers, and for your body.” Nine years after opening its first store just off campus, Sweetgreen has 54 locations and a fanatical following of roughage lovers who line up out the door for its signature salads: the Rad Thai (organic arugula and mesclun greens, shredded cabbage, citrus shrimp, and spicy cashew dressing) and the Guacamole Greens (organic mesclun, avocado, roasted chicken, tortilla chips, lime-cilantro-jalapeño vinaigrette). Told you so on the guacamole thing.

The sheer variety of what’s available for lunch is astounding, especially to anyone who’s been working long enough to remember those corner deli salad bars with the dry romaine lettuce and pale, watery tomato chunks piled behind Plexiglas sneeze guards. Sagaria says he sometimes picks a lunch place by walking around USHG’s Manhattan headquarters and looking for takeout packaging he doesn’t recognize. “People are exploring culinary options from their desks,” he says, with a touch of awe. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I heard about this new poke place. I need to order it.’ ” That savvy employee had probably ordered from Wisefish Poké, a Manhattan-based shop hoping to make Hawaiian raw fish bowls the next big food phenomenon. On the West Coast, the leading poke purveyor is Santa Monica, Calif.-based Sweetfin Poké, whose ownership group includes David Swinghamer, who helped Meyer popularize Shake Shack.

If you aren’t yet convinced that the midday meal is the center of our dining-verse, consider the list of chefs who’ve gotten into the lunch game in the last few years: ramen master David Chang, who hosted the first season of Netflix’s Mind of a Chef and whose Maple delivery service has gotten rave reviews; Top Chef head judge Tom Colicchio, who opened his first ’Wichcraft sandwich shop in 2003 and now looks like a wizard for getting in on the trend so early; and former White House chef Sam Kass, who used to cook for the Obamas but left in 2014 to start a meal-delivery service called Sprig. As for Whiteman, the co-creator of the food court is still running his restaurant consulting firm. The firm is working on a food hall project, though he won’t disclose the location.

Even automat-style commodity food is making a reimagined comeback. For the past year, San Franciscans have been lining up around the block to get lunch at a place called Eatsa, where they punch an order into an iPad and receive a $6.95 meal from a hole in the wall. The chain (slogan: “better, faster food”) has already spread to Los Angeles; this fall, the first Eatsa will open in midtown Manhattan. The concept seems novel. It’s quick. And the ingredients are fresh and healthy, if not exactly exciting. Eatsa’s house specialty, the foundation for every dish, is quinoa.

Editor: Bret Begun