Two decades ago, when I was cooking at restaurants in France, one of the conventions I found most endearing and appealing was what was known as the “family meal.”

At the time, French restaurant workers’ compensation typically included lunch and dinner at the restaurant, and so each day, one kitchen employee was charged with preparing the staff’s meals. Then, before each sitting, the entire crew would gather in one area of the restaurant and dine together.

The idea was simple, but the effect was profound. Those pre-shift mealtimes helped teams of employees gel in a way we would never have managed otherwise. Dining together each day solidified our working relationships, facilitated communication between team members and created a sense of camaraderie that made the frantic work in a Michelin three-star more tolerable.

In effect, our workplace “family meals” had much the same impact that real family meals appear to have on real families. As Time magazine reported earlier this year, a 2005 study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found that kids who eat with their parents are happier overall and perform better in school. This likely helps explain why the number of adolescents eating with their family most nights has increased 23 percent since 1998.

But the fact that Americans spend more than half of their food budgets on meals eaten away from home seems to suggest that those shared mealtimes don’t necessarily take place in the family kitchen or dining room. The operative question, then, is how can quick-service chains bolster their dinnertime credentials, create some big news around their evening menus, and snare a greater share of these family meal occasions? And the answer begins with understanding the distinctive, defining elements that make the evening meal different.

The family dinner is ritual and a ceremony of sorts as well. So the fact that we don’t all show up for the occasion in our Sunday best doesn’t mean we, as a society, don’t favor a splash of formality at the dinner hour. McDonald’s seems to have taken this observation to heart by giving thousands of its restaurants a Starbucks-inspired makeover, in which the outlets will be outfitted with leather chairs, plasma televisions, and wireless internet access, all of which lend a bit of upscale cachet that’s particularly appropriate for the dinner hour. There’s no question that certain settings seem more “dinnerworthy” than others, and McDonald’s move in this direction just might prompt other chains to follow suit.

That’s one way to lend the dinner hour a bit of sophistication; another has to do with actual mealtime mechanics. Quiznos’s Flatbread Chopped Salads have come packaged with metal forks, in a clear sign that this dish is meant to command one’s full attention. When you get right down to it, the very fact that a dish demands a knife and fork removes it from the realm of harried, on-the-go, handheld meals.