TIL I’m not sophisticated lol

(Don’t worry, I’m not offended)

Pick a point in the world. Find the area surrounding it within (an arbitrary) 30 minutes of travel by car under typical traffic conditions.

There are many such points in the world where there are no restaurants at all. If there's one restaurant, then it is the fanciest. If there are two or more restaurants, you can rank them. Without recourse to subjective comparisons, we might hypothesize that a restaurant with a higher average cost per main course is fancier than one with a lower cost.

Without actually doing the GIS searches, my contention is that there are quite a large number of points in the US where a Red Lobster can be considered the fanciest restaurant around.

I don't see why a restaurant being a chain would automatically exclude it from ever being thought of as "fancy", but I guess it depends on your definition of fancy. Serving high-quality, well-prepared food in a decently high-class environment would be "fancy" to me. Would Fogo de Chão (a $50-$70USD/person Brazilian steakhouse) be considered fancy? Nobu is often also considered a fancy restaurant and is also a chain.

Does a "fancy restaurant" require absolute uniqueness? How do you define a "fancy restaurant"?

It's a tricky one. I'd lean towards no, but there are some chains that push up against it. Often ones that are either small and/or where at least some of their restaurants are not "obviously chain restaurants" and often also employing the "trick" of a small number spread across cities that makes it seem "fancier"

As an example, Aqua has restaurants in New York, Miami, Dubai, London, and Hong Kong. Some of them are branded Aqua, but most are not. So while it's a "chain", it feels fancy, perhaps more so than justified. E.g. their London restaurants are perhaps more flashy / "tourist fancy" w/e.g. two restaurants in the Shard, than "actually" fancy. They're mostly pretty mid-range, maybe upper mid-range for London. I think that's about where you'll get to as a chain. To get above that, you get to the level where you expect the restaurant to at least tell you about their chef by name, whether or not they're actually famous enough for you to recognise it.

Yes. Some places in the US are a sea of chain restaurants so “fancy” is relative. People propose marriage at some chains, which I think indicates they think those chains are fancy.

I'd flip the question the other way around.

Why does becoming a chain automatically disqualify a place as being fancy?

I think people apply a lot of assumptions once the word "chain" has entered the chat. They assume they've entered a race to the bottom on costs to maximize profits, but there are plenty of chains that I would still consider on the fancy side. Fogo de Chao and Ruth's Chris, for example.

Is it about "how clean is the place" or about "how clean is the table while we are/after we are done eating"?

I've been in the US plenty of times, but I'm a burger guy, so I made sure I tried all burger chains and as many (indi) restaurants I could. But I've never been in a Red Lobster. I do understand though that lobster-eating can be messy - thus the bib.

I can also picture that cracking lobster 'body-parts' is not the most romantic setup.