I agree the slice of life vibe of GR, outside of the main story, makes the franchise so wonderful. It doesn't always work well (Zoey...), but for the most part it does.
I say this because I was just thinking of the waitress side missions. In the first you have to hand out flyers ("using every means necessary") which basically comes down to racing through the city while searching for people to knock over on purpose with Gravity slide. In the second you have to catch people with stasis and literally throw them to the stand you're advertising for. In the end I had people running away in terror while Kat ran after them with stasis as the metaphorical butterfly net.
There were no extra objectives either. Just hand out 50 or so flyers and gather 40 people at the stand and you're done. It's short, audacious and a lot of fun.
Same goes for the newspaper mission, by the way, although with less screaming NPCs.
