Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
- Fast-food salads are often looked down upon as menu afterthoughts best avoided, but many chains have seriously improved their salad offerings lately.
- We tried salads from several major national fast-food chains — Burger King, Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s.
- McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A’s salads are shockingly good, while others miss the mark.
The fast-food salad: an oxymoron? A pointless exercise in trying to be healthy? A grave mistake to be avoided? Fast-food salads have a bad reputation — the afterthoughts of the chain menus, half-heartedly made and forgotten amidst the glistening burgers and fries.
But somehow, these grab-and-go containers of lettuce have improved vastly over the years.
While they started off as a weak olive branch in the 2000s, aimed at placating health nuts who complained about chains’ glut of fats and dearth of healthy choices, many chains have seriously stepped up their salad game.
Gone are the days of iceberg lettuce and goopy ranch — think fruits, beans, mesclun, cabbage, and pomegranate vinaigrettes.
We decided to try salads from several major national fast-food chains — Burger King, Chick-fil-A, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s — to see how far they’ve come, and to find out who makes the best salads around:
Interestingly, all of the salads offered from these chains are centered around chicken. Some chains, like McDonald’s and Burger King, allow you to choose which kind of chicken to add — be it grilled or fried — while others don’t ask.
Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Burger King’s Chicken Club Salad
Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Burger King used to be my favorite chain as a kid, but in my aged wisdom I have come to find that the quality is severely lacking on the whole. This sentiment extends to its salads.
The grilled chicken is bland, stringy, and boring. The quality isn’t awful otherwise — there’s romaine lettuce, the Ken’s Steakhouse ranch dressing is solid, and the tomatoes seem … decent. But it’s lackluster. If “decent” is the best thing to be said, there may be an issue.
Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
There’s nothing exciting about this salad. And sure, I realize salads aren’t expected to be the Carnivale of meals, but a little pizzazz would be appreciated. The extremely salty bacon is a footnote at best, and the chicken is simply … there. It’s boring. The fact that I paid $ 7.49 for this feels a little insulting.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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