In case you are one of those people that can easily see your toes when you look down, you might have missed the news that Wendys is rolling out their breakfast menu nationwide. This news is all very new and very exciting to us fat people. How new and exciting is it? In the 11 days since my local Wendys went live with their breakfast menu, I have eaten every menu item on it. Yes, my cholesterol is atrocious, why do you ask?
I am not speaking in hyperbole when I say that this is the best thing to happen to civilization since the invention of electricity. McDonalds rolled out their breakfast chicken sandwiches which, whatever. Yea, we have a piece of chicken. We will slap it between a Mcgriddle and a biscuit. That’ll show Popeyes who is boss!
Meanwhile, Wendys just went and said “You know what the people really want? An egg on our Baconator! And so they did. And they did a bunch of other stuff too, which is also great. I’m aware that Wendys has had breakfast for some time now, and I actually ate Wendys breakfast in an airport terminal a few years ago. It…was not great. But I love Wendys, and was definitely willing to give them another shot, and I’m glad I did, because, ohhh boy, Wendys does not care for your quinoa and fruit breakfast, sir. Oh, you rode 25 miles on your Peloton this morning? I hope you choke on your steel cut oatmeal.
Wendys isn’t here for you calorie counting, recumbent bicycle owning, farmers market on the weekend in your hybrid types. The new breakfast is for people that get dirty for a living. Septic Tank Installers. Carnival Strong Men, the criminally insane.
So with that in mind, I’ve ranked the new breakfast menu from best to worst. Enjoy
1: Breakfast Baconator
Calories: 730
You know that sandwich your cardiologist specifically tells you not to eat, and then you ignore her because you once heard a famous person say “It’s better to flame out than fade away?” And you know how nobody has a damn clue whether eggs are healthy or not and the debate has battled on for so many decades that a joke was made about it on the Simpsons back when it was good?
The fine folks in R&D at Wendys decided that this was the time and this was the moment to unleash the Breakfast Baconator on the world, and let me tell you something. IT. GODDAMN. SLAPS. After one bite, my first instinct was to unhinge my jaw like a snake so I could fit the entire sandwich in my mouth at the same time. It’s literally a baconator with an over easy style egg on it. They replaced the regular burger patty with a sausage patty. Oh, and just for good measure, they drizzle swiss cheese sauce on it.
Don’t walk, run to Wendys for th….actually. Don’t run. If you are drooling about this right now, your knees are probably in a state of disrepair similar to mine. Just drive. It’s totally fine. The fine folks at Wendys won’t judge you. Not like those snooty jags at Panera.
2: Honey Butter Chicken Biscuit
Calories: 500
This is the chicken sandwich that McDonalds doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to do. If I’d have known they were only 500 calories, I wouldn’t have stopped at three. Take that, doctor appointed dietician who keeps forcing something called the “Mediterranean Diet” on me!
Remember the threesome scene in Wild Things? This sandwich is that scene in breakfast form. It’s satisfying and leaves you a little sweaty afterwards.
This sandwich is actually a bit of a delicate balancing act because, if you put too much of the honey butter on the chicken, it can become cloying, which is a word I’ve heard on Food Network before and think means “too sweet.” Not enough, and it lacks what makes this sandwich so good in the first place. But the perfect balance is a mouthgasm in every bite.
3: Classic Egg, Bacon and Cheese Sandwich
Calories: 350
There is something to be said for a classic done right. There is something that I don’t feel people talk about enough when the conversation of fast food comes up: the bun. When I was 16, I worked at Burger King, and during the winter, the rats would burrow into the trays of buns and eat their way through, like gluten locusts. I’ve never taken BK buns seriously, since. Also, remember when the King from their ads was a weird stalker dude who would chase women down dark alleys and just when the woman was going to scream out to the cops, the mascot presented her with a Whopper?
McDonalds knows that if you toast a bun, it can sometimes hide how stale the bun actually is. I see through the bullshit, McDonalds. Also a totally true story: I used to work out in the boondocks until 2am every night. If I’d had a particularly stressful night, I’d stop at the only open restaurant on the way home, which was a McDonalds. Something weird would begin to happen. On random nights, they would say that their credit card system wasn’t working and could only pay in cash. Then, on other nights, it was totally fine.
It took around 3 months of this back and forth before I realized that the employees on the shift were just super lazy and would announce that their credit card machine wasn’t working whenever there were multiple cars in the drive through. On nights when it was empty, the credit card machine always magically worked. I quit going there out of spite, which I realize now is exactly what they wanted.
So screw off, McDonalds buns.
A good Wendys bun, though? It’s airy and light. It keeps its structural integrity until food consumption is finished. It doesn’t overpower the food. It accents it. I must have shown up on new bun day, because it was the perfect vessel for the egg, bacon and cheese. Too often, chain restaurants are trying to slap a miniscule amount of food into a bagel, which is roughly the equivalent of putting Kate Moss into 76 Cadillac Eldorado. You can, but honestly, what’s the point? It needs more food girth to look right.
The Wendys bun, though? Good bun to food ratio, and sometimes, that’s all you can ever ask for. Plus, of all the fast food branches, isn’t Wendys the one you trust the most with bacon? They have earned that.
4: Seasoned Potatoes
Calories: 230
Ok, so I was not expecting much from Wendys version of home fries, which is essentially what these are. Normally, when you get a home fry, it’s a bigger piece of potato that gets a quick fry and seasoning but has the issue of never quite being cooked properly in the middle while also lacking a decent crunch on the bite itself. Wendys got it right with this one, though!
They almost have that amazing crunch of a potato chip for the skin with just the right size cut that allows everything to cook through correctly. I could probably fill an entire bathtub with this stuff, and just eat my way out while watching The Office on Netflix, like a white trash Caligula.
5: Classic Sausage, Egg and Cheese Sandwich
Calories: 540
Pretty much everything I just said about the Bacon, Egg and Cheese version, but I happen to like bacon more than sausage.
6: Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit
Calories: 420!!!
I don’t love the biscuits. There, I said it. They came across a bit dry. There wasn’t too much to them. The egg really saves the sandwich here, as it has a distinctly different taste than McDonalds eggs. It’s not my favorite thing on the menu, but I’d probably order it ahead of my least favorite eating vessel…
7: Bacon, Egg and Swiss Croissant
Calories: 410
I think it’s time we retired the Croissant. Burger King has it on lockdown. A croissant acts as a solid stand alone or with butter and jelly or dipped in Malort. It fails as a food containment system when you try to pile stuff into it. I honestly think people order a croissant because they think it’s healthier. For one thing, it’s all bread, silly. For another, the standard bunned version is 60 calories lighter.
For another thing, this breakfast menu isn’t what a croissant is about. A croissant is what you eat before you pay 275 dollars to take a guided Segway tour of the Golden Gate Bridge. A croissant is the perfect mid day snack for someone whose significant other is always gone on business trips and their step kid won’t speak to them and only refers to them by their actual name. A croissant is the preferred meal of whatever the opposite of Guy Fieri is. Curtis Stone?
8: Sausage Gravy and Biscuit
Calories: 450
I’m not even a little bit sure who owns the naming rights to “biscuits and gravy” but the name is super duper unnecessary here. We know what we are digging in for. It’s nice that they don’t make an entire meal out of this, and instead have it as a side, because I’m not totally sure I’d want more than the portion given. I’ve already stated my feelings about the biscuits, but the gravy needs a pepper kick. When I make gravy, I was always taught to use a decent amount of black pepper to give a transitional taste to the salt bomb you are making.
It’s fine. I get it could be a taste bud thing. But when you are throwing culinary hammers up and down your menu, it couldn’t hurt to take a chance and pepper this up a bit.
9: Sausage Egg and Cheese Biscuit
Calories: 610
Again, nothing remarkable about it. It’s fine. It’s food. If you like sausage and hate croissants as much as I do, then this is gonna be a fine meal.
10: Sausage, Egg and Cheese Croissant
Calories: 600
And this is where the train starts barreling uncontrollably off the tracks…
11: Maple Bacon Chicken Croissant
Calories: 560
…and this is where it crashes into the ocean. This is supposed to be the high end thing on the menu. An eye catcher of sorts that makes people say, “You know, I could get this standard breakfast fare anywhere, why not come in for a change of pace item that I can’t find anywhere else.” It’s not all that different from the turn of the 1900’s, when Carnival barkers would lure people into paying to see the freak show by putting one of their best looking acts out front, like the world’s fattest man, or Siamese twins playing an oversized banjo.
Where if falls apart is the taste. I can’t quite figure out what I don’t like about it most, just that I’m not about this life.
Maple and bacon is an obvious combination because you get the salty and sweet element. I don’t hate croissants so much that it tanks specifically from that.
I just don’t like it. Not “put it in a box and fire it towards the sun” dislike, but more like the band Sublime dislike. Yes, I get it, people of my age bracket, they were an important band when we were teenagers, but feel free to let it go. Incubus, too. God, Incubus is bad. Incubus should be forced to wake up every day and thank the lord that Nickelback exists.
12: Sausage Biscuit
Calories: 470
It’s cool I guess. It’s pretty damn basic. They could have done a nice drizzle of gravy on it to add a bit more too it. As it is, it’s just kind of flat and dry. It’s not bad. But like most breakfast menus that carry this item, it just kind of exists. Like Bowling For Soup.
26: Apple Bites/Oatmeal Bar
Calories: Nobody cares
We all know why you exist, Oatmeal and Apples. These things better be exclusively served for children six years and younger who only are planning to eat one breakfast Baconator.
88: Whatever overrated crap Chik Fil A is serving
Take your pickle brine and flaccid frying job and shove it.
1294: Sausage, Egg and Cheese Burrito
Calories: 340
You know how I talked about all of the fresh buns and whatnot for the items above? This threatens to undo all of that goodwill. I’m not sure where they have been keeping the tortillas for this item, but I can tell you with near 100% certainty that they had been kept there long enough that Billie Eilish might not have been born yet.
I’m not actually sure what Wendys was going for, here. There were an anemic few pieces of sausage in there, and the whole thing was square shaped, with the tortilla breaking at the edges. It also appears that for some reason, they may have cut the tortillas in half. Mine didn’t even have enough coverage to fully create a burrito.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, as this is basically the cheapest thing on the menu, but it is disappointing that there wasn’t more effort put into this product.
Fancy Boys Club 