I voted Subway, but have not been to all of the available options.
Fair enough I guess. I do concede that it is mostly just rice and beans and could use some spicing up but I’d still take it over anything else on that list. (Except maybe Sonic, I have a weakness for the Lime Slushes there.)
I want to start using “it hurts my fact” in conversation.
I figured Burger King, with their microwaved “flame-broiled” burgers and shitty fries, would be the easy choice. Then I saw Arby’s was on the list.
About half of these, I’ve never tried, so I can’t make an informed opinion. Of the rest, a bunch of them wouldn’t be my first choice, but if someone said “We’re going to ____; want to come?” I wouldn’t be averse.
Except for White Castle. White Castle is uniformly disgusting. In the very rare event one is actually in the mood for White Castle, it just means that one is in the mood for something disgusting.
I almost voted for Taco Bell, but they have a good chalupa, and they are at least fast.
In-N-Out though makes you wait and wait for okay burgers but the worst fries on the planet. The rest have at least one redeeming quality or are not close enough to threaten me.
I think that the people running the fry-well need to be properly trained, and it has to be maintained. There is a very narrow temperature range for frying where the breading doesn’t get all greasy and yucky, and the chroming on the baskets has to be intact or the oil will go rancid very quickly. Properly maintained equipment, and proper training and fresh out of the fryer fish can be sublime, stuff that has been sitting under a heat lamp not so. 
Most franchises if not inspected often tend to slide on training and maintenance.
McDeath food tends to give me the shits if it comes out of the fryer, and the buns are insipid, and the burger patties are indifferent and the fixings can suck - I have had burgers made with veggies that are somewhat less than fresh and properly stored overnight. This October’s visit to my mom’s left me in bed and running to the bathroom for the entire weekend we were there, thanks to a ‘fast McDonalds Lunch … what can one meal on the thruway matter’ :smack: [headsmack is to mrAru]
Burger King, hands down. After my last adventure at one of their outposts, I refuse to go any more. 45 minutes to get our food. Bathrooms were out of towels and mostly out of paper as well. Floor was greasy. Mind you, I think they are usually dirty but this place took the cake.
Mmmm, Chipotle burrito bowl…
It was close for me. I hate both Chipotle and In-N-Out quite a bit. In the end I had to go with In-N-Out because it has a greater disparity of how much praise it gets versus how much scorn it deserves.
Btw, Long John Silvers is amazing.
Are you talking about meats, or other things? The Subway near me will charge extra for extra meat. Aside from that, as far as I can tell, they will pile on any amount you want of anything, for the asking.
Oops. Misread the thread title and voted for my favorite. Subtract one from McDonalds and add one to either Quiznos or White Castle…probably White Castle.
ETA: Off topic, but I went to Wendy’s a couple days ago to try out their new fries and they were excellent. Huge improvement. The Burger on the other hand was just sad.
The worst fast food fair I ever had, and probably some of the worst food in general was at a KFC Breakfast Buffet once circa 1997. I mean most things on the buffet were so bad I’d have to be actually flat broke and hungry before I’d consider eating it again. And I aint that picky when it comes to food. It was apparent that whoever came up the the menu and suppliers had only one criteria, which was “is this the absolute cheapest supplier we can find?”. And I wasnt the only one in our little group that thought this way.
I said McD’s because I haven’t been to many of the others. There is nothing on the McDonalds menu that I like. Not even the salad, because they taste like that bag salad mix; all dried out. Even their fancy coffee drinks are horrible and oily tasting. I’m not picky about that sort of thing either. There is one thing I will get when I take my daughter after therapy every week and that’s the chocolate dipped cone. But even the cone part is usually stale.
My favorite is Wendy’s, where I get a plain baked potato and two honey mustard packets.
I love honey mustard potatoes.
Didn’t RR buy out Geno’s a long time ago? Geno’s was a local Baltimore franchise, so there may be some weird franchisee agreements in nearby Frederick that survive…
I took the time to read the thread and this discussion on Chipotle is bizarre. Some people saying is horrifically spicy and others saying it’s offensively bland. I’ve been to a lot of Chipotle’s and it’s neither. Is it as spicy as a mom and pop Mexican joint or a southwestern restaurant, no, but it’s not any where in the vicinity of bland. This stinks of chilehead snobbery to me. The barbacoa is well spiced and their hot red chile sauce has an nice mainstream heat to it. The chicken and pork are extremely salty but mild to appeal to chile adverse folks. That said, nothing on their menu is “blisteringly hot” either. My GF is extremely chile adverse and can’t touch anything spicy. There are a handful of things on their menu that she just cannot eat, the barbacoa and steak mentioned above and the chile sauces. The chicken, pork, rice, beans and pico de gallo are right up her alley though.
That said, Chipotle is more variable than most of the other restaurants listed because it’s less prefabricated than most other entries and I wouldn’t be surprised if a cook might have a heavy or light hand with the spice on occasion. Still I think the exaggeration in this thread is a bit silly.
I picked McDonalds (they have basically nothing that appeals to me), but the only fast food restaurant that I refuse to go to is Swiss Chalet – roasted chicken for double the price it would cost from a grocery store, accompanied with sauce that makes the chicken taste worse.
OK, glad to see an LJS defender, but gotta disagree on In N Out. Every trip to California or Arizona is not complete for me without a stop at In N Out. I was just in one of the Phoenix area outposts over Thanksgiving, and that place reaffirms my belief in chains. Yeah, they’re not the quickest. But the nicest service I’ve ever had at a fast food establishment (seriously, the first time I went to an In N Out, I was completely flabbergasted by the seemingly genuine smiling service) and absolutely perfect, fast-food style hamburgers. No fast food hamburger comes close in quality and flavor to an In N Out burger. (Well, 5 Guys and Culver’s actually are not that far behind.)
Oh, come now. What the fuck is “chilehead snobbery”? When I say “bland” it has nothing to do with heat levels. I mean it’s bland, as in the flavors are dull. Like I said, the quality of the ingredients is great, and Chipotle is nowhere near a bad fast food restaurant, I just don’t find the food particularly flavorful.
Your response was specifically directed at someone complaining about heat. Naturally bland implied low heat in that context. Secondly Chipotle is frequently criticized for being one of the single saltiest food options out there, making a bland conplaint aside from heat all the more untenable.
Calling Chipolte bland in any context relative to the other options highlighted here makes little sense. Mexican food with some heat and a lot of salt based on my understanding of the word “bland” does not fit compared to faux-Mexican like Taco Bell and Del Taco and your average midwestern burger chain.
Chipotle. I taste salt more than any other flavor. Blegh.
I suspect maybe some people are answering Long John Silver’s because they just don’t like fish. (Not saying that all LJS voters fall into that category.)