Robbie R. / Yelp
Not every morning starts with a nutritious home-cooked meal, and sometimes we have to eat on the fly. Most fast-food chains serve breakfast, but which ones are worth your money? Which breakfast sandwich is going to give you fuel without grossing you out?
I tried eight popular fast-food breakfast sandwiches and ranked ‘em from best to worst to find the answer.
In the '70s, a McDonald’s franchise owner who loved eggs Benedict figured he could turn his favorite brunch dish into a sandwich and voila: The Egg McMuffin was born. It was the first fast-food breakfast sandwich to hit the scene, but even today, it may as well be the only fast-food breakfast sandwich you need to worry about.
The Egg McMuffin is so good that the rest of the mediocre sandwiches on the McDonald’s menu don’t even knock it down a peg. McDonald’s is the king, but let’s be honest, you already knew this.
Maybe it isn’t fair to lump Starbucks in here, but look, the Bacon, Egg, and Gouda sandwich is one of the most reliable breakfast sandos you can eat. It’s probably better than the McMuffin, in all honesty, but it’s going to be hard to undo over 30 years of personal bias in favor of McDonald’s. Either way, consider yourself lucky to start a morning with one of these in your hands.
Panera’s Ciabatta Ham, Egg, and Cheese Sandwich is very similar to an Egg McMuffin, which is probably the reason I like it. The ham itself is lunch meat, and the eggs taste far more real than at a place like McDonald’s or Wendy’s. Because ‘Nera is a bakery, this is on some hearty ciabatta, but since the meat is so thin, the bread is basically all I can taste. Maybe Panera should look into some specialty breakfast breads.
Nobody is doing better biscuit sandwiches than Bojangles, of which there are usually about 10 to choose from. Pork chop and steak biscuits are big here, and you’d be hard pressed to find a better eggless fast-food breakfast biscuit.
If you’re willing to ignore the uncomfortable fact that Chick-fil-A has a mother and child reunion going on with a chicken-and-egg breakfast sandwich, the biscuit sandwiches are of a much higher quality than most other spots. These eggs are more luscious, the cheese is meltier, and the sausage patties are upper-tier.
It’s the burrito you want at Sonic in the morning, but the Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Brioche Breakfast Sandwich isn’t totally awful. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of a New York bodega B.E.C. The low-quality brioche bun aside, the bacon is crunchy and the cheese is melty. You can do a lot worse than this at other chains.
Wendy’s seems like it’s going unnecessarily hard during breakfast. They’ve got 13 items, and 10 of them are sandwiches. That just feels like too much. The Honey Buddy chicken sandwich is the best of the bunch, and that’s because sometimes the best things in life are simple. This is just a piece of fried chicken, covered in honey butter, and served on a biscuit. Glad to see there’s no egg here.
I find Burger King to be a swing and a miss, most often. Despite the King’s shockingly tasty soft serve, it’s rare when this restaurant makes something I enjoy. Such is the case for the breakfast sandwiches, half of which are served on croissants. Here’s another piece of highly specific bias: I hate the croissant as a sandwich vessel. It’s too sweet and too flaky. Bad bacon, bad eggs, bad bread. Sorry, BK.
