The best McDonald’s menu items, ranked

While ours had taken a tumble at some point in its little cardboard box, the messy Quarter Pounder still unequivocally looked better than any other menu item. The sesame seed bun was fluffy and un-squished. The burger patty was semi-thick and, well, three-dimensional. The lettuce and the tomato were all fairly decent. While fairly mayo-heavy, it also tasted good, with a bit more beef flavor than any other burgers on the menu. That’s likely due to the change McDonald’s made in 2018 to using fresh beef on the Quarter Pounder, and it’s a noticeable difference from the spheres of sadness found on the other burgers here. That said, the dominant flavor of the Quarter Pounder remains the American cheese, which isn’t necessarily bad, just making it seem more like a beefy grilled cheese with veggies. Overall, this is a pretty good burger, not just for McDonald’s but for fast food, a fine $5 offering for the adults in the room.

It’s not just that the egg McMuffin helped define McDonald’s early morning menu, it also helped create a staple on American breakfast menus. It’s hard to find fault in an English muffin, fried egg, American cheese and a slice of salty ham. The whole shebang is made far better, though, by asking for the muffin to be double-toasted, adding some texture to an otherwise quite-soft sandwich. If McDonald’s still offered breakfast all day, maybe this would be the winner.

If you grew up in the Land of the Free, there's a good chance that your very first milkshake came from a McDonald’s drive-thru. So there’s just something familiar about a shake here. It’s sweet. Like, someone added extra sugar packets, sweet. But the Hershey’s syrup flavor tastes like a mom telling you good job after getting on base, like an A on a report card, or maybe just something you sneak on the way home from the office before dealing with the chaos at home. It’s a chocolate shake, and it’s just like you remember.

The McDonald's fries are a pacifier used by parents everywhere to calm the chaos in the back of the RAV-4. They’re not just for the kids but for any adult wanting something indulgent without the burden of getting out of the car. They’re not as crispy as they should be, but they’re still pretty decent shoestring fries, well salted and not too greasy, those little tiny chip-like pieces at the bottom of the container are still the best of them. The adults at my table had a decent sample, but the kids devoured not only the medium-sized order we got but then also attacked the cute little container that came in the Happy Meal. These aren’t artisanal, skin-on, organic coastal elite Brussels sprout fries sourced from local farms and dipped in saffron aioli. These are fries, god damn it—good American fries.

St. Louis—the city that loves McDonald’s so much they half-built a monument to the golden arches—is home to the concrete. It’s frozen custard spun thick and often dotted with candy. And if you’ve had one, it’s essentially a McFlurry. Ours came with peanut butter crunches and was sweet enough to give everyone at the table two cavities. But if you’re not within driving distance to the Midwest, this is a fine approximation, albeit done here with a fairly flavor-free vanilla soft serve.

There are moments in life when the universe needs to accept that you cannot decide between a cheeseburger and fried chicken. Luckily, McDonald’s has responded to this too-real dilemma by combining them with a double cheeseburger served not only with a tiny four-pack of nuggets but also a drink and a dainty little side of fries. Besides the fries, nothing here falls into the glad-I-ordered-it category. But the Meal Deal deserves its high place on this list simply because there may be nowhere else on planet Earth where you can get all of these things handed to you in a paper bag for the exchange of a mere $5.

First and foremost, you have to appreciate the presentation of the Frappé (mocha version pictured), with its swirly whipped cream product sitting on top and downright artful design of Oreo bits sprinkled above it, like the McD’s version of fairy dust. Below is essentially a chocolate shake mixed with coffee and cookie bits in a way that’s both objectively tasty and also enough sugar—870 calories for the large—to give diabetes to the family sitting at the next table. 

In the chicken sandwich wars that bled through fast food restaurants in recent years, let’s just be honest that McDonald’s’ looks much like France and Popeye’s is the German blitzkrieg. The chicken patty here is pretty meh— not all that crispy or flavorful, just kind of simple. That’s not to say it’s bad, though, and with the addition of tomato and lettuce and the split-top bun that comes with the Deluxe version, it becomes an a-ok chicken sandwich. Like most of what we ordered, it was heavily sauced, with mayo as the prevailing flavor. Sure, there are better chicken sandwiches at Shake Shack, Chick-fil-A, Popeye’s, Bojangles and probably a half dozen others, but this still remains among the best things from the golden arches.

Take the general gist of a monte cristo sandwich, combining the sweetness of french toast with the savoriness of eggs and breakfast meats, and you have the concept here. The logo-pressed buns are oddly undercooked in the middle, and there’s a decidedly faux maple flavor in the McGriddle, so much so that it’ll perfume your Hyundai for the rest of the day. But this is also what’s good/bad about this country’s fast food, a somewhere-land of real and imitation, in a way that also makes you want another.

The standard McCrispy is still one of the Golden Arches' better sandwiches, and here, it’s theoretically made better with the addition of shredded lettuce and Roma tomatoes. But the pocket-lint-like iceberg shards here aren’t helping things and the quarter-sized discs of tomatoes go goey from a swim in the spicy sauce. A better move is to stick with the standard McCrispy, unless you’re looking to impress a date with your big-spending Deluxe standards.

This is essentially the best item on the McDonald’s menu but with the addition of super-smoky bacon and “BLT sauce.” While no red-blooded American should argue against the appearance of bacon, the sauce-pork combo here creates an underlying smoke flavor that tastes like how your shirt smells after you visited a barbecue joint the day before. Order this if, say, you miss how your firefighter dad smelled after fighting a two-alarm.

Having not ordered or eaten a McDonald’s apple pie since the era of Z Cavaricci pants, I was taken aback by the size: no bigger than a dinky granola bar. They’ve also changed it from the empanada-like version I recall as a kid, with its greasy exterior and molten-lava interior. Now, it’s more strudel-like, the outside flaky and slit to reveal the apple pie filling from within. The kids liked it fine, the adults liked it fine, and while it was just one bite for all of us, it’s still an apple pie from a drive-thru, because America.

“This is McDonald’s answer to Chick-fil-A,” my buddy said after one bite. He’s right too—essentially just bun, fried chicken, sauce and pickles. The patty here is the same half-decent one from the McCrispy, albeit flavored with spices that taste like Frank’s Red Hot and then with a blast of heat from a sauce that’s something like spicy ranch. This will unlikely be anyone’s favorite chicken sandwich from a long, long list of fast-food restaurants, but you also won’t hate it. It’s like, say, you set off on a road trip for a Nashville fried chicken sandwich but got drowsy and stopped in Peoria.

If you’d asked me before we filled our table full of paper-wrapped sandwiches what I’d think of a Filet-O-Fish, I would’ve assumed it tasted like a gulp of Jersey Shore low tide. The appearance of it, with its perfectly square battered fish patty, didn’t help my preconceived notion: sorry, but no living fish has four equal sides. Then we divided it up and found ourselves quite surprised. The actual fish flavor is absent here, but it’s flaky and a bit crispy on the outside. The tartar sauce and the yellow cheese primarily dominated the taste. But that seems like a good thing in the end, a shockingly edible fish sandwich—if you ignore that it looks like a cross-section of Spongebob.

I wanted to hate this sad little sandwich wrapped in jaundiced-colored paper. In the last generation, places like Five Guys, Shake Shack and In-n-Out proved that good burgers can be made quickly and economically. The McDonald’s cheeseburger, meanwhile, looked like a Whataburger that somebody found on the bottom of their shoe. But on the eternally damned soul of Captain Crook, I swear there was something enjoyable about taking a bite from this little approximation of a cheeseburger. It tasted almost entirely of just pickles and sweet ketchup and little bits of onion. And somehow that flavor combination was nostalgic, a thing most of us first ate while still in car seats— and now hand back to the next generation.

Nobody cuts open a Big Mac. But there were four of us, so we got a plastic knife from the counter, cut a cross-section, and then sliced it again into quarters. And it actually looked pretty good— three layers of bun, special sauce, you know the rest. It looked a whole lot like smashburgers you find at sit-down restaurants everywhere nowadays. This is, after all, the Big Mac, the pride of the arches, a pillar of pop culture. And it was not good. The burger patties were dry and flavorless like someone had accidentally built ours with old drink coasters. With no actual burger flavor, it became instead a special sauce and cheese sandwich, most of the texture coming from iceberg shards. For the love of Ronald McDonald, order the Quarter Pounder—and ask for it with special sauce.

Between the four of us at the table, there was a Mason-Dixon-level dividing line on the four McNuggets that came as part of our Happy Meal. The two kids devoured them and tried to bribe the adults into giving up their portion in exchange for the uneaten bits of the cheeseburger. There was barely any dipping over on the little-squirt side, just a two-bite plow through each nugget. The adults, well, we had a different experience. The McNuggets tasted slightly of chicken, like the aftertaste from taking a sip from a large water glass where you accidentally dropped a discarded wing bone. The outside had a texture that was not quite gooey or crispy. It’s like breading made by a remote alien species attempting to recreate fried chicken based on blurry telescope images. What we learned is that McNuggets are the definition of kid-friendly foodstuffs, a thing reminiscent of something, like a 3D-printed approximation of chicken product from a dystopian future. Are you of the age you could drive to a McDonald’s? Then these may not be for you.

Theoretically, the nostalgic draw of the standard McDonald’s Cheeseburger would only be improved by a triple shot of the ingredient that defines the thing. But an overload of the protein component here only over-emphasizes Ronald McDonald’s biggest shortcoming, that his standard burger patty is an overcooked beef frisbee.