Having spent a bit of time at various outposts of Popeyes, Burger King, and elsewhere, I can say without equivocation that you’ll encounter a more diverse crowd there than you would at most of the restaurants we critics cover. Show up at a Wendy’s in New York at 11:30 p.m. I cover these venues for a simple reason: People eat at them. This is my fifth fast-food review for Eater - or sixth, if you count David Chang’s quick-service NYC spot Fuku. *McDonald's Sweet and Sour and Chick-Fil-A’s nugget sauce didn't make the list after it was determined they weren't good enough to recommend at all. Sriracha (Wendy's): Bit of an unwelcome sour note up front, but the heat becomes intense as you continue to dip. Mardi Gras Mustard (Popeye's): The only fast food mustard sauce I know of that actually tastes like mustard.Ĩ. Buffalo Sauce (Chick-Fil-A): More acidic and spicy than the McDonald's Buffalo sauce, and closer to the New York original that goes on wings.ħ. Tartar Sauce (Popeyes): Creamy white sauce with an assertive punch of dill.Ħ. Nacho Cheese (White Castle): Thick, melty, nacho cheese it would've ranked higher if there was a heat element.ĥ. Ranch (Chick-Fil-A): Perhaps a touch thicker than Popeye's ranch, with distinct garlic and onion overtones that recall the classic Doritos chip.Ĥ. Ranch (Popeyes): The creamiest and tangiest of the ranch dressings.ģ (tie). Finishes with a gorgeously bitter olive note.ģ (tie). Sweet Heat (Popeyes): The hottest "sweet" sauce I've sampled at a fast-food outlet. Pure Honey (McDonald's): There's nothing better to cut through the saltiness of a nugget.Ģ. I can’t wait to try it.Ī Highly Accurate and Definitive List of the Best Nugget Dipping Sauces*ġ. That’s right, a nacho chip made from chicken. The nugget is a mysterious MRE-style foodstuff that restaurants can serve, with minimal outrage, in the shape of a disc, star, fry, doughnut, and, in the case of a Taco Bell item that’s being test-marketed in areas of the country with a lower density of full-time food writers, a nacho chip. In fact, it is one of the first two dishes I remember eating on this earth (the other dish was baked Peconic Bay scallops, a dish that fits my lifetime narrative more elegantly). I knew what a nugget was long before I was introduced to kale or capon. The nugget is a gateway drug, a young child’s unwitting indoctrination into the corporate culinary industrial complex. The nugget, with its multisyllabic emulsifiers and stabilizers, is almost exclusively the domain of fast food. The nugget is a dish that most high-minded establishments (or weeknight cooks) shy away from. It is more charcuterie than steak (albeit more mystery meat than artisanal sausage). If the tender is more pure product, more Jonathan Waxman, the nugget is more food science, more Wylie Dufresne, more manipulation - a polite way of saying more processed. I’ll take a chicken nugget any day over a chicken tender. Until you try a better version at Wendy’s. But dipping the engineered and salted protein disc that is the McNugget into a peel-away plastic-container filled with pure honey (and nothing else) is nearly a peerless fast-food experience. Biting into a Quarter Pounder mimics the sensation of chomping down on an oil-soaked sponge. The McNugget, by contrast, is an amalgamation of over 20 discrete ingredients - rib meat, breast meat, botanicals, chicken skin, sodium phosphates, autolyzed yeast extract, sodium acid pyrophosphate, safflower oil, dextrose, and other oddities - that are mixed, cut, molded, and fried in vegetable oil laced with the ominous-sounding (but innocuous) anti-foaming agent known as dimethylpolysiloxane.Īnd yet, the McNugget is the more delicious creation. Say what you will about the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder the hamburger patty is made of nothing but USDA-inspected beef. No food is perfect, but the masterpiece of molecular gastronomy known as chicken nugget is aggressively imperfect.
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