The Top 50 Fast-Food Restaurants in the United States
A good rule of thumb for living in America is to not eat fast food. But if you absolutely must, knowing the best places to do it is key. This ranking can help if you’re in a bind and have to eat fast.
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Introduction
I stopped eating at fast-food restaurants a little while ago, and I figured—after seeing so many “tiered” rankings of such restaurants on social media—that I’d commemorate the period in my life when I was occasionally eating fast food by doing what I believe Retro has always does best: curating a large amount of data in a journalistic format that honors a highly specific subcategory within the broad fields of History & Culture.
My feeling on fast food is the same as basically everyone else’s: it should be avoided whenever possible. But there are times when it does seem impossible to do so, for example when one is on a road trip or at an airport or profoundly pressed for time and not near home (yes, all of these situations can be navigated without eating fast food, but sometimes we feel harried and incapable of inflecting our inertia).
I’ve tried to acknowledge how circumspect I am about fast food by refusing to put any establishment classified as such in the “S” tier—the top ranking tier—below. I think it is a sort of mistake to say that any fast-food restaurant is (or can be) “S”-tier in quality.
{Above: A visualization of the largest fast-food chains worldwide, from 1971 through 2021.}
That said, some fast-food restaurants are better than others in terms of food quality, variety of food options, friendliness of food service, cleanliness of operations, menu navigability, availability of (relatively speaking only) “healthy” options, consistency of product, and ease of drive-through or pickup. And given that, as noted above, there will be times fast food seems unavoidable, I figured there’s some value in identifying the places to gravitate toward if you must—and the places to be avoided at all costs.
Rules
Obviously the ranking below is solely the opinion of the author, but it is an attempt to be comprehensive in the consideration of each establishment—by which I mean that I am trying to avoid geographic bias (which would of course require me to put Dunkin’ first), food-type bias (burgers have conventionally been my go-to fast food, but you’ll see many restaurants that do not feature burgers highly ranked below), or any ranking that only considers one aspect of an establishment, or gives an establishment a pass for being very good at offering only one type of food (as you may have noticed in the Introduction, above, “variety of food options” is one of the stated considerations here).
With only a few exceptions—all of which are noted with an asterisk—I’ve only ranked restaurants I’ve personally eaten at. The restaurants are ranked not just by tier but also within their tier. Any restaurant I have chosen to list in a given tier despite not having eaten there (a decision I made only when views on the proper tier for the restaurant in question appear to be all but unanimous) gets automatically placed at the back end of its tier, which is my way of saying that the tier placement for that restaurant is clear but not its placement within the tier. Virtually all the fast-food restaurants I’ve never eaten at appear in the final tier, “NT” (for “Never Tried”). Here, however, they’re listed alphabetically, rather than ranked.
As noted above, the considerations in ranking a given restaurant are as follows: food quality, variety of food options, friendliness of food service, cleanliness of operations, menu navigability, availability of (albeit relatively speaking only) “healthy” options, consistency of product, and ease of drive-through or pickup. The considerations here that relate to food are weighted much more heavily than those relating to service and user experience, though to be clear “cleanliness” is treated as a food-related assessment.
{Note: Included in this Top 50 ranking are several restaurants considered to be “fast casual.”}
The Top 50 Fast Food Restaurants
{Note: No fast-food restaurant deserves “S”-tier status because of how unhealthy fast food is.}
{Note: These fast-food restaurants are uniformly excellent for the range of good that they offer.}
1. Culver’s
2. Five Guys
3. In-N-Out Burger*
{Note: These fast-food restaurants are either good or excellent but offer limited food selection.}
4. Chick-fil-A**
5. Popeye’s
6. Starbucks
7. Wendy’s
8. Shake Shack
9. Bruegger’s Bagels
10. Krispy Kreme Donuts
11. Panera Bread
12. Jersey Mike’s*
13. Raising Cane’s*
14. Whataburger*
{Note: These fast-food restaurants are either middling or good but offer limited food selection.}
15. Steak n’ Shake
16. Chipotle
17. Sonic
18. Boston Market***
19. Potbelly Sandwich Works
20. White Castle
21. Au Bon Pain
22. Einstein Bros. Bagels
23. Jimmy John’s
24. Panda Express
25. Noodles & Company
26. Johnny Rockets
27. Taco Bell
28. Firehouse Subs
29. Pret a Manger
30. A&W
31. TCBY
32. McDonald’s
33. Burger King
34. Dairy Queen
35. Wingstop
36. Subway
37. D’Angelo’s
38. Dunkin’
39. Papa Gino’s
40. Mrs. Field’s
41. Baskin-Robbins
42. Honey Dew Donuts
{Note: These fast-food restaurants are either bad or middling but offer limited food selection.}
43. Hardee’s
44. Nathan’s Famous
45. Charleys Philly Steaks
46. Cinnabon
47. Arby’s
48. Auntie Annie’s
49. KFC
{Note: These fast-food restaurants are just so terrible that they should be avoided at all costs.}
50. Pizza Hut
51. Domino’s
52. Orange Julius
53. Sbarro
{Note: These fast-food restaurants I have never tried (“Never Tried”) are listed alphabetically.}
Big Boy
Blimpie
Bojangles
Carl’s Jr.
Checkers
Church’s Texas Chicken
Dave’s Hot Chicken
Del Taco
Duchess
Elevation Burger
Fatburger
Freddy’s
Hunt Brothers Pizza
Jack in the Box
Jollibee
Little Caesars
Long John Silver’s
Marco’s Pizza
McAlister’s Deli
Moe’s
Papa John’s
Papa Murphy’s
Pita Pit
Pizza Inn
Pizza Ranch
El Pollo Loco
Portillo’s
Qdoba
Quiznos
Runza
Salad and Go
Schlotzsky’s
Smashburger
Smoothie King
Spangles
Sweet Frog
Sweetgreen
Taco Bueno
Taco del Mar
Taco John’s
Tim Hortons
Tropical Cafe
Which Wich
Zaxby’s
{Note: These fast-food restaurants no longer exist, but are likely to be known to many readers.}
Burger Chef
Carrols
D’Lites
Kenny Rogers Roasters
La Petite Boulangerie
Pizza Haven
Red Barn
Seattle’s Best Coffee
White Tower
* This is the rare instance of a restaurant the author hasn’t personally tried but which holds such a clear consensus reputation among those who have that it can enter this ranking. If I try this restaurant and have a different opinion from the conventional wisdom, I’ll adjust its ranking accordingly, though as noted in the Introduction I am more or less off fast food now.
** Retro can’t support Chick-fil-A as an institution due to its terrible corporate record with respect to acknowledging the human rights of the LGBTQIA2S+ community.
*** This ranking is a historical one—as Boston Market has fallen on hard times of late and is currently in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings. Retro does not recommend it.
Conclusion
Don’t eat fast food if you can avoid it. Carefully prepared food using the best possible agreements is almost always going to taste better and be better for you. But anyone reading this already knows all that, so me saying it here is, I suppose, a bit pro forma.
It’s interesting to me how associated with America fast food is, and how poorly that speaks of my country, if I’m being honest. It does often seem like American cuisine is simply the food of other nations dumbed down in some way or simply made far worse by virtue of being mass-produced or cluttered with unhealthy preservatives.
At the same time, I hate the sort of snobbishness that says we should never make any distinctions between objectively bad (or bad-for-you) things, as though once one has crossed a certain line there’s no difference—that is, it’s no matter to—cross all lines.
I disagree.
For instance—to refer to an old canard, here—if you’re going to McDonald’s and you’re willing to get a Diet Coke instead of a Coke, do it. No one thinks that you think getting a Diet Coke makes the meal healthy, or even that Diet Cokes are particularly healthy in themselves, but by the same token anyone who would make fun of you for trying to minimize the “damage” of the meal is in my estimation a fool. All is relative.
More importantly, some fast food is simply better than other fast food, and it should be sought out if fast food is what’s going to be on the menu. And it’s not only a matter of taste, either; some fast-food restaurants are healthier, cleaner, and more convenient than others. The only drawback is that many of the best fast-food joints are limited in their geographic scope, which means that most of the country has never been exposed to them. In-and-Out Burger (largely to be found in California), Whataburger (largely in Texas), and Culver’s (largely around the Upper Midwest) are good examples of this.
All of which brings me to a broader point, albeit one that some may take as trifling.
I have many issues with and questions about American capitalism, and one of them is—contrary to everything we’ve been told by its defenders—how inefficient it is. Why is it that there’s a Subway and a McDonald’s on every corner, but I have to travel across the continent to get to an In-and-Out Burger? Why do I find White Castle everywhere if I travel four hours south of where I am, but there are none in my immediate vicinity?
There is, of course, an answer for this, which is that profitability—which is not the same thing as quality—governs how widespread any given food-service corporation is.
And profitability is tied to things like management and food-shipping logistics and liquidity and franchising policies, all of which are also intimately connected with the question of how far apart from one another any given instance of a certain fast-food franchise can be.
As the chart below ably confirms, there is only the smallest imaginable correlation between the quality of an institution the dictates of American capitalism have blessed with ubiquity and its profitability. Or, perhaps better stated, it’s not so much that the top brands are bad so much as that many amazing brands are nowhere near the top in terms of being profitable, which is a shame and (again) underlines the inefficiencies of a free market.
If you’re interested in finding out how the executives at the companies list above use their salaries when it comes to political donations, see here. If you want to make your own tiered list of American fast-food restaurants—or anything else, for that matter—you can do so by starting out on this website.
So what do we learn from the above? First, that fast-food pizza is very hard to do right.
Second, most fast-food restaurants are underwhelming. Only a few get things right.
Third, there are as many local fast-food joints that deserve to stay local as deserve to go national.
Fourth, that fast-food or fast-casual sandwiches are easy to do fine, but hard to do well.
Fifth—and this is no surprise—chicken and burger joints will dominate any ranking of fast food joints.
Sixth, for all that there’s been talk of making fast food healthier, it’s been slow going.
Seventh, there are more fast-food restaurants than most of us realize. Even the 100+ such restaurants listed above are only the most well-known ones; there are others.
Finally, there are virtually no fast-food restaurants that are worth going to unless you absolutely have to, with the exception of those establishments in the “A” and “B” tiers above—a grand total of just a dozen eateries on a list that numbers over a hundred.
And that probably tells the story of fast food in America as well as anything else does.
Schlotzsky’s is damn good
Zaxby's is awesome, and I have to say I'm very pleasantly shocked and delighted to see Culver's at #1! On Wisconsin!