

This feels like a missed opportunity for a chain that prides itself on being innovative, especially at breakfast. The fast food restaurant that invented Fourthmeal in 2007 somehow does not serve breakfast all day. Illustration by Maggie Rossetti for Thrillist Order it with a Mocha Sweet Cream Iced Coffee that tastes exactly like chocolate milk and you’ve got a great start to your morning. It’s not a sexy item, but it’s the tastiest thing they’ve got-a supremely thin fried egg, sliced ham, and American cheese on a bun so pillowy you could sleep on it during a cross-country flight. The stacked Loaded Breakfast Sandwich (eggs, bacon, ham, sausage, and cheese) looks perfect for Instagram, but even though copious amounts of egg and bacon look cool, it feels more like a dare than a well thought-out breakfast item.Ĭontrast that with the simple Breakfast Jack, and you might be surprised to learn that it’s the best breakfast meal on the menu. Not all of it is worth your money-a mostly generic breakfast sandwich line’s sole highlight is the crisp, hickory-smoked bacon. Mini pancakes! Burritos! Biscuits! Croissants! And you can order ‘em all day and night. Right off the bat, Jack in the Box earns points for having 16 wildly different breakfast items.

In all honesty, there’s not a single breakfast item here we wouldn’t order on the regular. Even the fluffy, crispy-around-the-edges pancakes taste like they’re from a diner instead of a drive-thru. The Honey Butter Chicken Biscuit has become a greatest hit in recent years with a fried chicken tender and a gooey honey butter sauce that only gets better the more you add on. In addition to its signature Taquitos with fluffy scrambled eggs, American cheese, and choice of bacon, crumbled sausage, Hash Brown Sticks, or chorizo when available, you’ll find sandwiches on biscuits (jalapeño-cheddar or regular) with a hard-fried disc of egg, cheese, and choice of meat (including a nice, kinda-spicy sausage patty that tastes way better than the pizza topping crumbles in the taquitos), as well as breakfast sandwiches with the same fillings on burger buns instead. It’s a rite of passage for anyone in a Whataburger town to feast on a late-night breakfast of taquitos sometime after 2 am, but even at a more civilized hour, breakfast at Whataburger wows. It’s a creamy, caffeinated java that’s worth pairing with any breakfast item. And if you leave a Sonic without getting an iced coffee poured over its famed nugget ice, you’re making a huge mistake. Eat more than one and your dentist will find out and schedule a cavity filling. On the sweeter side of things, its Cinnabon Cinnasnacks are sugary dessert egg rolls best dipped into its refrigerated cream cheese frosting. The Bacon BREAKFAST TOASTER (their caps, not ours) fares better, as it’ll remind you of a grilled cheese sandwich with an egg that you’d make in your kitchen if you weren’t so lazy, or tired. Skip the SuperSONIC Breakfast Burrito, a jumble of ingredients (egg, sausage, jalapeño, onion, tots, tomato, cheddar) that don’t work well enough together to form a cohesive meal. But don’t order just anything off its breakfast menu. It’ll let you order Texas toast, burritos, and French toast sticks all darn day and night. The drive-in chain doesn’t care if you show up at 11:01 am and want breakfast food, even though most fast food joints stopped serving it a half-hour ago.
