The best fast food breakfasts in America, ranked

This Deep South-bred chain knows what it does well and sticks to it, namely fluffy biscuits and fried chicken, which are among the finest in fast food. At breakfast, that means biscuit sandwiches that start simple—fried chicken filet, sausage patty, country-fried steak, eggs and cheese. From there, Bojangles allows custom orders that can turn sandwiches into towering breakfast behemoths. Just imagine starting your day with a biscuit attempting to contain eggs, cheese, country ham and fried chicken, dipped into a vat of white gravy served on the side. While that sounds like an order that’ll send your heart doctor’s kids to college, Bojangles breakfast is also a menu of some of the highest-quality ingredients you’ll find from a drive-through. My admittedly simple standard Bojangles order—biscuit, eggs, cheese and sausage—could seriously come from an actual sit-down restaurant. The biscuit seems almost homemade, fluffy and buttery, and the eggs and sausage are legit ingredients cooked recently. To wash it down, stop off at the supermarket first for an alcohol-spiked version of Bojangles sweet tea, which if consumed at breakfast, is like a redneck version of bottomless brunch.

A friend had recently told me about a god-awful experience with Starbucks breakfast sandwiches so flaccid and flavorless that they seemed nuked days earlier. So I had some apprehension at my neighborhood location when I ordered three items from the fairly limited breakfast menu (six hot sandwiches, everything bagels and oatmeal). But I’m happy to report all three sandwiches were among the best-tasted for this roundup, and the winner of the three was a total surprise. First, though, the Sausage, Cheddar & Egg sandwich, is essentially a sausage McMuffin, although here the bun is fluffier and a bit sweet. The Bacon, Gouda & Egg sandwich also comes on a fluffy bun that, especially compared to others on this list, seemed just nearly artisanal. But the winner from our sampling was the Beyond Meat, Cheddar & Egg sandwich, the faux sausage patty delivering far more flavor than the bacon or actual sausage on the other sandwiches. Perhaps the lesson here from my good experience, and the disaster I heard about from a friend, is that not all Starbucks restaurants are equal, which is really the only reason it didn’t end up on the top of the heap here. But order from the right spot and you’ll find sandwiches that are among the best available this fast.

It all starts here with the Egg McMuffin, a sandwich that not just defines fast-food breakfast but has also become something of an American tradition (How often do you see versions at fancy restaurants?). The muffin itself is a bit too pre-frozen squishy sometimes, but a pro tip here is to order it double-toasted, delivering a much-needed crispy texture—and also assuring it doesn’t come from the shoot of pre-cooked ones. From there, the other ingredients—eggs, ham, American cheese, butter—all seem like actual, real ingredients, cooked by a person. Sure, it’s sad that this is our standard of good fast food, but yeah, actual food is an improvement (looking at you, Subway). From there, no doubt there are misses on the McD’s breakfast menu; the Big Breakfast with Hotcakes leaves us wondering why you’d not just go to any diner anywhere in the entire country for a better plate of food. And the oddly undercooked bun of the McGriddle will leave fake maple flavor on your face for days. But an egg and sausage Burrito? Apologies to the breakfast Tex-Mex lords in Austin, but that little breakfast wrap is a fairly faultless fast-food order.

Having sworn off this chain due to the donations by the company and its owner that many say are anti-LGBTQ+, I went in skeptically. And it was something of a disappointment that there are a lot of things to love (about the food, at least). Namely, the chicken biscuit, which makes sense since it’s Chick-fil-A’s thing. The biscuit is cracker-crunchy on the exterior and fluffy inside, just as a Southern nanna would make. The chicken is crispy and well salted and surprisingly tender, all the things Southern fried chicken should be. As of summer 2023, you can now get that breakfast chicken sandwich spicy, which seemed like too big of a challenge first thing in the morning. It also doesn’t exactly seem like breakfast to order a fried chicken sandwich, which is why you can also get fried or grilled chicken with eggs and cheese, even though eating eggs and chicken at the same time seems oddly weird (no kidding, the Japanese call it “parent and child”). There are lots of other options on the Chick-fil-A menu, even burritos and muffin sandwiches, all of which are so-so. But you came here for the biscuits. And the chicken. So just do that, and apologize later to your LGBTQ+ friends.

Sonic is a big old slice of nostalgia, allowing us to do a drive-up thing most of us have otherwise only seen in movies. Although, to be fair, almost everyone just goes through the drive-through. In the morning hours of Sonic, they serve up burritos and sandwiches that are all pretty solid, made with decent ingredients and a modicum of care put into assembly. The sandwiches come on a Texas toast that, unlike most fast food, is a legit piece of toasted and buttered toast. Huh. The eggs seem recently scrambled and griddled. The bacon and sausage, actual bacon and sausage. It all seems solid and respectable. At least until you get to the “Jr.” versions of the burritos that seem sized to hand to the dog in the back seat. Finish it off with the Cinnabon Cinnasnacks, made in partnership with that company that cinnamon-scents the mall. The buttery pastries are stuffed with a cinnamon filling and dipped into a cream cheese frosting that is so sweet people three cars away will end up with the sugar shakes.

Whether you'll like the breakfast here depends entirely on your preconceived notion of junk food. Do you find pleasure in the cheesy, the greasy, the indulgent binge of preprocessed foodstuffs? If yes, you need to fill your piehole with a Breakfast Crunchwrap. It’s essentially griddled tortillas stuffed with eggs and sausage and hash brown patties and all manner of cheese and sauces, then folded into the shape of a stop sign and grilled into a portable concoction so transportable you could bring it as a carry-on. The rest of the Bell’s breakfast menu continues a whole lot like that, with griddled quesadillas and burritos bloated full of hangover-killing things, along with cream-filled sugared donut holes to get your blood sugar spiking. The true fourth-meal devotees among us should head for the Bell Breakfast Box: a crunchwrap, hash browns, donut holes and a drink: a mere $5.49 for, holy hell, up to 1,340 day-starting calories.

Burger King’s breakfast is old enough to have a kid in college, and yet it still seems far less popular than its golden-arched rival. That said, the King’s headliner is a fine fast-food breakfast choice, the Double Croissan'wich with Sausage & Bacon. It serves as something of a drive-through version of a monte cristo, with the candy-sweet croissant bun contrasting with the double meat setup. That croissant continues on most of the regular breakfast menu sandwiches here and is reason enough to avoid the disappointing “platters” available at only some BKs, consisting of half-cooked pancakes and weirdly textured omelets. But if there’s one thing that sets BK apart from the others, it's a constantly changing menu where they throw all kinds of Texas toasts and rye bread rolls and French toast-ified things against the menu wall to see what sticks, meaning this morning you might find something better than last time.

A chain born on the great plains of Kansas that exists largely due to the poor late-night decisions of the drunk, White Castle puts out a breakfast spread at all hours—which is entirely brand-appropriate. White Castle’s slider patties already possess the tang of a sausage product, so they find a suitable home below scrambled eggs, bacon and cheese. The breakfast slider can come on the marshmallow-soft steamed buns synonymous with White Castle, but the way to go here is the waffles, little semi-crisp discs that add a bit of sweetness.  The real mystery item on the White Castle menu is the donuts that come wrapped in plastic, I assume having been baked long ago in a factory far away, the packaging giving you the opportunity to pocket a reminder of White Castle for later.

Growing up outside Boston, it’s just about law that a box of Dunkin’ defines a special occasion breakfast. If cake-style donuts are your thing, no doubt you're just like ‘Merica and you run on Dunkin’. If you came here for something savory, you’re likely headed for  Dunkin’s (or is it Dunkin’’s?) Wake-Up Sandwich. It’s defined as a tortilla wrapped around eggs and cheese, but there was a point where I had to make sure I’d peeled back the paper wrapping, realizing, yes, that’s just the sandwich. The veggie egg white omelet came next and included an egg white omelet spiked with polka-dots of colored veggie bits under “multigrain thins” with the texture of brown paper bags. Things get a bit better on the crispy-ish sourdough sandwiches, which at least add a bit more semi-toasted crispiness.

After ordering, I pulled up to the takeout window just in time to watch the cook dump a pile of sausage patties out of the fry basket. With that reality sinking in, I took delivery of the pride of Wendy’s breakfast menu, the Baconator, along with a croissant sandwich. Out on the plastic tables out front, I unwrapped the pair of sandwiches and took in an alternate reality. Sure, it’s a cliche that fast food isn’t going to look like the ads, but the difference between the images of the breakfast sandwiches on Wendy’s website and what we were given was like the Sistine Chapel compared to a doodle above a dive bar urinal. It’s safe to assume Wendy’s created the Bacon, Egg & Cheese Croissant simply as a way to offend the French. The croissant was a gooey glob of dough that roughly resembled a bun, so undercooked-sticky that I had to peel off the paper. Between it sat bacon-flavored bubblegum, American cheese and a slice of plastic wrap resembling a fried egg. The messy, sloppy overly sauced Baconator looked squished and sad, each layer of bacon, egg, cheese, sauce and bun barely qualifying as three-dimensional. There’s a lot going on in this sandwich, what with the salty sausage, the salty bacon, the salty eggs, and the salty special sauce all feeling like some kind of sodium-intake Tik-Tok challenge. Baconator? Eating this you’ve got to be a self-hater.

Subway spread itself worldwide as a grinder chain concentrating on rolls baked right there in the shop. But Subway’s sandwich artists paint breakfast offerings on a canvas of flatbread reminiscent of supermarket gluten-free cauliflower bread. You can order them just with eggs and cheese, or paired with bacon, black forest ham or steak. I went with graying steak, which my sandwich artist dumped out from a bedpan-shaped container, then topped with semi-frozen provolone. On top sat a plastic representation of a fried egg that you might find in a child’s kitchen set. Tomatoes and lettuce did a lot to dress it up, as did the sauce—because every breakfast is better with garlic mayo. But this interpretive art representation of breakfast had to be eaten cold since the toaster at my local Subway was 86ed. If you asked me to take a second bite as a truth or dare, I choose truth.