Things You Should Never Order At Cracker Barrel

Cracker Barrel knows that when you've got driving to do, it's not just your car that needs fuel. Which is why its restaurants are nearly always located just a stone's throw from the highway. But while a gallon of lunch for your car is pretty much the same from one gas station to the next, the same can't be said for the human equivalent. And although the convenience of Cracker Barrel can help you keep your road trip on track, making the wrong decision when you order your meal might do the exact opposite for your diet — or your digestive tract. 

Cracker Barrel might draw you in with the promise of meals that are as close to home-cooked as you'll get on the road, but some of the ingredients are far from anything you'll find in your mother's kitchen. So should you find yourself filling up at the Cracker Barrel pump, here are some things to steer clear of.

You shouldn't be surprised to see the Homestyle Fried Chicken Salad on this list. Topping a salad with fried chicken, cheese, croutons, and boiled eggs is definitely one way to make your greens taste good, but it's not so helpful if you're working your waistline or your heart health.

With this salad, you're looking at 700 calories, 1,620 milligrams of sodium, and 45 grams of carbs — and that's without the dressing. Of course, it's not a salad without the dressing. Since you're on a roll already you might as well choose the Honey Mustard Dressing. That's going to add another 320 calories, 330 milligrams of sodium, and 33 grams of carbs. At this point, you may as well give up on ordering a salad and go for a burger and fries. It's just about as healthy, and you don't have all that pesky lettuce to eat around.

The Homestyle Chicken meal is comprised of two boneless chicken breasts, dipped in buttermilk batter, breaded, and deep-fried. That definitely sounds delicious, but probably not worth the calories — it clocks in at 1,060, and that's just for the chicken! It also provides 2,750 milligrams of sodium, which is more than what the American Heart Association says you should aim to take in over the course of an entire day. 

Hold on to your menus, because you still have to pick two sides, and make a choice between biscuits or corn muffins — both served with real butter, of course. Depending on what you choose there, you could easily add another 1,000 calories and a 1,000-2,000 more milligrams of sodium. That's an awful lot for just one meal. If you absolutely have to have this Homestyle Chicken dinner, we recommend choosing at least one of the lighter sides, such as green beans, and saving one piece of the chicken for a later meal. 

If you're a fan of pecans (is there anyone who isn't?), these pecan pancakes are a delicious breakfast option. Unfortunately, they're also incredible unhealthy. These two large, pecan-filled pancakes, topped with butter, come in at a whopping 850 calories, 1,550 milligrams of sodium, and 65 grams of carbs. What a way to start your day! Lucky for you, they're relatively low in sugar — just 8 grams — but hold on just a minute, because that part's coming.

It's almost impossible to eat pancakes without syrup, and once you add a serving of the 100% natural, pure maple syrup Cracker Barrel has on offer, you're tacking on 150 more calories and 37 more grams of sugar. That's your daily recommended intake of sugar, just in maple syrup.

Everyone knows that our moms just want what's best for us. One of the ways our moms look after us is to make sure we start the day with a good solid breakfast, the better to help us flourish and have all our dreams come true. But if your mom was Cracker Barrel, and "she" fed you her pancake breakfast every day, the only dream you could realistically expect to come true would be obesity, heart disease, and an early death ... so not really a dream, then. 

According to Cracker Barrel's nutritional guide, Momma's Pancake Breakfast (that's three pancakes, two eggs, butter, and your choice of meat — let's use bacon) would contain 1,150 calories, 25 grams of saturated fat, and a heart-stopping 2,930 milligrams of sodium. According to the FDA, your standard 2,000-calorie daily diet should include no more than 20 grams of saturated fat and 2,400 milligrams of sodium if you want to stay remotely healthy. You could save yourself 350 calories by skipping the butter and syrup, and switching from bacon to turkey sausage, but now you're eating a plate of dry pancakes and you're still over budget on sodium for the whole day. This one seems like a lose-lose, no matter how you look at it.

Cooking styles often run in families, and the Cracker Barrel family is certainly no different. Because if you take one look at the breakfast Grandpa Barrel is offering, it's clear where Momma learned everything she knows. Grandpa's country fried breakfast comes with two eggs, grits, gravy, biscuits, butter, fried apples or hash brown casserole, and either country-fried chicken or chicken-fried steak. Whew — so much food!

Even going with the slightly less bad options of fried apples and country-fried chicken, assuming two biscuits and ignoring the optional preserves, you're still consuming 1,030 calories, 12 grams of saturated fat, 435 milligrams of cholesterol, and 1,990 milligrams of sodium. Congratulations! Even this monstrous meal hasn't put you over your daily recommended intake of ... calories.

The saturated fat is just under the limit, and the sodium crosses the line, as well. If you're prepared to ignore "All the Fixin's," (the biscuits, butter, and gravy), you can bring the sodium and saturated fat content of your breakfast down to semi-reasonable levels, but that leaves you with a pretty boring breakfast.

Choose anything on the Cracker Barrel menu that includes the word "fried" in the description, and you know it's never going to be a poster child for weight loss, but it's not necessarily an automatic disqualification. Add the word "country" to that description however, and it might as well be waving a red flag. The country-fried shrimp platter comes with half a pound of breaded fried shrimp, hush puppies, three sides of your choice, plus a complimentary corn muffin or buttermilk biscuit with butter. Even choosing three boring sides like steamed broccoli, boiled cabbage, and coleslaw, along with a slightly more interesting complimentary corn muffin, you'll be sentencing yourself to a meal that contains 1,250 calories, 15 grams of saturated fat ... and 3,520 milligrams of sodium!

That's more than twice the ideal daily intake of sodium. Even if you abandon all the sides and just eat the fried shrimp and hush puppies, you'll still be consuming 2,570 milligrams of sodium in one sitting: 270 milligrams more than the maximum amount for a whole day. And if instead of choosing the relatively sensible sides, you go all in, you could go over a day's worth of calories — and a week's worth of sodium.

It's easy to get distracted by nutrition when you're trying to decide what to eat. However there are occasionally other reasons to decide against a certain dish. Take Cracker Barrel's Chicken and Dumplins as an example. However, there's an even better reason to avoid a plate full of dumplins: because it will probably just look gross.

You have to remember that the pictures you see on the menu are better than a best-case scenario of what your particular chef might turn out the night you're there. What you actually get will depend a lot on what's happening behind the scenes, but in the case of chicken and dumplings, a writer from the Dallas Observer described what he found on his plate the one time he stopped at the Barrel in 2013. It wasn't appetizing. What he received looked less like a meat — and starch — based entree covered in sauce and more like a beige, gelatinous mass that could conceivably double as an extra from "Ghostbusters." It probably wouldn't look much different if it had already made the trip to your stomach and then decided to come back for an encore.

Cracker Barrel's macaroni and cheese side option is basically regular mac and cheese. Mac and cheese has its place, but that place is mostly in a cardboard box, being cooked on a student's stove, or riding on a student's fork directly from the pot it was cooked in.

Mac and cheese can make for a good dinner when prepared well and eaten in moderation — it can even get fancy from time to time — but when it's casually included in a long list of side options, it's more like a landmine: sitting quietly and unnoticed until someone chooses it without thinking. Then boom! An extra 220 calories, 18 grams of fat, and 490 milligrams of sodium just blew your diet, and your health, to kingdom come.

Drinking sweet iced tea is a fine way to cool off on a warm summer day, or any other day for that matter. It's refreshing and easy to drink, often has less sugar than regular soda (and more nutritional benefits).

Cracker Barrel's sweet iced tea contains 160 calories from 41 grams of sugar, and as long as you know that's what you're drinking when you order it, it's probably fine. Except for those dang complimentary refills. All the time you're chatting away with your friends and casually drinking your tea, your servers are refilling it (like they should) and multiplying your calorie intake without you even realizing. At the end of the meal you might only have one empty glass in front of you, but thanks to good service it transformed into the beverage equivalent of the Tardis, containing several times more liquid and calories than you thought it did.

It's hard to criticize a dessert for being less than good for you. The dessert wasn't trying to keep it a secret. And no one saying the words "Double Fudge Coca-Cola Cake" to the server is expecting to gain some sort of health benefit from it. In fact, most of the "benefit" is gained in full knowing that the opposite is true ... but there are limits. 

Usually it's possible to eat a light meal, then indulge in a dessert without the numbers getting out of hand. But pick this option off the Cracker Barrel menu and you will be indulging in an extra 840 calories, 17 grams of saturated fat, and 71 grams of sugar. The only way to square that stomach-bulging muffin top of a circle is to limit your entree to a bowl of green salad and a glass of unsweetened iced tea. Then go for a 3-mile run, too.

When you're looking at a menu and trying to make a smart decision, it's easy to get distracted by the main elements of a dish and drop your guard when it comes to the sides. But it does you no good to save yourself from some calories and salt on the main course (by forgoing your favorite main, at that!), only to unknowingly get them back in an ill-considered side dish.

A side of dumplins, for example, seems pretty innocent. A little bowl of floury blobs covered in sauce — just the kind of thing you'd pick in a rush because you spent all your time making the big decisions. But those little dumps contain 240 calories and 1,190 milligrams of sodium, eating up a lot of your daily limit of sodium. There shouldn't be that much sodium in your entire meal, let alone in just one of the three forgettable side dishes that come with it.

Cracker Barrel jumped head long into the juicy burst of pickle popularity with its own batch of country fried pickles as part of its appetizer collection. Slices of juicy dill pickle coated in crisp lightly fried batter and served with a tangy dipping sauce to ramp up the excitement? It's the perfect blend of Southern spirit and bar bite creativity. But it only rises to the level of fan favorite if done properly, and word on the Internet is that Cracker Barrel fails to stick the landing.

How many different ways can a simple fried pickle miss the mark? Diners have called out egregious missteps ranging from receiving their order with the pickles "sitting in oil" (via Facebook) to the forgettable flavor resembling McChicken rather than a more convincing take on country-fried batter — one that's in desperate need of salt. Which is strange for a dish with nutrition facts that reveal a whopping 3,440 milligrams of sodium included in the recipe. Some were even thrown for a loop when ordering Cracker Barrel fried pickles and expecting to find meat somewhere on the plate, though the name clearly states the vegetarian nature of the order.

The grand tradition of the beignet hits a wall of modern convenience when Cracker Barrel added the southern pastry to its menu. Anyone who's ever enjoyed an authentic beignet knows the crispy exterior that gives way to a pillowy interior with enough decadent sweetness to make a sugar fiend blush. There's a finesse required to recreate a French favorite that's become an iconic creation done to perfection in New Orleans dining destination Café du Monde. So when Cracker Barrel turns the crank and makes an assembly-line beignet from the same dough used to make its famous buttermilk biscuits, something essential goes missing — and customers notice.

In an informal poll conducted by Mashed, 36% of participants listed these struggling pastries as the worst dessert at Cracker Barrel, citing their distaste for the reimagining of biscuit dough as a world-famous treat. Considering the Cracker Barrel dessert menu features a skillet filled with cinnamon rolls and a double chocolate fudge cake infused with actual Coca-Cola, there are much better sweets to be had.

You'd think a restaurant that prides itself on down-home country authenticity would be able to produce a breakfast staple like grits that convinces its customers that it knows what it's doing. But Cracker Barrel has some boning up to do on what it takes to create grits with grit rather than the pale imitation that many customers find lacking in Southern character. A Mashed poll showed that nearly 33% of participants consider these grits the worst breakfast dish at Cracker Barrel – a concentration of opinions too large to ignore.

How does a restaurant that proudly promotes its Southern style go so far off the tracks with a dish that announces itself as a staple of the regional cuisine? Redditors have decried the less-than-fresh personality of the grits, calling them out as potentially canned or frozen, though there's no evidence of either. Another customer fired up their Tripadvisor account to call Cracker Barrel's attempt at grits "the worst ever I ever experienced," describing them as watery and lacking in flavor — qualities Tik Tok reviewers have also echoed in reviews of their own. Regardless of the restaurant's home-style reputation, it seems you're bound to find better grits elsewhere.