Bob Evans Most Popular Menu Items Ranked Worst To Best

What do you think of when you hear the name "Bob Evans?" Well, unless you are one of the 117 Americans who goes by this name (info courtesy of HowManyOfMe.com) or their no-doubt numerous friends and family members, you may think of a brand of frozen sausage or mashed potatoes. If you're in the South, Mid-Atlantic, or Midwest, however, you may also think of Bob Evans, the restaurant. Although this chain has been struggling in recent years, over 400 Bob Evans locations are still open for business throughout the aforementioned regions.

While Bob Evans may be synonymous with sausage, they offer a wide range of other menu options. So which items are their bestsellers? Fast Food Nutrition has compiled a list of their top items. While these may vary from week to week, with some items rising up to the top of the charts while others sink to a lower position, as of the time of writing, the list below reflects Bob Evans' 15 most popular menu items. The list below, however, is arranged not in order of how well these items sell, but by how we feel about them. You may or may not agree, but then, that's the fun thing about food –- it's just about the most subjective subject there is, and all of these items are popular enough with Bob Evans fans that they're likely to remain on the menu no matter what we say.

While Bob Evans offers both lunch and dinner, they are often considered to be a breakfast chain, so it stands to reason that this would be one meal they'd consistently get right. Still, not all breakfast items were created equal. We're of the opinion that omelets are something that are really only good for the first few bites, since after that there's just too much sameness in each forkful. Obviously not everyone agrees, though, as one of Bob Evans' bestselling breakfast dishes is their Western Omelet.

Even as far as omelets go, Bob Evans' Western one is pretty meh. It's kind of spongy in texture, and neither the cheddar cheese nor the "hickory-smoked ham" offer much flavor. If anything, the omelet tastes primarily of bell peppers, a vegetable often used (and over-used, as in this case) as cheap filler. As the omelet doesn't even look good in its online menu photo, we're baffled as to how it got to be a bestseller in the first place.

Another one of Bob Evans' bestsellers is something that we find indescribably boring: Banana Nut Bread. It's just your plain old typical banana bread, nothing special. Ok, to give it a little credit, it does contain nuts, which at least provide a little extra flavor and texture to break up all that banana. Banana bread is something you bake at home to re-purpose fruit that's about to go bad, but doesn't seem like something you'd really want to order in a restaurant. Plus, didn't we get enough of this stuff in 2020?

Bob Evans features banana bread as part of their "Bakery & Desserts" menu section, but still, we struggle to imagine exactly where it fits into a meal. Is this something you'd have for breakfast? It could be a dessert, but kind of a disappointing one. Banana bread really doesn't stack up too well against pies, cookies, or even Bob Evans' Cinna-Biscuits, as these, at least, come with a creamy icing dip. While this banana bread isn't bad as banana breads go, it's just kind of blah.

Chicken noodle soup is, without a doubt, right up there in the pantheon of classic comfort foods, but we tend to think of it as something to be eaten when we're sick -– and yes, it seems that chicken soup (with or without noodles) really does have some medicinal properties. Whether it's made by a loving grandma or, more likely, comes from a red-and-white can, chicken noodle soup is something we typically eat at home, quite often while huddling under the bed covers.

Does Bob Evans attract a lot of patrons who are coming down with colds? This is the only reason we can think of for why their Chicken-N-Noodles Soup would be so popular. There is nothing particularly terrible about it, but nothing that excites the taste buds, either. Basic, boring, bland, and a trifle too overloaded with vegetables is our verdict. It's really not significantly tastier than any of the canned chicken noodle soups we've tried, so it's not something we'd bother ordering again.

If you tend to eat out at family restaurant chains like Bob Evans on a regular basis, perhaps due to having a job that keeps you always on the road but without the expense account that allows you to dine at high-end steakhouses, then it's only natural that you'd like to see some healthy options on the menu. If we had to eat at Bob Evans several times a week, then we, too, would probably resort to ordering something dull but healthy like plain old grilled chicken breasts. As it is, though, we don't eat there too often, so we'll likely give this one a miss in the future.

There is nothing particularly wrong with Bob Evans' Grilled-to-Perfection Chicken, other than that these breasts aren't really all that perfect, as they tend to be on the dry side. We will say, though, that dry chicken is far preferable to chicken that hasn't been cooked quite enough, so at least there's that.

Bob Evans' breakfast menu has a lot to offer if you like a good hearty meat and potatoes (and eggs) meal. While they do have a few breakfast meals featuring French toast or pancakes ("hotcakes," as they call them), it's fairly obvious that these aren't the specialties of the house. Instead, Bob Evans is all about those morning meats. If you can't decide between sausage, bacon, and ham, though, one popular entrée offers all three: the well-named Everything Breakfast.

Okay, so the Everything Breakfast doesn't really offer everything on the breakfast menu -– no hotcakes, for one thing. (No French toast, either). You do get the aforementioned sausage, bacon, and ham along with scrambled eggs with cheese and tomatoes sitting on a pile of hash browns and topped off with hollandaise. Also a biscuit. Nice, but we're not huge fans of having the food on our plate all stirred into one big mish-mash before we even get it. If we wanted to go Whole Hog, we'd go for the Bob Evans breakfast of the same name instead, as the items in that dish aren't all mixed together. This lets you decide on a bite-by-bite basis what you want to put in your mouth. The fact that nearly every forkful of the Everything Breakfast is identical to the one before knocks a few points off our rating.

If you order one of Bob Evans' beef, seafood, or poultry entrees, most –- but not all –- of them come with a few dinner rolls. Most of their smaller-sized Dinner Bell Plates, however, do not, nor do the sandwiches, soups, and most of the salads. It comes as no surprise, then, to find out that a la carte dinner rolls appear on the list of Bob Evans' bestselling items. Even if you do get them along with an entrée, you may well find yourself craving more, since these rolls are just that good.

Bob Evans' rolls and other bakery items are said to be "freshly baked in our Farmhouse Kitchen," but we're not about to launch an all-out investigation to find out whether or not this is true. As these rolls are, or have been, available in frozen form, we wouldn't be shocked to find out that individual restaurants bake them up fresh-from-frozen. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but frankly, we don't care. These yeast rolls are warm, soft, pillowy, slightly sweet, and entirely delicious, and we only wish Bob Evans offered an all-you-can-eat option like Olive Garden does with its breadsticks.

According to Fast Food Nutrition, the #1 bestselling item at Bob Evans at the time of writing is the Cranberry Pecan Chicken Salad, and we're not going to argue that it deserves a place among the best that Bob Evans has to offer. It's light, fresh, tasty, and ... okay, maybe not quite as nutritious as we'd like to imagine. The Bob Evans menu does say that, depending on your choice of chicken (grilled or fried) and dressings, it can run anywhere from 1110 to 1710 calories, although this calorie count may include the two dinner rolls that accompany it.

So this salad is not exactly a diet dish, but it's still one that we'd happily order again and again. Chicken + dried cranberries + blue cheese crumbles + pecans are a classic salad topping combo, and Bob Evans ups the ante by including bacon as well. They typically serve it with their "Colonial Dressing," something Fooducate shows to be a thickened, sweetened oil-and-vinegar-based dressing, but you can also get it with Italian, French, ranch (regular or "Wildfire"), or honey mustard. Our own favorite option, though, is to double down on the blue cheesiness by ordering it with blue cheese dressing.