The Worst Sandwich At Wendy's, According To 38% Of People

It can be hard to pass up a Baconator when heading to your local Wendy's for a meal. Featuring two of the chain's infamous square burger patties, six strips of bacon, ketchup, mayo, and cheese, the monstrous handheld is nothing short of a carnivore's dream. However, as drool-worthy as the 2007 menu addition sounds, not everyone may be looking to get the meat sweats every time they roll through a Wendy's drive-thru, which is where the eatery's selection of non-beefy sammies comes in.

As seen on the restaurant's website, our redheaded lady friend offers a number of chicken sandwich options to her customers who aren't pulling up to the order counter and asking "where's the beef?" The selection includes the timeless Spicy Chicken sando and its trendier cousin, the Hot Honey Chicken, as well as the Asiago Ranch Chicken Club and bacon-topped Crispy Chicken BLT. Additionally, Wendy's also gives patrons the chance to chow down on an ocean-based meal from time to time with its Crispy Panko Fish sandwich, which historically makes a brief return to the menu around the Lenten season.

Each sammie is clearly decent enough to play a supporting character to the succulent hamburgers at Wendy's, which many argue are the best fast-food burgers around. However, based on the results of a 562-person Mashed survey, in which U.S.-based customers were asked which of these Wendy's sandwiches was the "worst," one of the burger alternatives isn't exactly pulling its weight.

Out of the 562 participants in Mashed's poll, 216, or 38.43%, of respondents dubbed Wendy's Crispy Panko Fish Sandwich as the restaurant's worst non-burger sando. 

Consisting of a crispy, panko-breaded fish filet topped with lettuce, cheese, pickles, and a "creamy dill tartar sauce," the chain seemed to think it hit the nail on the head with this limited-edition handheld when it made the switch from cod to wild-caught Alaskan pollock in 2021. "Many of our customers last year remarked on how the sandwich's texture, flavor and crispiness is improved compared to the cod sandwich," Wendy's VP of Culinary Innovation John Li explained to Square Deal Blog, though the comments on one Reddit thread about the re-vamped sammie seem to indicate otherwise. "It's very bland and a huge downgrade from the cod sandwich they had years ago," Redditor u/misterman2629 wrote, while another admitted that they disliked the sandwich so much, they ended up tossing it in the trash.

As for the other sandwich options at Wendy's, the Asiago Ranch Chicken Club was deemed the second-worst option by pollsters with 18.15% of the vote, while the Spicy Chicken and Hot Honey Chicken sandwiches performed nominally better with 16.01% and 14.95% of the vote, respectively. Wendy's Crispy Chicken BLT fared the best of all the survey options, taking just 12.46% of the vote — and we can't say we're surprised. After all, bacon does make everything better.