You can sip a Mountain Dew Kickstart Orange Citrus soda, which packs about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee (92mg). Don't forget a side of buttery Cinnabon Delights-you might as well while you're here, right? And if you really want to go all in on the Taco Bell breakfast theme and take the experience to the extreme, throw in a soda for breakfast. Same goes for the Breakfast Crunchwrap, which is required ordering thanks to its warm, inviting Creamy Jalapeño Sauce and a crispy hash brown wedged inside to provide the crunch in the name. The Cheesy Toasted Breakfast Burrito's rubbery sausage is a miss, but the Hash Brown Toasted Breakfast Burrito is a lovely, eggy, cheesy, potato-filled bundle of breakfast joy that doesn’t even need meat to be satisfying (pro tip: order it vegetarian). These days, Taco Bell's breakfast menu is mostly composed of toasted breakfast burritos, which you can order with various breakfast meats (or no meat!) and with or without a hash brown inside. The Waffle Taco is no more, but there’s still plenty worth talking about. The Waffle Taco was the talk of the internet in 2013 when it launched in select cities, before being unleashed nationwide in 2014. 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.