When is the last time you spent $5 on a meal? A full meal, not just a foot-long sandwich or a cheeseburger.
Dining out is a luxury, and my recent credit card bills reflect that. With notoriously low profit margins, and the cost of everything from ingredients to labor on the rise, restaurant meals are far from cheap.
Fast food is its own category, the American dream as neighborhood burger joint, affordable sustenance delivered in a paper bag with a smile. But even the fast-food giants aren’t immune to inflation. In an open letter in May, McDonald’s USA President Joe Erlinger said that the average cost of a Big Mac in the U.S. is up 21% from 2019.
In the midst of widespread criticism over rising prices, McDonald’s introduced a $5 value meal in late June. That sparked something of a value-meal war, with competing chains soon after attempting to entice diners with their own value meals, many hovering around $5. Burger King brought back its $5 Your Way meal in early June, followed by Taco Bell’s launch of the $7 Luxe Cravings Box on June 27. Wendy’s is coming up on its five-year anniversary of the $5 Biggie Bag, and Jack in the Box and Carl’s Jr. have versions of a $5 deal as well.
The McDonald's deal was originally expected to run for a month, but 93% of participating McDonald’s franchisees plan to offer the promotion through August.
I set out to try them all, evaluating the meals for value, food quality, taste, how closely they resembled the advertised photos — and whether or not I felt ill after eating.
You can find the rankings below. If you agree with my assessments (and more likely if you don’t), let me know in the comments or in a pointedly worded email.
6. Jack in the Box $5 Big Deal Meal
What’s in the bag: A Jr. Chicken Sandwich or Jr. Jumbo Jack cheeseburger plus a taco, curly fries and a 16-ounce drink.
It’s unclear whether the burger patty was intended to be a smash burger or not, but it appeared less than a quarter of an inch thick, and was completely dwarfed by the bun. There was a single pickle, a single piece of wilted lettuce, a slice of tomato, a slice of American cheese and a squirt of both mayonnaise and ketchup. The bun could only be described as stiff. It was on par with the frozen burgers one might find in various dollar-store freezers.
Read more: Best fast-food chicken sandwiches: Is Chick-fil-A or KFC #1?
The taco shell was translucent with grease. It's mostly shell and lettuce, with a thin strip of meat paste along the fold. The curly fries were the meal’s one redeeming quality, though they were soft and extra greasy.
If you opt for the chicken sandwich, expect the same bun and a rubbery pressed and formed chicken patty.
5. McDonald’s $5 Value Meal
What’s in the bag: McChicken or McDouble plus 4-piece chicken nuggets and a 12-ounce drink.
The McDonald’s bun tends to have a curious plastic, almost waxy quality to it. It looks like bread. I’m told it’s bread. But I’m never convinced. The location I visited in Pasadena only offered the McChicken. I appreciated that they didn’t shy away from the mayonnaise, properly lubricating the sandwich and tossing on a good amount of shredded lettuce. The chicken itself is like a giant nugget, though looser in texture and not as tightly pressed — like a round of packaging foam breaded and fried to look like chicken, crispy in parts and well seasoned with salt and pepper.
The nuggets are the nuggets you know and love, served with your choice of sauce. The fries were mush, sticks of salty mashed potato.
4. Burger King $5 Your Way Meal
What’s in the bag: Whopper Jr., Bacon Cheeseburger or Chicken Jr. plus fries, four-piece chicken nuggets and a 12-ounce drink.
The Whopper Jr. tastes and looks like the burger your neighbor served you at the Fourth of July block party. The sesame seed bun tastes vaguely of the plastic bag it arrived in. The burger patty, thin, overcooked and with faint grill marks across the top, is smaller than the bun. It’s dressed generously with a slice of tomato, raw onions, pickles, ketchup and mayonnaise.
The fries are tough around the ends and mush in the middle. Though pale in color, they have a bitter, almost burnt aftertaste. The nuggets are comparable to McDonald’s, improved slightly by the addition of Buffalo sauce, if you can get past the pudding-like texture of the condiment.
3. Wendy’s $5 Biggie Bag
What’s in the bag: Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger, four-piece spicy or regular chicken nuggets, fries and a 16-ounce drink.
This was my first time having a Wendy’s burger, and I was disappointed to find that I didn’t notice the signature square shape of the burger. By the time I remembered to check the four corners, I’d already finished. The miniature sandwich felt more appropriate for a kids meal or someone feeling peckish. Despite the size, the bun was the softest and best of the bunch that I tried. The bacon was actually crispy. Both the slice of tomato and the leaf of iceberg lettuce were fresh. The patty was on the drier side, but the mayonnaise saved it.
The spicy nuggets did deliver some heat and a pronounced pepper flavor. The fries were over-salted, dense and stodgy.
2. Carl’s Jr. $5 All Star Meal
What’s in the bag: Charbroiled double cheeseburger or spicy chicken sandwich plus four-piece chicken stars, fries and a drink.
Both the double cheeseburger and spicy chicken sandwich appeared to be full-size versions of each sandwich, the chicken patty and ground beef matching the circumference of their respective buns. The cheeseburger was the favorite, its double charbroiled patties tasting like they were kissed by a grill. Adorned simply with dill pickle chips, raw onion, ketchup and mustard, it was the closest to a non-fast-food, fast-food burger.
The fries, though limp, tasted of real potato. And the real winner was the chicken stars. By default, stars are better than nuggets, the five arms resulting in an ideal ratio of crispy edge to meat. And the exterior wasn’t one solid sheath of coating, with breading that allowed for small nooks and crannies of crunch.
1. Taco Bell $7 Luxe Cravings Box
What’s in the box: Chalupa Supreme, Beefy 5-Layer Burrito, Double Stacked Taco, chips with nacho cheese and a 16-ounce drink.
It’s not really fair to pit Taco Bell against a burger chain, so feel free to slide Carl’s Jr. into this spot. For one, the box is $2 more than the other meals. And Taco Bell has the edge of being able to add hot sauce, nacho cheese and sour cream to many of its offerings.
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There’s a drastic shift that occurs when deciding what constitutes a meal at Taco Bell. Typical orders might contain a burrito, multiple tacos and possibly a Crunchwrap Supreme, cheesy potatoes and Cinnabons Delights for dessert — far more than what one might consume at another restaurant. But even through this adjusted Taco Bell lens, the Luxe Cravings Box contains enough to satisfy two. Both the Chalupa Supreme and the Beefy 5-Layer Burrito boast the heft and gravitas of a full meal.
The Chalupa Supreme presents as a taco with a deep-fried pita shell, with not a lot of meat, and a lot of shredded lettuce. The Beefy 5-Layer Burrito counts both a small, internal tortilla and a truck tire-sized outer tortilla as two of the five layers. Some bites involve nothing more than a mouth full of tortilla. And there is never a need to wrap a hard-shell taco in a soft flour tortilla, fused together by a thin layer of nacho cheese, but that is the Taco Bell way.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
