Worst Mash-Up: Sonic Drive-in Fritos Chili Pie
940 calories for chili? Well, I guess if you make it with Fritos chips and throw in a piecrust, anything is possible.
A better bet: A bowl of chili—without the Fritos.
Worst Appetizer: Chili’s Awesome Blossom
Chili’s is all sorts of wrong. The one and only time I ate there, I almost dove over the table and made the waitress give me my money back, it was so bad. It’s clear now I was just in a salt and sugar-induced rage. Even with their crappy food laden with sodium, fat, and emulsifiers, you’ve got to admire them. How they turned a simple onion into a day’s worth of calories and three days worth of fat is a miracle of food science.
A better bet: Skip the appetizer. Your meal will most certainly contain more calories, fat, and carbs than you’ll need for a week or so.
Smallest Slice of Sin: Baker’s Square Chocolate Caramel Peanut Crunch Pie
A day’s worth of saturated fat in a slice of pie. Yowsers.
A better bet: Apple pie. At least there’s fruit in it.
Worst Hot Dog: Wienershnitzel Pastrami Dog
It’s scary to top a hot dog with pastrami; it’s even scarier to think there is someone in this world that eats it. (Though it has been years since I’ve seen a Wienershnitzel.)
A better bet: Turkey Mustard Dog—only has 240 calories, and no weird red meat hanging off the sides.
Worst Onion Ring: White Castle Home-Style Onion Rings
Rings are supposed to accompany a main meal, but this snack has enough calories and fat to hold its own. Though some major fast food chains have made the move to rid their food of trans fats, the type of fat that really has it in for your heart, White Castle apparently hasn’t—30 grams of the bad stuff.
A better bet: Take a white castle slider and throw it across a room. Those things fly!
Truly, this is the short list of bad items at America’s popular restaurants; the long list would encompass most of their menus. Eating at a Chili’s, Outback, or any big fast food or chain restaurant should come with some sort of warning sign, a prescription for high blood pressure medication, a membership at a gym, or at the very least, prominently displayed nutritional information. Now that would be hard to stomach.
(Info Sources: CalorieKing.com, Eat This, Not That by David Zinczenko)
