The Ultimate Ranking Of Chain Restaurant Skillet Cookies

One of the most insanely delicious dessert creations to ever hit the fast casual dining scene was the skillet cookie. It's hard not to be enticed by an oversized slab of chocolate chip dough still sizzling and gooey in the pan, complete with ice cream, whipped cream, and fudge sauce melting on top. Whether you shared it with the rest of your party or bogarted it all for yourself, it was a turning point in the world of sweet chain restaurant indulgences that set the early 21st century dining scene on fire. Copycat recipes to make at home followed, but few captured the thrill of having someone else prepare this sweetly sludgy skillet-based masterpiece.

Several chains still offer the skillet cookie as a meal-closing treat, though the quality of these lingering confections isn't necessarily equal across the board. To find out how the current selection of skillet cookies aligns with one another, I set out on an adventure to the chain restaurants in my area that keep the classic skillet cookie on the menu. Whether for nostalgia or for the sheer pleasure of consuming as much sugar as possible in a single bite, I lined them up and mowed them down for a definitive ranking. And then, I took a much-needed post-cookie nap.

There's more than a bit of disappointment with Chili's Skillet Chocolate Chip Cookie offering. It looks like nothing but a big circle of cookie dough with a few chocolate chunks stuck in the middle — not the most enticing first impression to make. The ice cream and toppings are passable, though nothing special. Add on a nearly-$9 price tag, and you're looking at four different layers of disappointment arriving at the table, regardless of it all being soft and gushy and cooked up in a skillet.

And speaking of being cooked up in a skillet ... maybe it was a byproduct of my order being encased in a plastic clamshell stored in the kitchen where all the other food is made, but I could taste fajitas or nachos in the cookie, too. I hope it was just a mistake the staff made with my order and not the result of cooks using the same skillets for the cookies as they use for the entrées. All savory intrusions to this sweet treat aside, Chili's provides one of the least exciting skillet cookies on the circuit.

The first time I heard about Oregano's Original Pizza Cookie was on a work lunch outing with friends who introduced me to what was at the time a fun, old-fashioned feeling dessert. It was perfect for a pizza place and tied in with the texture of all the other foods and I remember enjoying it much more than I did this time. Maybe it was the novelty of the dish or the company I was with, but I have much better memories of that first skillet cookie than I will of this most recent encounter.

It seems like the cookie Oregano's uses for this one is just plain-old cookie dough — nothing better than what you could make at home, which is highly disappointing considering the price you're paying almost $9.00 for a restaurant-level dessert. The chocolate isn't very good either, which is sort of the whole point of the cookie; the dough is more or less a deliciously mushy vehicle for delivering melted chocolate. So if the cookie dough doesn't work and the chocolate is disappointing, what do you even have on the plate other than an overpriced version of something you can get a better version of somewhere else? Oregano's may be one of the originals, but it's time for a revamp.

It's not often that I would call out a dessert for having too much chocolate, especially if it's a skillet cookie that's designed to be this way. But the sweetness-on-sweetness that comes with the BJ's Cookies and Cream Pizookie is just too much to swallow. It would be a different scenario if you could taste the fudge among all of the sugar. But with the ice cream and cookie crumb-sprinkled whipped cream that comes on top, your tongue never gets a chance to catch up.

Having two chocolate cookies from BJ's to compare side-by-side, I can also call out the cookie dough as being markedly different from the dough used in the Triple Chocolate Trio. Maybe they're made of the same stuff and it's just my taste buds detecting a difference due to all the surrounding elements, but it has an entirely distinct flavor that ends up mushing together with the other sugary elements. The truth about BJ's Restaurant is that it should have its Pizookie game on lock by now. But this cookies and cream concoction just doesn't stack up.

Having something more distinctive than just chocolate and cookie dough gives Oregano's Peanut Butter & Chocolate Pizookie flavor an advantage in the skillet cookie competition. The vanilla ice cream is topped with another sprinkling of chocolate chips, which feels unnecessary, considering the cookie has so many peanut butter chips you can barely see the surface, and those are in addition to the chocolate chunks embedded in the cookie dough itself. Though it's plenty sweet, there's something about the peanut butter elements that temper the sugary essence to provide a decent flavor balance.

It was nice to have an option beyond the usual chocolate-based cookie to sink a fork into, though I would vote for even more peanut butter — maybe in the form of peanut butter sauce drizzled on top. I'd even go so far as to suggest a peanut butter ice cream to justify the chocolate chips and keep the ratio in check. The more I think about it, the more I realize this could be a top-ranker with a few tweaks. Oregano's, if you're reading this: Should there ever be a dessert design upgrade, I'm available for notes.

Could giving a chocolate skillet cookie two other forms of chocolate possibly improve your dessert situation? BJ's seems to believe so and takes a huge leap with its Triple Chocolate Pizookie, which may sound like overkill and definitely takes decadence to new heights. Yet somehow, the combination works, providing an option that's different enough from the usual blueprint to give even diehard fans something new to savor. Using Ghirardelli chocolate doesn't hurt matters either.

The chocolate cookie here tastes much more like a brownie, a unique twist on which to stack on ice great vanilla ice cream and mini chocolate chips to complete the scene. It's a less sweet and more complex chocolatey combination, thanks in part to the use of bittersweet chunks that break up the base cookie with luscious bits of sophisticated flavor. For chocolate lovers looking for something hot and gooey that hits all the marks without being tooth-achingly sweet, this skillet cookie should be a significant find. It's sure to be exciting news for Pizookie fans, especially those who can't get enough chocolate in their dessert life. A bit more creativity — a molten center, maybe, or some white chocolate chips instead of a repeat of the usual chocolate kind — would have moved it even higher up in the ranking.

With its Legendary Monster Cookie, Cheddars presents a supremely buttery cookie that looks more like a thick crêpe or a chocolate chip pancake as the foundation for its skillet cookie dessert. The tenderness of the dough keeps the gooey texture while the vanilla ice cream and the sticky fudge sauce do their part to slather the surface with supreme sweetness. This one tastes more like an old-fashioned homemade cookie then some of the others, which ended up having more of a store-bought batter taste. I would be surprised if this wasn't one of the more popular items on the Cheddar's menu.

For the homemade touch, as well as the under-$8.00 price tag that makes this monster-sized confection a heck of a deal, I'm giving Cheddar's a relatively high spot on the list. It would be even higher if I could have just a hot skillet cookie without the toppings instead of the deluxe construction. I'm making a note if I ever order this one again to skip the doodads and stick with a more straightforward version. Since it was a take-out version and the toppings came separately, I could easily have made the adjustment at home. As the taste test included the works, I'm ranking based on the overall impression it made.

Of course the proprietor of the Pizookie is going to have a trendy salted caramel version of its sauce dessert, even if the trend is a little dated by now. To be fair, the whole skillet cookie concept is a bit dated too, but that doesn't stop BJ's from offering a menu 10 flavors deep, with limited edition selections cropping up from time to time. Still, I was a bit leery diving into the Salted Caramel Pizookie, wondering how much magic this blend of tastes and textures could still have. Is salted caramel still capable of surprises when combined in skillet cookie form?

Not only are there surprises in this skillet cookie, they're the sweet sort that make dessert lovers sit up and take notice. The lumpy-bumpy deliciousness of BJ's base cookie makes an exceptional crust for the scoop of deluxe vanilla bean ice cream, adorned with a sticky caramel sauce and chocolate chip mixture. The nutty dough is delicately singed on the edges, giving the cookie a bit more texture than some of the other selections on the list. Maybe mine spent more time in the skillet, or maybe the larger cookies come out of the process more complete. Either way, this is an inspired version of what a skillet cookie should be.

Though Denny's Lava Cookie Skillet gets high and mighty with a more muffin-like structure for its base, this is what I would call a proper skillet cookie. It's a tall stack to see on your plate, for sure; with the ice cream and the salted caramel sauce added to the structure, you have a pretty delicious combination towering on the table. And once your fork hits the lava fudge interior, all heaven breaks loose. The molten chocolate emphasizes the quintessentially loose center delivered while still cooking in the skillet. Overall, Denny's provides the equivalent of a Toll House cookie with a melted chocolate heart that will do anything to be loved. So loved, it shall be.

With a satisfying price of $5.99 in my location and being available 24 hours a day, the Denny's lava skillet cookie is a great selection for the more budget-minded dessert lover, though fans of a higher-caliber skillet cookie are sure to enjoy it just as much. The fact that there are Denny's locations all over the U.S. means it's widely available as well, unlike some of the restricted regional-only access offered by smaller chains.

The Chocolate Chunk Pizookie from BJ's is the ancestor of the other cookies in the skillet lineage, which should give customers great hope for a prime dessert experience. If you can't count on the core creation to come through in a clutch, what hope is there for any iteration that comes afterward. Even if you try to conjure up a brookie pizookie in your own kitchen, it's nice to trust that the foundational recipe at the restaurant that owns the Pizookie name is a winner. I'm pleased to report that it's still a skillet cookie champ.

What makes it so much better than the other skillet cookies on the block? BJ's does an excellent job with the chocolate chip cookie dough, making it buttery and chewy while sprinkling oversized cubes of chocolate throughout, in a form dessert bakers might consider the Skillet Cookie Golden Ratio. With a scoop of authentic vanilla bean ice cream on top, you get a moderately-sweet version of the dessert that lets you taste every layer individually, even when merged in a single bite. It's old-fashioned and modern, classic and contemporary, and it's a list-topper when tasted side-by-side with the other players in the skillet cookie game. And at under $9.00, it's also worth spending your dessert money on.

I ordered my skillet cookies to go so I could control the taste tests and the photography without having to eat at seven different restaurants. This meant that the ice cream was a little soft and the cookies were a little cold by the time I got them home. So I refroze the ice cream and after snapping their glamour shots, I heated up the cookies to get them as close to the original state as possible for the taste test.

Rather than just digging into the whole thing all at once, I took a sample of the cookie, then a sample of the ice cream, then a combination bite of both together to gauge how each component stood on its own and how well they complimented one another. This was the best way to determine if there was one aspect or a combination that made the creation better or worse. The varying sizes of the cookies played a small part in the ranking, especially with all of the prices hovering between six and nine dollars per cookie. To me, picking up a poor-quality cookie that costs less seems like a bigger mistake than a higher-quality cookie that cost a little more.