4 Best And 4 Worst Chick-Fil-A Chicken Sandwiches

Chicken sandwiches may be commonplace at fast food chains nowadays — especially after the famously delicious Popeyes chicken sandwich kicked off a years-long chicken sandwich war — but Chick-fil-A is the only major fast food chain synonymous with the chicken sandwich. Popeyes, KFC, Raising Cane's, and virtually all other close competitors offer a chicken sandwich as an alternative to a default chicken preparation, be it fried chicken, chicken tenders, or something else. Out of these, Only Chick-fil-A spotlights the chicken sandwich as the focal point of its menu.

Accordingly, the chicken sandwich section of Chick-fil-A's menu is pretty expansive. Its four baseline items are standard and spicy chicken sandwiches in regular and deluxe configurations, with the latter adding lettuce, tomato, and cheese. Rounding out the chain's offerings are a grilled chicken sandwich, a grilled chicken club, a standard wrap, and a spicy wrap. In order to determine which of these chicken sandwiches are worth ordering and which are best skipped, I tried all eight of them myself. Based on my findings, the following are the four best and four worst chicken sandwiches from Chick-fil-A.

The standard Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich consists of just a bun, a fried chicken patty, and two pickle slices. While it's pretty much as straightforward as a sandwich could be, Chick-fil-A ensures that all three of those ingredients in its signature offering add up to something special. Simply put, it earned the top spot on the Mashed list of 14 popular Chick-fil-A items ranked for a reason.

First off, the chicken patty is thick, juicy, crispy, and just slightly oily. It basically hits all the notes that it should. Encased in a buttery, rich breading, the chicken's flavor may not be bold but it's still deeply satisfying, like a chicken noodle soup or a milder mac 'n' cheese. The pickle slices add just the right amount of tang, while its bun fades into the background, housing everything in pillowy softness without significantly impacting the sandwich's flavor. This simple combination is so effective, that despite a conspicuous lack of sauce, I enjoyed plain bites more than a couple I tried with Chick-fil-A's Honey Roasted BBQ sauce. I'm hardly the first nor will I be the last person to praise the Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich, and for good reason — it's the storied Chick-fil-A chain's very foundation, and it's still worth ordering over most of the alternatives on the chicken sandwich menu.

There are four items on the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich menu that are oriented toward customers who desire something a little healthier than its fried chicken-based offerings. The standard Grilled Chicken Sandwich is the simplest of these, consisting of a multigrain bun, a grilled chicken patty, lettuce, and tomato. It also comes with Honey Roasted BBQ sauce by default.

What surprised me the most about the Grilled Chicken Sandwich was how sugary it tasted, largely courtesy of the multigrain bun. What you're really eating when you order Chick-fil-A already includes more sugar than expected in many items, but in that bun especially is a surprising quantity. Even though it's seemingly meant to be healthier, the Grilled Chicken Sandwich contains almost double the sugar of the standard Chick-fil-A sandwich. Because the grilled chicken itself isn't super flavorful, the admittedly high-quality (for fast food) veggies dominate much of the Grilled Chicken Sandwich experience, adding up to a sort of hot, sugary, chicken salad flavor. Honey Roasted BBQ sauce helps supplement a noticeably dry chicken patty, but it's also pretty dang sweet. Together with the bun, the resultant flavor borders on a dessert-like sweetness. The standard Grilled Chicken Sandwich, then, is a little off without sauce and a little off with sauce. Skip it for one of a few superior alternatives.

Chick-fil-A's Spicy Chicken Sandwich is almost identical to the Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich, substituting a standard fried chicken patty for one breaded in spicy seasoning. Pretty much everything that's good about the regular Chicken Sandwich applies to the spicy version too — so, anyone who likes spicy food and chicken sandwiches should enjoy this one.

Perhaps most importantly for an item with "spicy" in its name, the Spicy Chicken Sandwich is decently hot. It shouldn't pose a challenge to most customers, but when so many purportedly hot fast food items underdeliver, it's notable that the sandwich satisfies in this regard. The one element lacking from the Spicy Chicken Sandwich is the butteriness of the standard chicken patty's breading. Fortunately, the spicy seasoning that replaces it is a suitable alternative. The Spicy Chicken Sandwich is no second fiddle, but 1B to the Chick-Fil-A Chicken Sandwich's 1A. Chick-fil-A's two simplest sandwiches, then, are among its best.

The Chick-fil-A Deluxe Sandwich includes everything on the standard Chick-fil-A sandwich, plus lettuce, tomato, and cheese. The default cheese selection for this sandwich is American. Especially after trying the regular Chicken Sandwich and the deluxe version back-to-back, it was abundantly clear to me that those extra ingredients weren't just unnecessary but actively detrimental.

The biggest offender was the tomato. It's to Chick-fil-A's credit that it uses fresh, juicy tomato slices, but rather than add heft to the sandwich, they complicated its flavor and sogged up the bottom bun. Similarly fresh lettuce worsened both the superfluous vegetable flavor and unwelcome wetness. Since the chicken patty isn't a flavor bomb but subtly rich, a lot of what's so good about it ended up buried underneath those fresh vegetables. Meanwhile, I thought the cheese was perfectly fine, but the regular Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich is so good without it that it was more of a net neutral than a value-add. More-so than either standard chicken sandwich, I enjoyed the Chick-fil-A Deluxe Sandwich dipped in sauce, but that was predominately because the sauce helped dull the vegetables. It did little to accentuate the ingredients I liked most. The Chick-fil-A Deluxe Sandwich is more than just a couple steps down from the standard Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich, offering virtually no benefits beyond the nutrients in its veggies.

So, a lot of what I thought was bad about the Chick-fil-A Deluxe Sandwich also applies to the Spicy Chicken Sandwich to some extent. But, whereas the spicy chicken patty is lateral to the standard version on both simpler sandwich options, it single-handedly adds enough to the Spicy Deluxe Sandwich to warrant ordering on occasion.

Because the chicken patty's spicy seasoning is so bold, it cuts through the vegetable content in a way the butterier, non-spicy chicken patty simply cannot. Paired with a solid baseline flavor, then, the veggies serve more of the supplementary role that they should. There are plenty of times a sandwich with at least some vegetables on it is the preferable choice to a sandwich consisting of literally just bread, oily fried chicken, and a smattering of pickles. For a sandwich that offers both the indulgence of fried chicken and more nutrition than a plain fried chicken sandwich, the Spicy Deluxe is the way to go.

There are two chicken wraps on the Chick-fil-A menu. Even if a wrap's sandwich-ness or lack thereof may technically fall into a gray area, I considered these to be sandwiches for the sake of the most expansive exploration of the chicken sandwich selection possible. The basic Chick-fil-A Cool Wrap consists of grilled chicken, lettuce, shredded cheese, and flaxseed flatbread. By default, it comes with a large packet of Avocado Lime Ranch dressing.

Biting into the Chick-fil-A Cool Wrap with no dressing, I thought it was aggressively mediocre, approximating something I easily could have thrown together at home. The fatty, tart Avocado Lime Ranch dressing tasted pretty decent on the wrap, and was absolutely necessary to get any enjoyment out of the thing. But, in some bites the dressing flavor would wear off pretty quickly, leaving me with the mediocre, dressing-less taste sensation once again. While this wrap seems like it's supposed to be a healthful item, the dressing packet alone adds 32 grams of fat and 520 milligrams of sodium to a baseline of 45 grams of fat and 1,420 milligrams of sodium. So, the wrap's healthfulness depends on not using the dressing, but then it doesn't taste so great. A lack of healthy items at the chain may be a false thing many people believe about Chick-fil-A, but finding those healthy items requires venturing out of the chicken sandwich menu entirely. Just skip the Chick-fil-A Cool Wrap altogether.

Whereas neither the Chick-fil-A Cool Wrap or the Grilled Chicken Sandwich is worth ordering at Chick-Fil-A, the Grilled Chicken Club Sandwich is the standout of the chain's four health-oriented offerings. On the basis of just taste, it's not quite as good as the Spicy Deluxe Sandwich, let alone either of the two standard fried chicken sandwich options. But for offering a solid flavor while falling within certain health constraints, it's preferable to its closest alternatives.

What makes the club different from the standard Grilled Chicken Sandwich is the inclusion of cheese — Colby Jack by default — and bacon. While the cheese flavor is kind of buried beneath everything else on the sandwich, a satisfactory but not overwhelming portion of bacon adds plenty of meaty, smoky flavor. It's worth clarifying that the Chick-fil-A Grilled Chicken Club Sandwich is only lower in sodium and higher in protein than fried chicken alternatives. Categories like fat and carbs are about the same across the board. That said, grilled chicken and a wheat bun are a little more nutritious than fried chicken and a white bread bun. All in all though, it's not great for you. Nevertheless, customers for whom factors like significantly less sodium or a less greasy chicken patty make a difference should find that the standout flavor of the bacon on the Chick-fil-A Grilled Chicken Club Sandwich is enough to make it the only worthwhile health-oriented chicken sandwich option.

As expected, the Spicy Cool Wrap is compositionally the same as the Chick-fil-A Cool Wrap, but with spicy chicken instead of standard grilled chicken. In the latter wrap, I found that boring ingredients and a false promise of healthfulness held the sandwich back. While analyzing the Spicy Cool Wrap, those factors hardly even mattered because it tasted so unpleasant.

On the regular ol' Spicy Chicken Sandwich, spicy seasoning imparts the sandwich with a dry, fiery sort of burn that builds and lingers, nicely complementing the bready, oily meat at the sandwich's core. For some reason the seasoning on the Spicy Cool Wrap is completely different, lacking that pleasantly fiery burn entirely. Instead, it tastes like too much black pepper — technically spicy, but in a way that's sharp and annoying. The included Avocado Lime Ranch dressing helps, but only by temporarily eliminating the spicy element, canceling out the very reason someone would opt for this item. Not only is the Spicy Cool Wrap not worth ordering, but it's handily the worst thing on Chick-fil-A's chicken sandwich menu.

In order to determine the best and the worst chicken sandwiches at Chick-fil-A, I ordered all eight permanent chicken sandwich options from my nearest Chick-fil-A in the outskirts of Las Vegas, Nevada. So-called secret menu items like Chick-fil-A's spicy char were ineligible for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there's no guarantee every single location will make the same secret menu items. I brought my order home and tasted everything in a single sitting. I worked up enough of an appetite to finish more than half of every sandwich, save for the Spicy Cool Wrap, which I disliked so immediately I didn't think much further exploration was necessary. I still finished about 40% of it.

To determine which items qualified as best and which qualified as worst, I took two main factors into consideration. First and most importantly was whether or not I enjoyed it. Then — especially in borderline cases like the Spicy Deluxe Sandwich and the Chick-fil-A Grilled Chicken Club Sandwich — I thought about what value they add to the Chick-fil-A menu. So, whereas the Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich and Spicy Chicken Sandwich were so good I'd recommend them based on taste alone, the aforementioned borderline cases earned recommendations for combinations of taste and utility. After all, for a work lunch or, say, an airport lunch, a sandwich with veggies is typically preferable to a tastier but less healthful option.