Raising Cane's Menu Items Ranked Worst To Best

The motto of the burgeoning fast food chain Raising Cane is "ONE LOVE," which suggests the brand's commitment to doing just one thing well. Raising Cane is all about one love, and in this case, that one love is chicken, specifically, meals built around breaded and fried boneless chicken fingers.

The menu at Raising Cane's is audaciously simple. In a highly competitive, convenience-oriented landscape with fast food menus across the board offering numerous burgers, chicken, sandwiches, sides, specialty, and limited edition items, Raising Cane's operates on a business model consisting almost entirely of combo meals, all served with the same side dishes.

Customers at Raising Cane's can order almost as few or as many chicken strips as they'd like, or they can opt for chicken strips in burger form, generally served with crinkle-cut fries. These meals are also accompanied by the famous tangy Cane's Sauce, as well as fountain drinks and ice tea. Raising Cane has several menu items that range from wonderful to tasty in terms of deliciousness. 

Raising Cane eschews standard fast food French fry varieties such as shoestring fries or skin-on homestyle fries and instead serves its chicken strips and sandwiches alongside a hefty portion of crinkle-cut fries. Crinkle-cut fries are often perceived as being more processed than other sliced-and-fried potato strips on account of the unique, accordion-style shape in which they're cut, prepared, and presented. For many people, they evoke memories of public school cafeteria side dishes or a pre-packaged bag of fries that came straight out of the freezer and was baked in a home oven. 

Raising Cane's crinkle-cut fries taste almost exactly like those historically and traditionally poorly and barely prepared fries. They're crisp on the outside but flaky on the inside, leading the customer to wonder if these aren't cut from potatoes but assembled from dehydrated potato flakes, an ingredient that is used in processed items like boxed mashed potato mix or Pringles. Another strike against Raising Cane's fries is the saltiness level. A combo meal with fried chicken and Texas toast already packs plenty of sodium, and the chain could afford to lay off the salt on these mediocre fries that get cold way too quickly anyway.

Coleslaw is a quirky side dish that is most commonly found at grocery store deli counters and real old-fashioned delis. It is often slopped onto a plate at barbecue joints, fried fish places, and fried chicken restaurants. It's sort of healthy but sort of not: It mostly consists of  finely chopped, nutritionally void cabbage (nevertheless a vegetable) along with some carrot bits for color, sugar, and a hefty amount of fatty, watery, mayonnaise-like sauce.

Coleslaw is a "love it" or "hate it" kind of thing, and there are hundreds of recipes out there for making fresh coleslaw. The coleslaw that Raising Cane's chooses to put into its customers' bellies tastes almost identical to the world's most famous and popular coleslaw: The slaw that is sold that competitor chicken chain KFC. If one is going to copy, one should copy from the greats because KFC's coleslaw is a perfect mix of sweet and sour, crispy and smooth. Raising Cane's slaw is all those things, too, but with maybe just a little more pepper in the mix.

Bread can often be an afterthought at restaurants of all levels; it's often used as a cheap and easy way to bulk up a combo meal or offer a well-rounded dining experience. But at Raising Cane's, bread is often a part of the combo meals in the form of Texas Toast, which outranks its non-chicken cohorts of coleslaw and fries. It's thoughtfully prepared, and it's made from pull-apart bread that is grilled on a flat top after being slathered in a mixture of garlic and butter. 

In other words, this toast isn't technically toasted; rather, it's stove-cooked, which makes it taste as fried as the chicken tips that are so good atop it. Unlike traditional toast, this bread retains its moisture quite well. The Texas Toast is thick-cut by definition; however, the bread itself is also think, dense, and quite fluffy. It has a strong,  flavorful crust that simply cannot be skipped. It's topped with sesame seeds that are visually appetizing while also adding nuttiness and extra crunch to the crispy, snappy bread

Raising Cane's classic menu offerings really stood out during the great chicken sandwich wars of 2019 when massive chains like Popeyes and KFC released new versions of the sandwich that became a cultural phenomenon: A massive, breaded hunk of white meat chicken wedged between two hulking halves of a bun, maybe topped with some mayonnaise or sauce along with some perfunctory vegetables (Restaurant Business). 

However, Raising Cane's sandwich doesn't do anything fancy, nor does it entail engineering some new chicken patty or breast serving for its sandwich. The Raising Cane's Chicken Sandwich is refreshingly simple; essentially, the chain arranged items it already offered into the form of a sandwich. 

The sandwich consists of a bread that is similar to the Texas Toast (toasted, not grilled) topped with three classic chicken fingers along with a liberal dousing of Cane's Sauce and a little lettuce. It glorifies and highlights the Raising Cane's chicken, and it's a refreshingly basic yet fresh, mouthwateringly juicy, and delicious offering that will wow your senses and leave you wanting more. 

If Raising Cane's founders were going to enter the crowded and competitive fast food world with something as mundane and as run-of-the-mill as chicken tenders, then they had to present something completely original and memorable to the world, and that's exactly what they: The chicken fingers at Raising Cane's are probably the best available among franchised fast food establishments. 

All the other items offered by Raising Cane's, such as the sides, the dipping sauce, and the beverages, seem engineered to serve, complement, and elevate chicken fingers, so it's no accident or surprise that the chain's signature, key item is also the best thing on the menu. 

There isn't much to a chicken finger in the first place, so Raising Cane's development cooks had to perfectly nail the recipe of boneless chicken, flour blend, and spices. The chicken fingers are actually much more chicken-forward than other restaurants' chicken strips or frozen varieties, which by and large tend to be overly breaded and overly salted. 

Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers are breaded just enough to completely and properly cover the fried in fried golden batter while letting the chicken flavor (and its juices) really shine.