In February 2017, The Ringer made a regrettable declaration. Arguably one of the worst takes imaginable. Company founder Bill Simmons has always encouraged his employees to find different angles and lanes. But where we landed for no. 1 on a purportedly definitive top 50 ranking of American fast food items might as well have been an affront to everything he thought he was building. Given my past, it’d be fair to assume that I’d be sympathetic or even unapologetic in my approval—the Norman Rockwell Freedom of Speech meme, more than a half decade before it took off. It’d also be fair to assume that, of all people, especially of all the people working at The Ringer at that time, I would have understood our decision. See, Chick-fil-A holds a unique place in the pits of my stomach. Let me explain.
It wasn’t the taste of childhood nostalgia but the fervor of adolescence. I had my first taste of Chick-fil-A as a high school freshman in the summer of 2006, away from home, one day before the National Speech and Debate tournament held in Dallas. Our coach had spent the better part of a decade to that point traveling all across America shepherding high schoolers to various speech and debate tournaments and had developed an obsession with Chick-fil-A—its quality, its expedience, its reliability, and most essentially, its sweet tea. His passion became our own. I appreciated the simplicity of the sandwich, the bounty of its sauce varieties, the warm call-and-response of my “Thank you” being met with a swift “My pleasure.” When Chick-fil-A made inroads in my home state of California in the mid-aughts, it felt like destiny to be reunited with it. Unbeknownst to me then, the restaurant chain would become a place to test the limits of my body and spirit.
I once faced off against competitive eaters in a one-hour chicken-nugget-eating contest at a Chick-fil-A in La Habra, California (I managed to take down only 85, a disappointing result). As a 19-year-old college sophomore, I started a Chick-fil-A blog called Starving on Sundays to keep my mind off the 2011 NBA lockout. I wrote sauce power rankings, columns grappling with the restaurant’s notorious antigay politics, reviews of fringe menu items like chicken noodle soup, sausage breakfast burritos, and oatmeal. I camped out and slept on parking lot concrete for a full 24 hours in hopes of winning a raffle for a year’s supply of Chick-fil-A meal combos. Somewhere in the span of that 24-hour parking lot delirium, I caught a case of gastroenteritis, reducing me to a puking, shivering zombie. For my troubles, the employees gave me a Chick-fil-A sandwich, on the house. Before becoming an intern for Simmons’s Grantland back in 2013 in legitimate fashion, I once offered to provide the staff with free Chick-fil-A in exchange for a position—and it almost worked.
Chick-fil-A, for better but probably for worse, will be a part of me for as long as I’m in possession of my memories. Yet even I squinted and craned my neck looking at the top of The Ringer’s fast food rankings back in 2017. Chick-fil-A took the top spot, but the winner wasn’t the restaurant chain’s iconic chicken sandwich. It was something far more puzzling: the waffle fries. What? How? Why?
All good questions, all to be answered in due time. This is the story of how we created the most controversial thing the company has ever published on the internet and how it changed the shape of The Ringer to come.
No Bad Ideas in a Brainstorm
Mere months after The Ringer’s website launch in June 2016, the organization’s brain trust was feeling a bit stifled. A publishing partnership with Medium allowed for a pleasantly minimal reading experience but did not allow for much in the way of creativity on the back end of production. As alums of ESPN’s Grantland, which found a lot of success (and attention) through pop culture brackets and themed content packages, then–editor in chief Sean Fennessey and then–managing editor Juliet Litman sought to instill that ethos in the burgeoning company. After [ahem] a Ringer feature titled “The Burning Desire for Hot Chicken” was named one of the best articles of 2016 by Longform, food appeared to be an increasingly viable area of coverage. So: A theme week was proposed. The concept? “The Last Meal on Earth.” All it needed was an anchor, a tentpole. It needed a ranking. And it needed to be built outside the constraints of Medium’s content management system. It required a special build, the first in Ringer history, but certainly not the last.
Bill Simmons (founder, The Ringer, in 2017): One of the things we did was the Ringer staff—a millennial-driven staff, I'll leave it at that—decided to make a list of their top 50 favorite fast food items.
Juliet Litman (head of production): I was never a special projects editor, but we decided to do a food theme week, and I somehow became in charge of it. I think it was Sean’s idea to rank fast food items, and we had not yet come to rely upon Andrew’s [Gruttadaro, The Ringer’s special projects lead editor] expertise in creating ranking systems.
Sean Fennessey (head of content): It’s very possible that it was my idea. I do think that at that time, as you may recall, I was just desperate to have more things on the site that were not just “This is what happened in the Wizards-Nuggets game.”
Litman: I was in charge of [the fast food ranking], which is so funny. I would never be in charge of that now for multiple reasons. Sean and I had worked really closely together on special packages at Grantland, and that was part of my role there.
Fennessey: That stuff was really just fun for me to work on, particularly having a print magazine background. [Before Grantland, Fennessey was an editor at GQ.] Packages were the lifeblood of every issue. You had to effectively find a way to theme every issue that you were working on to make it stand out, to create cover lines that could create excitement amongst people browsing newsstands. And so I tried to bring that ethic as much as I could to [Grantland] and this site. And so I’m always sort of thinking that way, and there’s a very delicate balance between painting your face like a clown to get attention and doing something that you feel like is genuinely insightful and fun to experience.
Litman: We felt like food was just a fun vertical. I don’t know why we did it, I have no idea. But we used to just have such emotional editorial meetings about what’s the best thing we could do. And it was just everything for the first year, everything felt like the life or death of the company.
Riley McAtee (special projects editor): The way I remember it working was we had everybody nominate. We were like, “We’re looking for nominees for the best fast food dishes,” and we got over a hundred different nominees. Then we asked people to vote on a top 10 or pick their top 10 and put them in order 1 through 10, which it looks like 53 people did. Then we had a bit of a point system for that. So we had, if it was first place, we would give that 12 points, and then 11, so on. So a 10th-place vote was worth three.
Los Angeles–based staffers convened in a corner office room on the Sunset Gower Studios lot, the original home of The Ringer, with a conference call line open for remote employees and the East Coast bureau operating out of the WeWork offices in Brooklyn. Chaos ensued. For one, L.A. staffers, and just L.A. staffers, were asked to fill out their top 10 on paper ballots. The contents of those ballots have been lost to time. Seriously.
McAtee: I have a spreadsheet with some ballots that people filled out. It’s all people who are in New York and things like that. Everyone in L.A., I think, filled it all out on paper. That’s why so much is missing. Paper ballots for voting. What can we say about that?
Litman: Slack was still much more of a social presence. And so for official business, it seemed like having a ballot would be funny or fun. We were like, “OK, we’re going to have people vote,” and [paper ballots] was the way we thought to do it.
Justin Charity (senior staff writer): I just remember the fast food ranking being loud.
Claire McNear (senior staff writer): All I really remember is everyone being mad at us and also everyone being mad at each other.
Litman: With the voting itself, I remember it was tacked on to one of our production meetings at 2 p.m., and it was just chaotic. Everyone’s just like, “Well, what about this? What about that?” There were a lot of questions, and we were like, “Just vote.”
Charity: It feels relevant that in the middle of the rankings, there was a lot of regional consternation, and maybe that’s what Juliet was talking about when she talks about how annoying we were about it.
Litman: I think that’s one of the reasons why it got so wonky, as there weren’t enough parameters. We were like, “Just vote for whatever your favorites are.”
Fennessey: I do remember it feeling chaotic, and I do remember feeling excited about that because this was in a totally different time for professional environments, where we were just all together a lot. And we’re just not all together as much now because of everything that’s transpired over the last four or five years with the workplace. And I liked having noisy meetings where people were throwing out bad ideas.
Litman: I was cringing/dying inside, mostly due to discomfort in kind of leading this lawless meeting.
Fennessey: I honestly don’t remember how we got to a place where the rankings became so ignominious. I feel like people were genuinely voting with their heart in that environment.
McAtee: I tabulated these votes, and I believe I sent out all of the assignments for the writing and stuff. I don’t think I was leading projects at this point. I was more like, I’ll gather all the copy and I’ll gather all the votes or whatever, but I was taking direction from Juliet. That’s my way of throwing her under the bus.
Fennessey: I was never short on ideas, but we didn’t have enough arms in the bullpen, so to speak, to be able to execute. And so handing something like this responsibility off to somebody like Riley [who was a former Grantland intern and a Ringer assistant editor at the time] in general—it’s ironic because Riley is now one of the masters of all project-oriented stuff that we do with the company. He’s one of the most trusted people that we have.
McAtee: In 2017, I barely had a concept of how spreadsheets work, and so this would be so much more elegant now and easier to interpret, and instead it’s just a complete mess.
Fennessey: I think there’s probably a part of me that saw the list and felt like this is going to be good chaos.
McAtee: Unfortunately, the way I did this back then, I didn’t keep any of the individual ballots from people, so we can’t name and shame. And that’s fine. That’s probably for the best.
The Worst Kind of Consensus
Without any semblance of a safeguard or electoral college that could intervene, The Ringer staff’s apparent consensus led to the most absurd proclamation the company has ever made: Chick-fil-A’s waffle fries were deemed the best fast food item in America.
McAtee: Waffle fries got the most people who put it in their top 10. [Nineteen staffers] did, out of 53.
Joe House (Ringer podcast host, in 2017): You have a problem. You have an immediate credibility problem when you trot out a list that purports to be a ranking, and the very first thing that appears on that list is waffle fries.
Simmons, in 2017: It would be like if I wrote The Book of Basketball and my no. 1 basketball player of all time was Robert Horry.
McNear: I remember being mystified because a guy I dated in college grandiosely took me to a Chick-fil-A after weeks of hyping the waffle fries, and they were … bad.
Charity: I remember I was a supporter of the Chick-fil-A waffle fries. I stand by that.
McNear: I don’t understand why anyone would like them, much less love them, much less my brilliant colleagues.
Charity: It has that good, like, crystally salt on it, and it’s like, well, it tastes like a potato. Right? But I feel like there’s a twofold thing with fries, where there are fries that taste like a potato but it’s, like, derogatory. There’s the ones that taste like potato but in a way that they taste undercooked and kind of cut badly. Whereas, yeah, the Chick-fil-A waffle fries taste like potato, and they kind of taste natural. But they got the grease and they got the salt, and so it’s like the perfect balance.
The restaurant chain’s own data can, at the very least, corroborate the waffle fry’s popularity: It is the most ordered item on Chick-fil-A’s menu since debuting in 1985. The waffle fry is a signature of sorts, definitive in its design—slicing a potato with a crinkle cutter and rotating it 90 degrees after each cut reveals a lattice pattern. And, given its size in comparison with typical fast food fries, the waffle fry offers a visual cue of abundance.
But consuming Chick-fil-A’s waffle fries is a race against time. The very first fry is almost assuredly perfect: crisp, substantial, the speckled potato skin gleaming golden, with a deep, crackling earthiness that almost takes you to the volcanic Washington State soil that the potatoes first emerged from. The fifth waffle fry, though? Absolute shit. The tender interior begins to retrograde into something stiff and gummy, and suddenly that visual cue of abundance becomes a bit tedious. In my opinion, it’s a good enough side dish! It deserves to be on the list. Just not in the top 10, much less the no. 1 overall.
House, in 2017: You don't know anybody and I don’t know anybody that’s ever climbed in their car and driven directly to the Chick-fil-A for the express purpose of purchasing solely the waffle fries. It’s never happened.
Fennessey: I will say also that some of the placements, particularly of Chick-fil-A items, were the product of a lot of East Coasters, Northeasterners getting exposed to Chick-fil-A over a very small window of time after having not experienced it.
Charity: It felt super salient. And it was around the time [that Chick-fil-A first opened in NYC]. I don’t know what it’s like in New York now, but that Chick-fil-A for the first two years, no matter what time of day you went, there was like a line down the block. I think it was like a two-block line for that Chick-fil-A, for a long time.
Litman: I just walked past one in the Theater District, and it’s huge. And I was like, “Wow, Chick-fil-A, how far we've come here in New York.”
Charity: And it’s like, what was the fry game in Manhattan at the time? Waffle fries were novel, and I do feel like there was a lot of goodwill in the New York office.
Fennessey: So it tipped in a direction away from Bojangles, for example, which had not made its way to the West Coast in the same way that Chick-fil-A had.
House, in 2017: You can’t have a list that purports to be the top 50 fast food items and have Subway’s cookies included on there and not have Bojangles on the list. I mean, that’s a crime. That’s a crime of omission. And it’s also arguably another instance where the coastal elites are up to their fancy business again, shutting out the Southeast, forgetting about people who are honest, hardworking people. Let me tell you a little bit about Bojangles biscuits: made from scratch, baked fresh, every 20 minutes. They come out of the oven, the chicken hand breaded, never frozen—never frozen chicken at the Bojangles. And every football game you attend from Roanoke, Virginia, all the way down the entire Southeast portion of the United States of America, you’re going to find Bojangles.
Charity: It did actually feel in a way like a crash course in the regional diversity of The Ringer.
Fennessey: There were just items that we just could not properly account for.
Charity: I do remember feeling a sense of, like, “Man, I really don’t understand the Californians at this website.” I remember feeling this sense of, like, “OK, wow, we really unearthed a lot.”
McAtee: So, 19 people picked [waffle fries in their top 10]. Another thing got picked by 19 people—but had fewer people picking it in their top five or whatever—the Wendy's Frosty. Waffle fries and something like the Frosty are things that people don’t have a real strong opinion on. Both those items are fairly unique. No one else has waffle fries and the other [restaurants] have milkshakes or whatever, but no one really has the Frosty—whereas everybody has some version of cheeseburger. That’s probably the thing that ultimately led to having a fairly broad consensus.
Litman: I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. If people really love Chick-fil-A waffle fries, so be it. I don’t know. I also think that there’s so many fast food items that are ridiculously overrated. So yeah, I’d stand by it, and I’d be happy to say that publicly.
McAtee: [Riley checks his spreadsheet.] Oh my God. Only four people ranked it no. 1.
Charity: This is like how Eric Adams became mayor. He wasn’t necessarily no. 1, but enough people put him high, you know what I mean? I don’t like to compare the waffle fries to Eric Adams, but it tracks.
McAtee: The only thing that had more no. 1 rankings was the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich, which had five, but way fewer people put it in their top 10 overall.
This proved to be a true fracture point in the rankings, a real sliding doors moment, to borrow the boss’s parlance. If it were Chick-fil-A’s chicken sandwich that had ranked no. 1 instead of the waffle fries, how might that have altered the trajectory of the website? Is there more honor in an ordinarily bad list than there is dishonor in an extraordinarily bad one? Certainly, the sandwich would have been more deserving of the honor. Chick-fil-A’s original chicken sandwich is one of the true enduring archetypes of popular American cuisine: buns, chicken, two slices of pickles always placed on the bottom bun. The last time I went to a Shake Shack, I ordered the fried chicken sandwich, plain, with nothing but pickles. The pickles were tenuously bull riding on top—it felt like a sin. After all these years, there is still a part of me that holds a devotion.
Simmons, in 2017: I don’t understand how any fast food list can exist that doesn’t have the Chick-fil-A sandwich no. 1. It’s the most delicious fast food item God has ever created.
Waffle-Cut Martyrdom: A Checkered Window Into the Future
Well, Bill, there’s a simple explanation. Without any real guidelines, votes were cannibalized. Had the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich been an umbrella category with its various iterations—spicy, deluxe, spicy chicken deluxe—it would have secured the top spot handily. (Whether that solution would have been any more correct is a debate for another time. It may shock you given all I’ve disclosed, but I, for one, voted for Popeyes fried chicken in the top spot.)
No matter what you think about the rankings themselves, their existence served as a successful prototype, a proof of concept. It was a validation of the website’s desire for interactive special builds that would become a hallmark of the Ringer ecosystem and of the spirit of collaboration that would set it in motion. Appreciate our Streaming Guide? How about NBA, Ranked, or the NFL Draft Guide? None of those flagship modules would exist if it weren’t for the fast food rankings, which pushed the boat out for a maiden voyage. We like to think we’ve learned some things along the way.
McAtee: I would just say that the real flaw in our methodology—the major, major flaw—is we just broke everything out way too much. How would I do this differently [today]? Just narrowing down the actual list of items would be the no. 1 thing. It just makes no sense the way that we have it. We needed to consolidate some stuff down, and we just didn't.
Simmons, in 2017: My wife went through the list and got angry 12 times. The Subway cookies—she actually asked if it was put in as a joke, if it was like an elaborate prank like the Joaquin Phoenix movie. What was the Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck movie? Whatever. That was just an elaborate prank for two hours. She thought that was why the Subway cookies were in there.
Fennessey: I talk about this a lot with Amanda [Dobbins] on The Big Picture now, where there’s an art to list making too, where you want to insert somewhere between three and seven items on your list that get people thinking, “Well, why the fuck did they do that?”
Charity: At The Ringer, I felt like with that ranking, we were having fun with a fun subject. But I also think we were kind of trying to figure out: How do we want to rank things?
Fennessey: That is an interesting conversation—and one that is not often had in public forums—about how editorial decision-making operates.
Litman: I do think we’ve tried to make our lists more broadly representative of some kind of consensus outside of the staff since then. I mean, maybe aside from draft boards, because that’s a little bit more subjective and it’s kind of more of a gamble. But on the culture side, I guess we try to make them a little bit more consensus driven.
Charity: As much as I think readers of the web can take that stuff for granted, it’s actually quite hard to do, right? It’s hard to poll internally for that stuff. It’s hard to know when you need to make distinctions like that and why and how it affects the quality of the package. Or do you want to have a top-down approach, right? Where the editors say these are the options, and then you’re really just picking from a preselected menu of things. But then you don’t end up with weird stuff, dark horse stuff, on the list.
Fennessey: There is this open question of: Is it what it actually is, or is it what you want it to be? I wouldn’t say that the list that came out of the fast food rankings is exactly what I would’ve wanted it to be, but it isn’t not what I wanted it to be, either.
Charity: I think it’s hard for publications to solve it in general. Like at [Charity’s previous employer] Complex. God, we would have so many meetings. We’d have them quarterly, basically, where we’d do, like, let’s rank the rap releases of this year, or halfway through the year the R&B releases, or let’s do a retrospective ranking of hip-hop or best MCs, whatever. Lots of meetings like that. Juliet would have hated them. They were very tumultuous, and it was very kind of, like, mob democracy, like, pluralistic. And sometimes that works, but sometimes it makes for really inefficient process.
McAtee: Back in 2017, we were like, “No, there’s a process.” We have to abide by democracy here. I would do this so differently now if we did it again.
Litman: One thing that we changed, we evolved, and purposefully so, was our big projects now, for the most part, have a much longer shelf life. And we did that on purpose so that it’s a resource that you come back to. I think also with rankings that you update regularly, there’s just more of an opportunity to acknowledge flaws. With this, it was just one and done. We dropped it and we moved on, and we never intended on updating it. We haven’t since.
Charity: Around the time The Ringer launched, we were still really in the thick of web media feeling very ranking heavy. I remember that project made me think a lot about the art of the ranking and my own personal tolerance for ranking projects.
Fennessey: I don’t look back on it and think, like, “Wow, we really need to fix our processes here.” We don’t. We’re imperfect. We’re a weird collection of people. We always have been. I think I was hoping that it would reflect that there was some idiosyncrasy in the building to the way that we do things. And when you look at the list, you might think those guys are weird.
“This Is Not a Joke.”
On the Monday morning of February 27, 2017, the fast food rankings went live. Hours earlier, a different debacle had taken place. “There’s a mistake,” Jordan Horowitz, a producer of La La Land, exclaimed to a stunned Academy Awards audience. “Moonlight, you guys won Best Picture. This is not a joke.” In damage-control mode, Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel made light of the gaffe. “I blame Steve Harvey for this,” he said, a reference to when Harvey named the wrong Miss Universe winner in 2015. Lucky him. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
Charity: Yeah, so people are in a bad mood, in general.
Litman: My main memory of this is just finishing the special build on Sunday night with [developer Mike Morisco and designer Linsey Fields] and being at my friend’s house with the Oscars on. I’m on my laptop, and the La La Land–Moonlight debacle is happening, and I’m asking them to make a favicon—the little icon for the URL bar—and other things like that.
Fennessey: I don’t think I was hosting The Big Picture at that point, or if I was, I was not covering the Oscars in quite that way. I did write a column, I remember, about the Moonlight win and what a historic win and what an unusual win it was in Oscar history and remains in Oscar history. So I was obviously working on Sunday night. I think I probably stayed up, as I often did, till one o’clock in the morning writing and filing my copy.
Litman: We almost never launch projects on Mondays anymore because it’s too stressful for Sunday night and nobody’s around. So it was a crazy time.
Charity: I was in the office [the morning the rankings launched], and I do remember this was probably one of the first times where I was kind of, like, overwhelmed. I think the Bill of it all, it makes it a bit different. And I sort of started to realize that there was just something about social media being this place where something could blow up like that. I was like, “I don’t know if I’m built for this stuff.”
Fennessey: I must have been delighted to have spent my morning simultaneously reading Oscar analysis, charting this remarkable moment in Academy history alongside the hilarious vitriol related to the list. That must have been a delightful Monday for me.
Charity: Think about it. Think about Grantland, and you think about The Ringer, and you think about the whole narrative of the site coming into being. A special thing about The Ringer is people really do come to it as readers or listeners with a lot of passion, a lot of preconceived notions. And I felt like we betrayed someone or something. I just remember people being mad, and not in a normal way.
People were mad. So, so mad. So were we.
In a Medium post titled “The Ringer’s Fast Food Rankings Are a Disaster,” a creative director named Dave Fymbo wrote, “The point of a subjective list is to put forward something that implies you know anything about the subject. In other words, you want to avoid immediately losing all credibility. Any website could publish a list of the best pizza toppings and put artichoke number one but what’s the point? That was the case with the Ringer’s recent outing. Even Bill Simmons, the site’s CEO called an emergency podcast to rip the list.”
McAtee: I will say, though, that the fast food rankings led to what I think is Bill Simmons’s best podcast.
Simmons, in 2017: I have a lot to worry about. I don’t get as bent out of shape about lists anymore, but considering these are people I work with, I got a little bit out of shape, and then I talked to Joe House, and he was bent in half.
Litman: I think when Bill did a podcast about it, I was like, “Oh, Bill’s so pissed about this that he is doing a pod.” They were so outraged. That’s when I was like, “Oh, OK. They don’t agree.”
McAtee: Obviously, it’s Bill’s company, and he had no input on how this all went down, so it was just like, “The fuck are my employees doing?”
Fennessey: Even though Bill and House and [Dave] Chang publicly castigated something that we all made together, I don’t feel bad about it at all.
Do I Still Linger in Your Mind?
Time doesn’t necessarily heal all wounds, but it does make it easier to forget. The first year of The Ringer was a whirlwind. To use Litman’s words, “I think of the early Ringer years as just incredibly stressful. So I’ve lost my memories.” But the fast food rankings still rankle to this day. Nearly biannually, the denizens of the r/BillSimmons subreddit issue reminders saying, “Never forget: The Ringer ranked waffle fries as the best fast food item in America.” We commend their diligence, lest this moment in time and human error be erased. But all these years later, it does raise a question: Whither the waffle fry? When was the last time you even had one?
McAtee: Within the last month. So we bought a house last year, and in the same parking lot as the local Home Depot is a Chick-fil-A.
Fennessey: Amanda always gets Chick-fil-A for the Oscars, so we always eat it during the Academy Awards before we record. So there’s also some nice synchronicity for your story. And so I’m almost certain that I would’ve had some in March when it happened.
What Fennessey is suggesting is some sort of sorcery. Dear reader, you know as well as I do that Chick-fil-A is notoriously closed on Sundays.
Amanda Dobbins (features lead): I did have Chick-fil-A this year for the Oscars—I went on Saturday and bought two extra emergency sandwiches. They keep in the fridge very well! I also have a Chick-fil-A nugget platter at my holiday party every year, pretty much the only Southern tradition I have held on to.
Litman: I spent most of my time in the Northeast, and then I went to college in the Midwest, where they also did not have Chick-fil-A. I feel like just where I’m from, and I’m not even saying this is right or wrong, but regionally it was frowned upon, or it was until the last 10 years, for their politics and stuff. So it wasn’t something that I thought I was missing out on because Chick-fil-A was associated to me with being closed on Sundays and how they don’t support gay people. I was like, “Why would I go?” I had it for the first time when I started working at Grantland, and I remember we went to pick it up from the USC campus, and I was just part of the crew. So it’s possible I’ve never had a Chick-fil-A waffle fry.
Dobbins: Finally, I want to make it clear that despite my loyalty, I do not claim any responsibility for the waffle fry ranking disaster—I had one vote like everyone else.
But what’s your actual answer to the question of best fast food item in America?
Dobbins: My official no. 1 has to be the Chick-fil-A original sandwich—simple, classic, my only source of protein through two pregnancies. Anticipated the great chicken sandwich boom. The one and only!
McAtee: The Double-Double would be my answer for sure, and then the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich would probably be my no. 2. And I think that if that had been our list, and even if waffle fries had been third or something, I think that people would’ve grumbled about the usual, but it would’ve basically been like, “Yeah, this is fine.”
House, in 2017: The Egg McMuffin is a seminal fast food sandwich. It’s a gateway sandwich. It’s probably the first fast food I ever consumed in my life because in the 1970s, my parents, driving us to whatever event on the weekend, trying to, on the fly, get us a little bit of pre-hoops nutrition, would hit the McDonald’s on the way, and we would get not just a delicious Egg McMuffin, but also a hash brown.
David Chang (host, The Dave Chang Show), in 2019: I have said this before, and I think people think that I’m joking. As delicious as the fried chicken is at Popeyes—and it’s as good as anything that any top restaurant could make—I think the best thing that Popeyes makes is not the chicken, but the red beans and rice. And I’d argue, it’s not just the best side, it’s the best fast food item that any fast food restaurant can make.
Charity: When I say no. 1, I mean it’s the one I always go back to. The Filet-O-Fish, man. It’s like a childhood friend.
Fennessey: For me, McDonald’s fries. I have always also had a real affinity for Wendy’s nuggets—that would’ve been high on my list. They used to be in the Dollar Menu, and I would eat four packages of six nuggets for dinner.
Litman: The fast food that I crave, that is actually kind of hard to get, is Taco Bell. I love Taco Bell.
Deion Sanders (head coach, Colorado Buffaloes football), via GQ: I love me some KFC. God, I love KFC, but I try not to do the fried stuff, tremendously. I don’t count KFC as a cheat meal. KFC is a lifestyle.
Fennessey: I loved the Chicken Selects for McDonald’s. Those weren’t eligible, they discontinued them, but that would’ve been on my long-term, lifelong ballot.
I interject to confess that I have no idea what “Chicken Selects” are.
Fennessey: It was like the original chicken strip. It was deep-fried, but not with the same consistency or chicken style of the chicken nugget. It felt more like real chicken. It pulled, it was stringy, but it was boneless. And it was a moment where people were like, “Wow, McDonald’s is making real food, not this heinously destructive, prepackaged, frozen concept.” And it seemed like they were a huge hit, and then they stopped making them. And I guess they haven’t made them in 20 years. You never heard of them? That’s terrifying. I’m so old.
Charity: That is a psychotic answer. The chicken strips? Lived experience, don’t want to invalidate it, but that’s just … it’s kind of beautiful. Actually, I take it back, it’s not psychotic. It’s beautiful. It’s almost like in a movie. Like you get to the end of Everything Everywhere All at Once or something, and it’s a flashback to Sean Fennessey with the chicken strips. And it’s just silence. You’re just looking at this placid scene of Sean with the chicken strips, and he’s like, young, but he still has the slick hair that he has, somehow. He still has 2024 Sean Fennessey hair, and you’re like, “Oh … that explains everything.” And then the climax of Sean’s life happens.
Those Proustian moments that propel your inner child to emerge outside you before bulleting straight back into the soul—it’s a shared experience only insofar as we’ve all experienced it. But we all don’t experience it the same. What triggers those out-of-body jolts is specifically coded to the individual. So then maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the fast food rankings came out as wonky as they did. There is no consensus on, in Charity’s words, our personal lived experience. There is no consensus on what makes us tick. So maybe it’s time we all take it back. The Ringer’s fast food rankings aren’t psychotic. They’re actually kind of beautiful. Aren’t they?
Litman: I think people have such a personal relationship to fast food that also, for a lot of different reasons, engenders a lot of strong feelings.
Fennessey: I mean, it’s a question of: What is the historicity of our work? Does it matter what our fast food ranking was? Is this ephemeral entertainment, or is it an active, if not journalism, like documentation of something somewhat meaningful? I don’t really know the answer.
Litman: I will say, looking at the list right now—I just pulled it up—I still feel fine with waffle fries being no. 1, but it is a bad list.
Interviews have been edited and condensed.
