Tampa Bay Food Monster

hello, harby’s. long time no eat. i missed you, baby! i missed you. i miss your 5 roast beef sandwiches for 5 dollars. i miss you now defunct “big montana“, and to a lesser extent, your giant roast beef sandwich. you may have changed a bit over the years, but you know what? you still serve up that great roast beef flavor i love so much.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vxQqdFOeoM]

hahaha oh arby’s. everyone loves you! or at least, everybody loves your patented beefwiches. that’s the only reason i ever stop by there. but it seems like in recent times they’re trying to expand their menu, adding items that are new and different and frightening to me. sometimes… sometimes even things that don’t have roast beef in them. i know. has the world gone mad?? yeah. yeah it has. oh man remember when they used that ridiculous oven mitt as a mascot? haha arby’s.

recent additions to the arby’s menu include such items as the angus three cheese and bacon, steakhouse onion rings, some zany cinnamon dessert, and even a buffalo chicken sangwich! wacky choices. well, at least one of them has beef. but how about the others? where do they rank in the ever growing world of arby’s?

let us find out. together.

first up, the jr. buffalo chicken sandwich. for a buck. caught my attention immediately (i like wings!). and i had high hopes for a buck spicy chicken sandwich that made use of a sauce rather than a spicy chicken patty.

as it turns out, this thing is no competitor in the high-stakes world of hotty mcchickens. it… eh. it kinda sucked. it was small (hence the “junior”). the chicken itself was pretty good. kinda thin patty, but good quality. too bad it was covered in that lame “buffalo” sauce, which turned out to be just some simple vinegar based hot sauce. i could have thrown hot sauce on any chicken sandwich! i wanted buffalo! buffalo! they could have at least thrown some ranch on there… i feel like maybe that would have given it something interesting. or blue cheese. aw yeah. as it was, it was not worth the purchase. that dollar? wasted. a whole dollar! i’ll never recover financially!

next are the honkin’ big steakhouse onion rings. this ain’t none of your weak-ass burger doodle onion rings. nah. this is like the onion rings you’ll only find in a high-class steakhouse. these are big. and salty. aww yeah. for two bucks, you get five or six of these things, which are almost big enough to make up for the fact that there are so few of them. actually, i wasn’t even able to finish them! but that wasn’t because of their massive size – it was due to their saltiness, and the ratio of breading to onion. inside these giant things were tiny, slimy rings of onion. but i could see splitting the five among a group of friends. one onion ring each and you’re done.

last and possibly least are the outside-in cinnamon bites. three for a buck. and these things truly are a mystery. half cream cheese. half cinnamon… slime. all nasty. the two sides were definitely very distinct in taste. the cinnamon stuff tasted just like cinnamon, but not so intensely that you passed out or vomited or anything. unless you looked at it too long. the cream cheese was supposed to be sweet, but was mostly just rich. gross. it was like when something is sickeningly sweet, but without the positives of the sweet. it was kinda just disgusting. but the flaky crust pastry shell was really good! i would have loved for them to use it as a conveyance for fruit fillings. the world was never looking for a cinnamon/cream cheese combination (why didn’t they just use icing?). that being said, i do believe these would be ideal for chucking at your neighbor’s house or any authority figure you’ve taken issue with. especially when hot. i recommend you do that. i’m sure arby’s does too.

so yeah this was a wasted visit to arby’s, once again reassuring me that the only thing señor arby is good for is roast beef related goodness. luckily for him, he’s very good at that.

NEXT TIME: i do battle with arby’s ferocious angus three cheese and bacon! does this new spin on their old classic work? does so-called angus beef actually mean anything at all? can i resist calling it “anus beef” instead of “angus beef”?? tune in to find out!