What You Should Absolutely Never Order At Applebee’s

What You Should Absolutely Never Order At Applebee’s

In Atlanta, GA, the first Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar opened in 1980. But it wasn’t called that until 1986.

Before that, it was called T.J. Applebee’s Rx for Edibles & Elixirs, which was kind of a long name.

What You Should Absolutely Never Order At Applebee's

And the company’s owners, a married couple named T.J. and Bill Palmer, thought about using either the name “Cinnamon’s” or “Pepper’s.”

They didn’t, though, because those names were already taken by businesses in Georgia.

Today, there are almost 2,000 Applebee’s restaurants in almost a dozen countries and every state except Hawaii, except Hawaii.

Millions of families like to go to the restaurant for lunch with friends, dinner and drinks with coworkers after work, or just to get a good meal at a good price.

Applebee’s serves a lot of good food, including soup, salmon, burgers, and beer. The setting is warm and friendly, and the staff, called “Applebuddies” (yes, that’s what they call themselves), is friendly and willing to help.

Still, there are some things on the Applebee’s menu that you should avoid like the plague because they may make your taste buds and body feel like you have the plague.

Applebee’s menu has a lot of meals, sides, and desserts that are bad for you in terms of nutrition, and a few meals that taste bad as well.

Here are 12 things you should never order at Applebee’s.

Applebee’s Loaded Baked Potato soup is loaded with fat

Applebee’s Loaded Baked Potato Soup may be delicious comfort food, but it’s not much of a comfort to know that it will give you more than your daily suggested value of many nutrients.

Applebee's Loaded Baked Potato soup is loaded with fat

The average amount of soup has 600 calories, and more than 300 of those calories come from fat.

It has 36 grams of saturated fat, which is 16 grams more than the average adult should eat every day, according to doctors.

Even though the soup tastes great, if you knew what was in it, you might choose something else.

Applebee’s website says that to make enough soup for four to six people, you need “2/3 cup butter, 7 cups milk, 10 to 12 strips bacon, 1 and 1/4 cups shredded mild cheddar cheese, and 1 cup sour cream.”

There are also potatoes in there, but most of the flavor comes from the cheese, cream, bacon, and other ingredients.

And how many calories. And fat, saturated fat, and salt. There are 1,290 milligrams of sodium in the food, just so you know.

Avoid Applebee’s Oriental Chicken Salad Wrap at all costs

The words “salad” and “wrap” make you think of light, healthy food that you can eat without feeling guilty (or bad about yourself) or thinking about the diet you should be keeping.

Avoid Applebee's Oriental Chicken Salad Wrap at all costs

Here’s a wake-up call: to get the same number of calories as Applebee’s Oriental Chicken Salad Wrap, you would have to eat three Big Macs and a handful of fries.

Even though the meal comes with fries and a vinaigrette sauce, which add to the number of calories, it is still a very bad choice.

Worst of all, this meal might seem like a healthy choice to many people, but a plate of ribs or a bacon hamburger has fewer calories and fat.

If you really want a chicken salad wrap, get the Oriental Grilled Chicken Salad Wrap, which has less than 100 calories and 120 calories from fat less than the regular chicken salad wrap.

Even so, it has even more salt than the other one, so you’re still not winning.

The Applebee’s Loaded Fajitas pack in the sodium

Sodium is a necessary mineral that helps your body with everything from muscle and nerve function to balancing body fluids and staying hydrated. Your body needs some of this important electrolyte to work.

The Applebee's Loaded Fajitas pack in the sodium

But too much sodium can cause high blood pressure, damage to the kidneys and other systems, heart disease, stroke, and other health problems.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that a healthy adult should not eat more than 2,300 milligrams of salt per day.

But the CDC says that most Americans eat more than 3,400 mg of salt every day, which is 1,100 mg more than what is suggested.

So what does this have to do with the fajitas at Applebee’s?

Well, if you ate an Applebee’s Loaded Steak & Chicken Fajita by yourself, you would eat 2,700 milligrams more sodium than the CDC’s daily recommended amount. This is well over double the full daily advice in a single meal.

every meal. Which is another way of saying that it is very bad for your body.

Grilled chicken dishes at Applebee’s aren’t worth the price

Many people eat at Applebee’s because it has a lot of cheap choices that let them enjoy a restaurant meal without getting stuck with a huge bill that ruins the whole night.

Grilled chicken dishes at Applebee's aren't worth the price

Depending on the situation, late morning or early afternoon. Avoid ordering grilled chicken breasts at Applebee’s if you’re on a budget. You’ll receive little for your money.

A former employee of Applebee’s, who went by the name “Applebuddy,” said that the chain pays an average of about 30 cents per chicken breast that goes into these meals. Many of these meals then sell for nearly $20.

Even so, you also get sides like vegetables, rice, potatoes, and other things with that chicken breast.

Overall, though, you can bet that a lunch that costs $18.99 has a markup of more than fifty times what the restaurant paid for its ingredients.

In general, though, retail prices are double what a company pays for its ingredients at wholesale.

On the other hand, you don’t have to cook or do the dishes, which is certainly a plus.

Applebee’s Strawberry Frozen Lemonade has 76 grams of sugar

Avoid Applebee’s frozen lemonades. At least not if you don’t want to contribute to arterial wall inflammation, heart failure, stroke, diabetes, cancer, restlessness, poor sleep, and other health issues caused by sugar.

Applebee's Strawberry Frozen Lemonade has 76 grams of sugar

These frozen “treats” have between 52 and 76 grams of sugar (Classic has the least and Strawberry has the most), which means that even the frozen lemonade with the least amount of sugar has double

the amount of sugar that experts say a woman should eat every day and 15 grams more than an adult man should eat every day.

For comparison, a drink of Coca-Cola Classic soda has 26 grams of sugar, which is about six teaspoons.

That’s more sugar than most people should consume, but it’s nearly three times less than what Applebee’s Strawberry Frozen Lemonade contains.

If you must have anything sweet, try to limit yourself to fruit drinks. They have real fruit in them and about the same amount of sugar as the frozen lemonades.

Pass on every pasta dish on Applebee’s’ menu

You may have heard that eating five to six smaller meals throughout the day is better for your health than eating three big meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Pass on every pasta dish on Applebee's' menu

In fact, science isn’t sure yet, but experts agree that it doesn’t matter as much when you eat as long as you eat healthy foods and watch how many calories you take in.

(But irregular daily fasting does seem to help with weight loss in some important ways.)

All medical science and nutrition experts agree, however, that it is not good to eat about three-quarters of your daily calories in one sitting.

So if you order a pasta entree at Applebee’s, you should really cut it in half and take 50 percent of your food to go. If you take the average number of calories in their six pasta meals, you get an average of 1,400 calories per main dish.

And you don’t want to know how many grams of fat or how much salt are in it. (But if you do, you can find all the information on Applebee’s Menu Nutrition Facts.)

Skip the Hand-Battered Fish & Chips at Applebee’s

Experts in health say that a healthy adult should get between 20% and 35% of their daily calories from fats. For those of us who eat around 2,000 calories a day, this means between 44 and 77 grams of fat a day.

Skip the Hand-Battered Fish & Chips at Applebee's

Let’s add these up and split by two to get a daily average of 60.5 grams of fat.

The Hand-Battered Fish & Chips meal has 95 grams of fat in it. People often think of fish as a low-fat food, which is one of the main problems with this.

Which it can be if you don’t have to deep-fry fried fish to make it. Choose the Blackened Cajun Salmon instead of the fried fish, which has 1,430 calories but the Blackened Cajun Salmon only has 240. But you can always fill up on fries and breadsticks.

Breadsticks aren’t the best thing to put on your plate, though, as we’ll soon see.

Applebee’s Strawberry Shake is a glass full of sugar

Like Applebee’s frozen lemonade drinks, too much sugar is unhealthy.

But the worst of those had 76 grams of sugar, while the worst of the shakes has 61, another has 75, the next worst has 100, and the Strawberry Shake has 110 grams of sugar.

Applebee's Strawberry Shake is a glass full of sugar

Which has 38 grams of fat, 23 of which are saturated fat, which is more than the daily limit for fat. Even if you just look at the calories, it’s probably a good idea to skip the Decadent Shakes.

Their names don’t lie: the Vanilla Decadent Shake has 730 calories, while the Strawberry Decadent Shake has 920 calories, which is almost half the normal daily value.

recommended value for your entire food. in a single cup. That’s as much as WALL-E ate, and you’ll probably eat it as a “treat” after a full meal that already put you over just about every nutritional measure.

Don’t get the Oriental Chicken Salad if you’re trying to eat light

The good news is that Applebee’s has a number of salads that are totally healthy. These salads are low in calories, fat, and sodium, among other things.

Don't get the Oriental Chicken Salad if you're trying to eat light

The bad news is that these are all just different versions of the house side salad, like the house salad with honey balsamic dressing or the house salad with fat-free Italian dressing.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that ordering one of the entree salads is a good choice.

Half of Applebee’s main course salads have more than 1,000 calories, and several have more than 1,500 calories, like the Oriental Chicken Salad, which you might think is a healthy pick.It will still cost you 1,560 calories, though.

(We’re thinking that no one thinks the Big Tex Taco Salad with Beef or with Chipotle Lime Chicken is a good diet choice.)

Also, more than half of the calories in all of Applebee’s main salads except for two come from fat.

Don’t order the Southwestern Steak Salad at Applebee’s

Customers have spoken, and the results are clear: two out of three people who have eaten at Applebee’s say you shouldn’t get the Southwestern Steak Salad.

Don't order the Southwestern Steak Salad at Applebee's

People on the popular polling site Ranker.com voted against the meal by that much, and one TripAdvisor reviewer said,

“When [the Southwestern Steak Salad] came to the table, the way it was presented totally turned me off. I could make something

like that at home. The cabbage had turned brown, and the meat was at room temperature. “This is a big letdown.”

Another reviewer on TripAdvisor put a picture of the restaurant’s ad for the salad next to a picture of the salad they actually got,

which looked like a horrible pile of wilting plants next to a piece of low-quality meat.

One customer said on Twitter that they ordered salad and steak was forgotten. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, or maybe four words in this case: Don’t get this meal.

Avoid the Breadsticks with Alfredo Sauce

When people eat too much saturated fat, it is very bad for their health. Saturated fat raises the amount of bad LDL cholesterol in your body, which can make you much more likely to have a stroke, heart attack, or other serious health problem.

Never Order At Applebee's

So, doctors and nutritionists say that a normal adult shouldn’t eat more than 17 or 18 grams of saturated fat per day.

Applebee’s Breadsticks with Alfredo Sauce have 48 grams of fat per order, which is about three times as much as you should eat of this junk every day.

Remember that you shouldn’t think of things like saturated fat as something you should get a certain amount of every day, like calcium or vitamin C. Instead, you should think of them as something you can have.

You shouldn’t get more than 18 grams of saturated fat a day, but even if you share this unhealthy snack with three people, you will get more than that.

But this is based on the idea that you eat pretty much anything else during the day. Please, just don’t eat the breadsticks. That’s the one thing you should remember from this story.

Even Applebee’s employees pass on the Bourbon Street Steak

You might think that most current and even past Applebuddies would try to say good things about the food at this friendly chain of restaurants, but a former Appplebee’s employee asked Reddit users to never, ever order the Bourbon Street Steak.

Never Order At Applebee's

In his story about the dish, the ex-Applebuddy said, “Don’t order a whiskey steak from Applebee’s. It tastes like a steak that tastes like black licorice. It doesn’t make sense.

I’m sure that every one of those I’ve ever made was for someone who had never had it before.”

They then told a story about a time when the waiters were especially annoyed by it.

“I remember that one time we cooked an extra one by mistake, so we gave it to a waitress to eat. “She took one bite and spit it out right away,” the person who used to work there said.

“She kept asking us all night, “What did you guys put on it?!” She thought we had put something bad on it to mess with her. We didn’t do anything to it, but they were just that bad.”

Someone who liked their employment at Applebee’s mentioned this. He was honest about the steak’s badness.

FAQs About Never Order At Applebee’s

What should I never order at Applebee’s?

Avoid ordering the “Bourbon Street Steak” as it has been reported to be tough and flavorless.

Is there anything I should stay away from on the Applebee’s menu?

Yes, it is generally advised to avoid the “Double-Glazed Baby Back Ribs” as they tend to be overly sweet and lacking in tenderness.

What dish should I steer clear of at Applebee’s?

Stay away from the “Oriental Chicken Salad” as it is often criticized for being high in calories and lacking authentic flavors.

Are there any menu items I should avoid ordering at Applebee’s?

It is recommended to skip the “Quesadilla Burger” as it can be greasy and overwhelming in terms of portion size.

What is one popular dish I should skip when dining at Applebee’s?

The “Fiesta Lime Chicken” is not recommended due to its heavy use of sauces, which can overpower the dish.

Is there a specific appetizer I should avoid ordering at Applebee’s?

The “Boneless Wings” at Applebee’s are often criticized for being small, dry, and lacking in flavor.

What dessert should I avoid ordering at Applebee’s?

It is best to steer clear of the “Triple Chocolate Meltdown” as it has been described as overly rich and too sweet for many tastes.

Should I be cautious about any seafood dishes at Applebee’s?

Yes, it is advisable to avoid the “Cedar Salmon” as it has received complaints for being overcooked and lacking in flavor.

Are there any vegetarian options I should avoid at Applebee’s?

The “Vegetarian Burger” at Applebee’s is often criticized for its dry texture and lack of taste.

What is a drink I should skip ordering at Applebee’s?

The “Bourbon and Whiskey Sour” cocktail is not recommended as it is considered to be poorly mixed and lacking in balance.

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