8 Items To Avoid Ordering At McDonald's

Ah, good ol' McDonald's. Love it or hate it, the fast food giant is an American icon with a storied rags-to-riches past the likes of which define the post-war epoch of its birth. The McDonald brothers — children of impoverished immigrants — faced their fair share of trials and tribulations while they were taking their humble California hamburger stand to new heights. But despite reigning as one of the most prolific fast food chains on the planet today, hardships still befall the restaurant, many of which stem from its food, which, let's just say, doesn't always hit the spot.

In recent years, McDonald's has seen a drop in sales, likely due to ongoing economic hardships among the working class. But we'd be lying if we said the food wasn't also the problem. While there are plenty of tried-and-true favorites on the Micky D's menu (a McGriddle and a sweet tea might be the best fast food breakfast of all time), some items don't hold up (please get the McRib the McAway from us).

Using personal experience, including past reviews by Tasting Table staff, plus online reviews and discussions on internet forums, we've put together this list of some of the most egregious items on the McDonald's menu. Some of these foods lurk ominously in the dark corners of the menu, while others make up the chain's most famous offerings. Whether the recipes went downhill, they're outrageously unhealthy, or they just never tasted very good to begin with, these are the items on McDonald's menu that are the McWorst.

You might be surprised to see the mighty Big Mac, McDonald's golden child, on this list. You can't even think about those big shining arches without a vision of the massive Mac — with its sesame seed bun, double beef patties, pickles, cheese, lettuce, onion, and super secret Big Mac sauce — begging to be added to your next burger order. But, as iconic as this burger is, we have to give it to you straight: The mac daddy of the McDonald's menu sadly just isn't worth the room in your belly.

Let's totally ignore the ingredients for a second and talk about cost. All of McDonald's menu prices seem fair at first glance, but looks can be deceiving. If you pay attention to what McDonald's charges for the Big Mac compared to what you're getting, it simply isn't worth the splurge. A former McDonald's chef even claims you should never order the Big Mac, explaining that you can order a double cheeseburger with added Big Mac ingredients to get more bang for your buck.

Now, let's say you're not concerned at all with price (okay, Rockefeller) and you're only thinking about flavor. Well, here's another bummer for you: The whole three-bun schtick means an overwhelming amount of bread, and to make matters worse, you never get enough sauce to give each bite the moisture it deserves. Order up that modified double cheeseburger instead and save your appetite (and your wallet) from the frustration.

If the idea of fish from a fast food joint disturbs you, well, good. The famous Filet-O-Fish joined the McDonald's menu back in the 1960s as an alternative to meat for customers observing Lent. Today, it's still a Lent staple and a permanent fixture on the McDonald's menu, although changing tastes might prove that it won't stand the test of time for much longer.

The modest Filet-O-Fish doesn't have a whole lot going for it. It consists of just a lightly breaded square fish filet, tater sauce, and a half slice of American cheese on a steamed bun — a bun unique to the Filet-O-Fish, while other McDonald's sandwiches require a grilled bun. This fishy (pun intended) meal sparks so many questions: Why is the filet square? Why no lettuce or tomato? Why a half slice of cheese and not a full slice? Why didn't McDonald's immediately throw this recipe in the ocean where it belongs?

We appreciate that McDonald's offers a non-meat sandwich, but we wish it would step up its game for the pescatarians among us. The fish lacks any sort of crisp, leaving us wondering why McDonald's even bothered to bread it in the first place. The steamed bun gets soggy quickly, while the tartar sauce is watery, and the flavor of American cheese doesn't pair well with seafood whatsoever. No matter how famous, the Filet-O-Fish can't stand up to more modern fast food fish sandwiches; it just feels stuck in the past.

We don't have to be the ones to tell you that expecting a quality cup of coffee from a fast food restaurant is downright silly. But it's worse than you might think. McDonald's coffee comes primarily from Gaviña Gourmet Coffee, which sources its beans from many of the top coffee-producing countries in Central and South America, Africa, and other areas. It uses Arabica beans, as opposed to robusta, which is cheaper, more bitter, and generally lower in quality. But you wouldn't know that the chain opts for the higher-quality variety based on its taste.

McDonald's offers regular drip coffee and espresso drinks, but no matter what you get, you'll be met with the same too-strong, acrid taste. There are multiple theories as to why McDonald's coffee is so dastardly. If we hearken back to the infamous lawsuit of 1992, we'll recall that McDonald's still brews its coffee lava hot and didn't learn its lesson, which yields a burnt-tasting final product (not to mention the possibility of serious injury).

It's also thought that McDonald's coffee is the worst thing on its menu because it simply doesn't brew fresh coffee every 30 minutes as it claims it does. Every cup has the unmistakable flavor of beans that were roasted until charcoal nuggets spilled from the roaster before it was brewed, just to sit in a carafe for hours. Then, some poor sucker — who was looking for a little morning boost — found themselves with a cup of sludgy, charcoal lava and a ruined morning.

Remember the days when folks would gather around the breakfast table for an early-morning feast of pancakes, eggs, bacon, juice, biscuits, and all the fixings? Nowadays, we're more content with a smoothie and maybe a slice of avocado toast for our first meal of the day, saving our appetites for the evening. But McDonald's protests our frugal morning eats with its self-proclaimed Big Breakfast with Hotcakes. This humongous dish comes with pancakes, eggs, sausage, hash browns, and a biscuit, plus plenty of butter and syrup. Large breakfasts might not be as fashionable anymore, but that's not why McDonald's Big Breakfast is one of the worst things you can order at the chain.

No one looks to McDonald's for a healthy meal, but when it comes to breakfast, a 1340-calorie fast food dish isn't setting you up for a successful day. The Big Breakfast with Hotcakes has more than half a day's worth of calories (for the average adult), plus 90% of the day's allotment of sodium, 82% of the day's allotment of sugar, and a whopping 122% of your saturated fat for the day. Now, let's be clear: We're not against the Big Breakfast because we hate fun. There certainly is a time and place for an epic feast, calories and sugar be damned. But for a less-than-satisfying, soggy meal in which more than half of the ingredients were microwaved, it just isn't worth it.

You either love cinnamon rolls or you need a lobotomy — 'nuff said. But if you don't love McDonald's cinnamon rolls, we don't blame you. Before trying one of these hefty baked goods, you might have thought that there was no such thing as a bad cinnamon roll, but Micky D's is here to prove you wrong.

This McDonald's dessert comes topped with a thick layer of icing that looks more like a sheet of melted plastic than the gooey, wispy cream that normally adorns a fresh bakery cinnamon bun. If you don't wind up with a cold, icing sheet, then you were probably the unlucky recipient of a cinnamon roll with icing that's too hot and therefore watery, so it winds up sticking to the top of the container, leaving you with a sad, bare bun. If the dough was soft and fluffy, maybe we could look past the egregious icing. But once you take a bite, you're met with a tough, too-dense pastry that tastes like it had been abandoned for a week before it found its way into your McDonald's order.

There's barely any cinnamon on its namesake bun, so if you ended up with most of your icing on the lid of the container, there isn't much to carry this treat in the flavor department. Even if your icing stays intact, it has a strange marshmallow-like flavor — as opposed to a rich, coat-your-mouth sweet cream cheese taste — that doesn't do a good job of masking the tough dough's texture.

There's a reason why nearly every depiction of a fast food burger contains some sort of cheese. A cheese-free burger needs top-tier beef to steal the show if the patties are showing up to the party in their birthday suit. And McDonald's beef just doesn't make for an appetizing product in the dry, flavorless Double Hamburger.

The double hamburger comes with pickle slices, the chain's famous minced onions, ketchup, and mustard, plus a double helping of beef in between a grilled bun. The burger patties at McDonald's are famously thin, so opting for two just makes sense. However, going for the double meat in the hamburger over the cheeseburger just amplifies the dry, bland flavor of the chain's beefy hockey pucks — erm, we mean burger patties. They're begging for a little cheese to up the moisture content and give the sandwich a flavor boost.

If you're dead-set against cheese, order a double hamburger with extra fixings at the very least. A double dose of pickles, onions, and condiments can make the patties appear less dry and give your meal the flavor it deserves, because without a little something extra, this burger just isn't worth it. Ask for a mayo packet or four to smear on the meat and up the moisture content even more (or just swallow your pride and get the cheeseburger).

There's something about a bad burrito that's more disturbing than other poorly executed dishes. Maybe it's because you can't see what you're biting into until it's too late. At McDonald's, you'll know before your first bite that the Sausage Burrito — with sausage crumbles, egg, cheese, and green chiles — is a no-go.

Unlike the savory, delectable creations at Taco Bell, there are no grill marks on the tortilla to make the Sausage Burrito crispy and give it a little personality. It's soggy, lumpy, and barely as long as your pointer finger — we don't know if that's better or worse. The sausage inside doesn't taste much like real meat; it's more akin to greasy, wet chunks of salt, and it comes scattered throughout the burrito in tiny brown spheres that are identical to dog food. Yuck. The fiery chiles do all the flavor heavy-lifting in the burrito, since the egg goop and bland, melty cheese do nothing but create a weird soupy texture.

Don't worry — it gets worse. McDonald's employees claim that the breakfast burritos are crafted early in the morning, sitting around for hours until an unfortunate patron tacks one onto their order. Then, the hard burritos are tossed in the microwave. Pockets of the burrito are lava hot while others are ice cold, proving that nuking them does little to mask the stale ingredients that make this McDonald's breakfast a manifestation of sadness.

We know what you're thinking — "how dare you lump McNuggets with the Filet-O-Fish and McDonald's near-deadly coffee?" Hear us out. Objectively, the Chicken McNuggets aren't terrible, per se. But they used to be so, so much more delicious, making the new, sad excuse for McNuggets a distressing reminder of what was taken from us far too soon.

Currently, McNuggets are made with white meat chicken, which sounds appealing on paper. But back in the early '80s, when McNuggets were first rolled out, they were an absolute sensation. Folks had never tasted anything like them, and that was thanks to their unique recipe, which included the same crispy breading that's used today, plus dark and white meat chicken.

Compared to the McNuggets of today, the vintage nugs tasted like genuine meat and less like a spongy, bland, chicken-like product. Back then, we all fought over the dark meat nuggets, which were identifiable by their longer shape and greasier exterior. They were more tender and moist than the nuggets that contained more white meat, with a melt-in-your-mouth quality that the modern product could never compare to. The dark meat chicken was rich with savory flavor, and its moisture content gave them a more appealing texture contrast against the ultra-crispy breading. But alas, white meat became trendy in the 2000s, so McDonald's ripped dark meat nuggets away from our grease-stained fingers in 2003 to give us drier, blander white meat nuggets. And we'll never forgive, nor forget.