The Basic Panera Sandwich You Might Want To Avoid

Panera's vast selection of soups, salads, sandwiches, and flatbreads has many great items worth ordering — check out Tasting Table's ranking of the 20 best Panera menu items if you're looking for inspiration on what to get. However, not all of its dishes are winners. So, we have also done our research on which Panera Bread menu items to avoid ordering. And landing second to last in our ranking of Panera Bread sandwiches from worst to best was, sadly, the classic grilled cheese. We based our ranking on criteria like overall taste, filling-to-bread ratios, and unique toppings or sauces. The grilled cheese is as basic as they come, consisting of bread and cheese grilled to a buttery, gooey crisp. It's perfect in its simplicity, and Panera's high quality, freshly baked bread as the foundation sounded promising. 

The chain even honors the simplicity of a classic grilled cheese by not adding anything fancy like grilled onions or meat to it. But in the absence of sauces and toppings, we were really hoping for that famously crunchy and gooey textural contrast between the bread and the melted cheese. Disappointingly, the texture was its biggest failure. The bread was soggy and mushy and the melted cheese had hardened into a chewy, cold glob in the time it took us to get the sandwich home. As such, perhaps one big mistake to avoid at Panera Bread is ordering the grilled cheese to go. But even a half-hour trip from the restaurant to your kitchen table or work desk shouldn't result in a mushy, soggy, borderline inedible mess.

Notably, Reddit is absolutely filled with scathing reviews from disappointed Panera Bread customers complaining about how terrible the grilled cheese tasted. One Reddit thread claimed that it was "seriously the worst grilled cheese ever," decrying the "dry bread with a huge sloppy mound of processed cheese that could have, perhaps should have been served over Nachos." Another Redditor confirmed that they found the bread to be incredibly dry overall, which obviously doesn't help with texture. While American cheese is a popular type of cheese to use in a grilled cheese sandwich, the problem isn't necessarily with the processed cheese, but rather the execution of the sandwich as a whole. 

As one Redditor pointed out, "They are literally never grilled and the cheese is always unmelted." In response, another Redditor criticized the method used to make the grilled cheese by arguing, "A panini press is one of the worst ways to cook a grilled cheese. The butter just gets absorbed by the bread and it never gets crispy and melts." Unsurprisingly, a former employee confirmed that the grilled cheese sandwich is, in fact, not grilled.

If you order the grilled cheese as a dine-in option, you might have better luck. You can also customize your grilled cheese with tasty upgrades or bring more flavor to your lunch with a soup accompaniment; some of our favorite Panera soups include the vegetarian Autumn squash soup and the French onion. Of course, you can always make your own basic grilled cheese sandwich for a fraction of the price, and it'll probably taste a lot better.