Look, we all know it’s cheaper and better to get your own food at the grocery store, bring home some veggies and rice and pasta and whatever and cook for yourself. But it’s a pretty busy planet we live on and a man’s got to be a fool to think for a minute that he’ll always be able to cook at home. Especially if you travel, sometimes you just have to eat on the run. So I’m looking at the dollar menus of a lot of these chain places that you find everywhere, or nearly everywhere, to see how we can get a little something to keep the fires burning at a reasonable price.
Jack’s has a very flexible pricing menu based largely on how affluent the area that they are in is. The more rich people you have around, the higher they drive their prices. Out here in the Bay Area of California, for example, it’s not uncommon to find a place asking $1.30 for the chicken sandwich and $1.60 for the Jumbo Jack, whereas in the heartland of America or whatever they are 99 cents. So be aware that this is a sneaky dollar menu.
Two Regular Tacos – The most evocative and appropriate description I’ve heard for the Jack In The Box taco filling is “meat toothpaste”. My belief is that it is just the same beef that they use for the burgers, pulped into a fine paste because it is more economic in some way. Like Fox Mulder, I very much want to believe this, because I just ate a couple of them recently and there are probably still remnants of the meat paste somewhere inside of me. Anyway, the twin tacos can actually be an almost edible taste experience, if you down them fresh off the assembly line when the corn tortilla is still hot and firm. If they sit for awhile, however, they absorb all that grease and sauce into the shell and become limp soggy drippy piles of Do Not Want.
Final Verdict? BLECH
Beef Monster Taco – The regular taco, but bigger. Seriously, no extra stuff, no sour cream, nada. I think, for raw food poundage, you might actually be better off with the two tacos than this. Not that you really want to ingest a huge amount of this stuff anyway.
Final Verdict? BLECH
Chicken Sandwich – Your standard round “rib meat” chicken patty fried and placed upon a bun with lettuce and some mayo. Somehow, though it contains no onion, there is some sort of a faint onion flavor. As far as fried chicken patty sammiches go, it’s unexciting but passable.
Final Verdict? EDIBLE
Hamburger Deluxe – A thoroughly basic burger with a thin patty, lettuce, ketchup and mayo. Not mindblowing, but neither is it disgusting.
Final Verdict? EDIBLE
Jumbo Jack – Jack’s “upgraded” discount burger, this is more or less a bigger regular burger with a slice of tomato added. Most locations have this at $1.30 or $1.50, but as there are apparently some that hold it to 99 cents it gets in on the technicality. A passable cheap burger, better than McDonalds or Burger King and significantly less greasy.
Final Verdict? EDIBLE
Egg Roll – Blech.
Final Verdict? BLECH
Breakfast Jack – Jack takes three breakfast staples – egg, ham and cheese – and slaps them together on a regular old hamburger bun. The result is actually an alright breakfast sandwich for a buck, better than Mickey D’s and the King’s limp offerings. The egg is sunny side up and actually tastes like egg and not microwaved space food, there’s a slice of actual ham on there and … well, the cheese is American but it’s tolerable in a pinch. You’d think the burger bun would detract from it, but somehow it works.
Final Verdict? EDIBLE
Side Salad – Ah, now we’ve reached the token vegetable-based offering so the company can slap up a “Healthy Options!” sign on their advertising. Consisting mostly of iceberg and romaine lettuce for your roughage needs, there’s also the expected two or three cherry tomatoes in there as well as some carrots, cucumber, shredded cheese and crutons on the side. Kind of boring, but ultimately eatable.
Final Verdict? EDIBLE
Regular Jack’s Coffee – Aww, they call it Regular so you don’t feel like so much of a cheapskate. It’s a decent size for a dollar coffee, but every location I’ve had these at the coffee has been extremely watery.
Final Verdict? BLECH
The final word on Jack’s – it really needs something beyond a tolerable burger, a tolerable chicken sandwich and a tolerable egg sandwich to make it worthy of note. As is, not worth bothering with unless it’s right in your road.
