Forgotten ’80s fast food menu items we wish we could order one more time
The 1980s were when fast-food chains decided that burgers and fries weren’t enough. They wanted dinner customers. Breakfast customers. The customer who might, conceivably, want pizza from McDonald’s. Some of these experiments were ahead of their time. Most were not. All of them are gone, and some are missed more than they probably should be.
McDonald’s McPizza
McDonald’s made a big bet on pizza in the late 1980s, developing a quick-cooking oven and widening drive-thru windows to accommodate the boxes. It failed for an obvious reason: pizza takes longer than a burger, which is the opposite of what a fast food restaurant is supposed to do. Most locations pulled it within a few years. One location in Orlando still serves it alongside pasta and waffles, which is either a museum of ambition or a very specific kind of nightmare.
The McDLT
A burger with two separate styrofoam compartments; one for the hot beef and bun, one for the cold lettuce and tomato. The idea was that warm, soggy lettuce was a problem worth solving with engineering. It was. The styrofoam was not. When McDonald’s moved away from polystyrene packaging, the McDLT followed suit. The problem it solved still exists.
McDonald’s Onion Nuggets
Deep-fried breaded onion pieces sold as a vegetarian side in the late 1970s. They flopped. The important footnote: when a McDonald’s chairman suggested the same concept might work with chicken, the idea became Chicken McNuggets. The failure that accidentally gave rise to a dynasty. The Onion Nugget itself has never been mourned adequately.
Wendy’s SuperBar
Launched in 1987. A self-serve buffet inside a Wendy’s, with a salad bar, a pasta bar and a Mexican Fiesta station that at some point included dessert pudding and pizza. All-you-can-eat for between $2.99 and $3.69. Wendy’s ran it for several years before deciding the operational complexity wasn’t worth it. People who remember it remember it with fondness reserved for things that were genuinely strange and genuinely good.
Taco Bell’s Bell Beefer
A taco-sloppy joe hybrid on a bun. The Bell Beefer was in service from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s before Taco Bell decided it wanted to be entirely a tortilla company. The bun is gone.
Burger King’s Cini Minis
Small cinnamon rolls with warm icing, introduced in the late 1990s and discontinued in 2016. The spirit of them — the idea that a burger chain should serve tiny glazed pastries — belongs entirely to the decade that produced the SuperBar and the McPizza. People who had them are still talking about them.
The bottom line
The 1980s fast food experiments that failed mostly failed because they tried to make fast food do something it wasn’t designed to do. The ones that are missed weren’t missed because they were brilliant. They were missed because they were specific, and specific things are harder to replace than good ones.
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