Fast Food Review: Raising Canes

The first time I ever heard of Raising Canes was actually through a hellthyjunkfood video, one of my favorite channels on youtube. I like watching people try food from places I've never heard of and immediately got jealous that I couldn't try it as well. But then my husband told me they were opening a Raising Canes nearby and that he wanted to give it a try. He hadn't even watched the same video as me! I immediately agreed.

This chain has grown a lot in recent years and you might have a restaurant near you, even if you haven't heard of it before now.

Raising Canes was founded in Louisiana and therefore has a lot of southern, deep fried influence. Similar to chicken-fil-a, their passion is chicken and the special sauce they created.

I always take a picture of the food I eat, but this time, I forgot to wait until after I took a bite out of the toast. It looked so delicious and I was hungry, so my mind completely blanked. I hope you can forgive me.

Anyway, all their food seems to come in these generic styrofoam boxes (if you get it to go), which I really like. The meals are already separated, you just need to open them and try them.

The restaurant has a very limited selection of food. This box has one of everything on the menu, except the chicken sandwich (eventually, I will try that as well and add it to this review.) It has coleslaw, cane sauce, chicken, texas toast, and crinkle cut fries. Raising Cane's prefers to specialize in only a few items rather than spread themselves thin with many items. It's similar to In-N-Out in that way, except they specialize in chicken rather than hamburgers.

The chicken strips were actually pretty bland. They were deep fried and battered obviously and the chicken quality was nice, but there seemed to be no spices on it. While other fast food places, like chick-fil-a or burger king, for example, you can eat the chicken without any dipping sauce, that's not the case here. I suspect they made their chicken this plain because they want the focus to be on the sauce. They want to make sure everyone uses the sauce. But if you're not a fan of unique dipping sauces, you probably won't be a huge fan of this restaurant.

The sauce is the star of the show. It's tempting to want to dip everything in it to make all of it tastier. And it's the main thing that separates Raising Canes from other fast food restaurants.

On first inspection, the sauce looks to be some kind of thousand island dressing with pepper pieces in it. But then you try it and your taste buds are surprised. It's unlike any sauce you can get anywhere else. It's tangy, it's peppery. it's creamy, all at once. The best description I could think of for it, and this is not a taste you can imagine unless you actually eat it yourself, is that it tastes across between lemon pepper sauce and thousand island dressing. It's like the two have been mixed together. It's not often that you taste something that's both tangy and creamy like that at the same time.

Your opinions of this sauce are probably going to decide whether or not it's one of your favorite restaurants to go to in the future.

On your first visit and all visits following, you're probably going to want to order extra sauce, so you can generously dip all your food into it.

The crinkle cut fries taste very similar to the ones you can get in the frozen section of any grocery store. Therefore, they are good, but they aren't special. If you love those kinds of fries, then you will love these. And if you don't, you can always dip them in the cane sauce to improve the taste.

The coleslaw was also very generic. It wasn't bad, but was probably the most uninteresting part of the meal. It was the kind of coleslaw you could get anywhere.

The texas toast was my personal favorite part of raising canes. I could eat a million pieces of it. It's not something you will probably want to dip in the cane sauce, so that's probably why they make it special.

It's very soft, yet slightly crispy because of the toasting. Mostly, it's soft as a cloud though (on the inside) and not chewy, which I like a lot. It's got perfect, melt in your mouth, buttery flavor that makes you want to drool.

I ate my toast so fast and then snuck a few bites from my husband's meal. He did not appreciate it.

Raising Canes is the kind of fast food place that you are either going to love or just think is okay. It's worth a try because there's a very low chance that you're going to hate it (unless you hate deep fried foods or chicken already.) I lean more towards the "just okay" side of things. I think it's interesting and different than other fast food places, so I'll probably eat there again just for variety, but it's not on my top then list of restaurants. My husband, on the other hand, absolutely loves it and always wants to go there ever since we tried it.