The Cracker Barrel Side Dish Customers Are Ready To Retire

The bar is not necessarily set high for Cracker Barrel. For one thing, it's a chain restaurant, meaning nobody is going there expecting Michelin-starred cuisine. For another thing, Cracker Barrel specializes in down-home Southern food, which is delicious when cooked properly, and honestly pretty tasty even if it isn't cooked properly. It should not be difficult for Cracker Barrel to put satisfying meals on the table, and yet the chain named after a method of transporting soda crackers has had plenty of complaints about the quality of their food. There are over a dozen menu items that left Cracker Barrel customers cold, leading them to take their dissatisfaction to websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, but diners spared special scorn for the mashed potatoes.

If there's one dish you'd expect Cracker Barrel to get right, it would be mashed potatoes. Whether they're served alongside fried chicken, roast turkey, or chicken-fried steak, they're one of the most hearty and versatile side dishes you're likely to find in American cuisine. And yet negative reviews abound for Cracker Barrel's offering. "The mashed potatoes were brown and overcooked," complained one review on TripAdvisor from Florida City, Florida. Another diner, this one in Morrisville, North Carolina, chimed in on Yelp that she tried to improve the dish to no avail. "Of course I put salt, pepper, and butter on them, but it didn't seem to help. Along with that, but there was a clump of potato that wasn't completely cooked." Bland and undercooked — pick a struggle, right?

Mind you, just because some people online have had bad experiences with Cracker Barrel mashed potatoes — or Cracker Barrel in general — doesn't mean you necessarily have to steer clear. By their nature, online reviews on sites like Yelp tend to be slanted towards the very positive or (more often) the very negative. After all, if you just had an okay experience eating at a restaurant, would you go straight to the internet to write a little paragraph about it? Until they invent a Letterboxd for restaurants (which we're sure some venture capitalist will pitch any day now), that's not really how we interact with food.

And Cracker Barrel's mashed potatoes still have their fans. One reviewer on Yelp who had a meal including the mashed potatoes described the experience as "oh-so-yummy," while a copycat recipe for the potatoes describes them as "creamy, buttery, with those perfect little lumps" and as "a warm hug on a plate." The heart wants what the heart wants — or the stomach, as the case may be. And even if you don't end up liking the mashed potatoes, you can always keep yourself busy with that little peg game Cracker Barrel always has.