The Free Bread Is Sadly The Only Thing Worth Eating At This Italian Chain

We found one restaurant where you should ignore the common wisdom of not eating the free bread. The tactic is used to create a spike of glucose, making you hungrier, which in turn causes you to order more food. However, at the lowest-ranked Italian restaurant on our recent ranking of 12 popular Italian restaurants, Fazoli's, the breadsticks aren't only free, they're unlimited. This is a good thing in this case because it's the only thing on the menu worth eating. So if you find yourself at one of its 208 locations, your best bet is to just fill up on the breadsticks.

Our reviewer scoured the internet, reading and watching reviews and rankings to determine this to be the worst Italian chain in the USA. This shouldn't be terribly surprising, as the chain was founded in Lexington, Kentucky, a state with a rather small Italian presence. It wasn't founded by an Italian immigrant making his nonna's old recipes who struck it big, but as an offshoot of Long John Silver's, which scrambled to try a new fast food concept during a cod crisis. You'd think nowadays such a poorly rated spot would be on its way out, but it's somehow one of a few once-failing Italian restaurants that are making strong comebacks thanks to a recent deal to open 25 new locations in Canada.

Somehow, Fazoli's got the breadsticks to come out hot and tasty. It makes one wonder how they got everything else so wrong. All over the internet, people agree that the breadsticks just work. A food reviewer, Cibsandibus, described the chain's most popular offering in a video as "Hot, warm, soft, salty, buttery." Everything you need from a basket of bread. He went on to call Fazoli's "not a terrible experience" after enjoying the breadsticks and the wings and feeling let down by everything else. 

Over on Yelp, a reviewer gave his local Fazoli's three out of five stars, but still recommends it even though it's fast food. Their comment on the garlic breadsticks was that they "were very good, soft with a buttery taste. Garlic was not overwhelming." Another reviewer raved, "their garlic breadsticks are incredible, we are talking better than Olive Garden incredible." Olive Garden's breadsticks being surpassed may be one of the reasons that the popular Italian chain is no longer the top casual dining place in the nation. 

Over on Reddit, a former Fazoli's employee started a thread on the chain. The top comment was, "If they have even one single bad thing to say about the breadsticks, I'll riot." Thankfully, no riot ensued as no one had anything bad to say about them. In fact, one Reddit comment on the thread was how people would order only meat sauce to dip the free breadsticks in, saying the "whole meal cost like $.55." While we don't encourage this, it does sound like the only way to really enjoy an outing at Fazoli's.