Ranking the appetizers

I did Rankings Week a while back, but I missed a rankings topic that, as a certified heavy guy, I feel needs to be ranked. Appetizers.

Better-at-health people just eschew appetizers at restaurants. You have an entrée. You have drinks. Maybe a soup or salad. Maybe bread. You might even have dessert! What do you need with an appetizer? To which I say pfft, amateurs. Eating is an event. If you aren’t throwing calories down your gaping maw at every opportunity, what are we even doing here? More food. More.

(In related news: Found out at my last doctor’s appointment that my blood pressure has taken a real jump lately. New meds for Daniel!)

Today, I’m ranking the top 18 pre-foods. (By top, I don’t mean the 18 best, just the 18 most common ones that I thought of when putting this together.) It’s not strictly a taste evaluation, because some foods are offered as appetizer options when they really have no business being that. So taste is a component, but so is “should you be an appetizer?”

Here we go …

18. Fried pickles

Pickles. Are. Not. Edible. Stop. Eating. Pickles. Pick. Anything. Else. And. You. Will. Have. A. Better. Eating. Time.

I will accept no dissent on this. Pickles are not food. Cucumbers are food! Pickles are not.

17. Shrimp cocktail

Has anyone in the world ever been excited by shrimp cocktail? Like, if I’m at an event and shrimp cocktail is a component, I’ll eat one, maybe even more than one. But that’s mostly because I’m a glutton. I just can’t envision a scenario where you’re picking shrimp cocktail over any other edible option.

16. Oysters

I thought about dividing oysters into raw and cooked and such, but then you start having to separate out, like, different sauces on wings and such, and it just becomes silly. So oysters are one unified force here, and they’re … fine. I mean, I’m occasionally bad at grown-up food, which means raw oysters do very little for me, which means I’m generally getting oysters Rockefeller or something, which means I’m really getting them for the butter, the bread crumbs, the non-oyster components, and at that point, can you really rank the food itself highly?

15. Crab cakes

Okay, so crab cakes done well are wonderful. They are amazing foods. The problem with crab cakes as appetizer is that it’s an expensive dish, which means a “crab cakes” appetizer often ends up being, like, one crab cake. It’s always so disappointing. We the people demand more crab cakes!

14. Potato skins

I mean, whatever. Skins are glorified bacon-cheese fries. And if I’m going to get bacon-cheese fries, I’m just going to order bacon-cheese fries. The O’Charley’s combo appetizer is tenders, cheese wedges, and skins, and when I worked there and would order that, I’d just sub out the skins. It’s an innately boring food.

13. Crab Rangoon

If I do this exercise again tomorrow, this might be in the top five. The next day, it might be three spots lower. They’re very good! But they’re such a random food with such a specific home that I don’t know how to classify them as their own appetizer. I don’t think I’ve never even had them as an appetizer; crab Rangoon is a food I have with Chinese buffet. So tasty, but hard to put in place.

12. Sliders

There is a huge gap between floor and ceiling on sliders. They can be absolutely ordinary, little dried-out burgers on cheap buns, or they can be absolutely exquisite. But here’s the problem: Sliders don’t have a home. The bad ones don’t really matter, but the good ones? If you’re doing it as an appetizer, odds are you’re sharing them, which means you get one little slider and then want more. Sliders done right are just the same amount of food as a full burger in a slightly different form. So food, good, but placement, dodgy.

11. Onion rings

I hate onions. But you fry them up, add a good sauce of some kind, and then they’re much better, because, you know, fried batter and sauce. The best onion rings are the ones that mask the flavor of the onion the best, and that’s not exactly a great selling point for a food.

10. Chicken fingers

Our first chicken entity here. The best chicken fingers/tenders are excellent, but I get so angry when I see them listed as an appetizer. Chicken fingers aren’t an appetizer! That’s an entrée! I will not back down from this. They’re delicious, but it’s absolutely a food that needs to be its own meal with sides and whatever. (Important note: If you can ever have O’Charley’s chipotle sauce, you should have O’Charley’s chipotle sauce. The restaurant by and large is fine for what it is, but that place makes the best chipotle sauce in all of the world.)

9. Jalapeño poppers

Anyone know why jalapeño poppers aren’t more ubiquitous? When done right, they’re delicious, but you see them on a menu at like 10% the frequency of the other foods on this list. That’s really the only thing holding them back here; they’re just much harder to find. Is it just that they’re weird? I don’t understand why you never see them.

8. Nachos

Little-known fact: Nobody has ever — ever — enjoyed an entire plate of nachos. The first few bites of some good nachos can be absolutely insanely good, killer, knock-it-out-of-the-park. But at about the one-third point, maybe one-half if you’re lucky, you’re just eating chips and hoping there are enough topping left to be worth it. The inconsistency of nachos is what knocks them back a few notches. (A possible exception here: Cheddar’s nachos. They make each giant chip an individual nacho, and it’s brilliant. The problem: If you have 6-8 of them, the big chip is soggy by the time you get to it. So it’s a damned-if-you-don’t, damned-if-you-do situation.)

7. Chips and salsa

Man, is there a range of outcomes for chips and salsa. Are the chips out of a bag or are they cooked in-house? Is the salsa thick enough to get real tomato chunks, or are you dipping the chip into juice? At their floor, chips and salsa would be down in the potato skins range. But man, if you are in just the right (probably Mexican) restaurant, you’ve hit the jackpot and you will eat four baskets of chips and then be surprised when your actual food gets there.

6. Pretzels

I’m not going to relitigate the pretzel wars. This topic is about big soft pretzels. Rods, twists, I don’t care the form. Generally, these come with beer cheese (good!) or mustard (not good!). And they’re very good! I love a good pretzel. The only reason they don’t rank better here is that pretzels are just so specifically located. It’s a bar app. Most of the foods ranked higher can be eaten in any number of locations, but if you’re eating pretzels, you are in a sports bar, and that limitation hurts their score.

5. Chips and queso

This is kind of cheating, because the ideal chips and queso is going to be served with salsa as well, which means it’s co-opting another appetizer in itself. But whatever, this is my list. Queso is adding extra fat to the meal, and who is ever going to argue with that? This is another example of a low-floor/high-ceiling proposition, but there’s a good ceiling involved.

4. Boneless wings

Separating foods into different versions of themselves is silly, but man, fingers and boneless wings and bone-in wings are such wildly different foods that I didn’t know how to rank them together. Boneless wings are good. Depending on the sauce and the preparation, they can be very good. But I can’t eat them without feeling like I’m just having grown-up McNuggets. It’s like the closest you can get to a kids meal without actually having a kids meal.

3. Calamari

Reportedly some of the calamari you get in restaurants might be pig rectums very stealthily disguised, through frying and such, as squid. And you know what? I don’t even care. SO GOOD.

2. Traditional wings

There are times I’d rather have a boneless wing than a traditional wing, primarily if for some reason I don’t feel like getting my hands gross, but for the most part bone-in is going to win every time. It’s a superior collection of meat, more about the chicken than the breading, and actually offers some variety between flats and drums. The sauce is an important component and can render them much more average if done poorly, but the ceiling on wings is wonderful.

1. Mozzarella sticks

Mozzarella sticks check every single box. They’re easy enough that every single restaurant can make at least passable versions of them (seriously, even fast-food restaurants do cheese sticks well), but also open to some serious elevation (a place in town does fried feta sticks that are wonderful, another place does full-on fries cheese logs that are like 2 inches by 2 inches by 4 inches, and you feel like an absolute monster eating it, but that’s okay because OH MY GOD SO GOOD). The absolute ceiling on a good wing or some nice calamari might be slightly higher than a cheese stick, but only slightly, and no food in the entire world has a higher floor than a cheese stick. Eat cheese sticks. Eat all the cheese sticks.