5 Dishes To Avoid Ordering At Red Robin, Based On Reviews

Red Robin is one of the original fancy burger chains, with gourmet burgers and other dishes in a setting that's still casual and welcoming to everyone. It first opened in 1969 in Seattle, after a restaurateur bought an old tavern/student hangout known as the Red Robin Tavern. Since then, the restaurant chain has grown to have over 500 locations, both corporate-owned and franchised, in the U.S. and Canada.

While the core business of Red Robin is about burgers, the menu offers so much more, with new dishes joining the lineup every so often. The food is extremely popular, but even well-loved chains can have the occasional miss. We took a look at social media and online food reviews to find out which dishes have been not so well-received in the past year in hopes of saving you some time and money. We found five of them, ranging from entrees to sides to dessert.

The Whiskey River BBQ Ribs sure do look good. You get two reasonably sized slabs of ribs slathered in barbecue sauce, along with cole slaw and a side (steak fries seem to be popular). The ribs are served St. Louis style, in which spare ribs (not beef short ribs — those are different) are cut into relatively flat and even rectangles. But that's only how they look. Based on some customer reviews, it sounds like the taste doesn't match up.

One person on TikTok said the ribs looked microwaved. He claimed they were excessively salty and disappointing, even going so far as to call anyone ordering the ribs weird and clearly stating that he didn't think people should buy ribs at a place known for its burgers. Another TikToker was a little kinder, saying that while the ribs weren't actually bad, they just weren't that good. Nothing stood out about them that would make her order them again. Yet another TikTok reviewer wasn't that impressed, claiming the ribs needed more sauce. However, he did compliment the restaurant for serving them very hot. Two of these reviews rated the ribs, and both gave them a 5/10.

The bottomless steak fries at Red Robin get some less-than-positive reviews not because of the fries themselves, but because the portion size is apparently laughably tiny. Yes, the fries are bottomless, and you can order more. But a small portion means you have to keep ordering and keep waiting for the kitchen to make more fries to be delivered to your table. And if you aren't at the restaurant for long, that also means you're not going to get a lot of fries overall for the price. That's kind of disappointing given that the menu entry states that the fries arrive in a large basket. Note to self: A large basket doesn't necessarily equate to a large amount of fries. One Redditor suggested telling the waitstaff who serves the fries to go ahead and just bring out another order immediately. You might think it was just a particular restaurant location doing this, but the problem is apparently way more widespread, to the point that you can find people online asking specifically why Red Robin has such small servings for these bottomless fries.

This isn't a new problem either. Customers were complaining about this same issue 10 years ago, too. One reviewer said his waitress had told him the restaurant was corporately owned, and the owners thought the smaller portions would prevent food from going to waste if people couldn't finish the fries.

The Cinnamon Sugar Doh! Rings are small croissant doughnuts that come with a couple of dipping sauces. One's chocolate fudge, and one's caramel, and the doughnuts are covered with a cinnamon-sugar coating. That sounds wonderful, but some people haven't been that happy about the dessert, especially the doughnuts themselves.

One Tasting Table writer called the doughnuts dry and tasteless, noting the sauces and coating didn't help much. A YouTuber who tried the doughnuts said they weren't sweet and that the topping tasted of cinnamon only, as if the restaurant had completely left out the sugar. What was worse was that the caramel and chocolate sauces weren't that sweet either, which sounds bizarre considering that caramel has sugar as a main ingredient. He noted twice that the doughnuts and sauces tasted almost bitter, although the chocolate was more acceptable than the caramel. He also warned that the sauces were easy to spill, that they couldn't overcome the intense cinnamon taste on the doughnuts, and that you get cinnamon all over your hands when eating. Neither reviewer had any desire to eat this dessert again.

Fried mozzarella, the bar food that dates back to Medievial France, should be easy for a restaurant to pull off, especially when served with a side of marinara sauce. Or so you would think. The Cheesy Mozzarella Twists at Red Robin look fun to eat, with a twisty shape that you know the marinara sauce will stick to. But a number of reviews have been completely unimpressed with the side, calling the flavor weird and plain.

A Daily Meal writer said they were pale and bland, with none of the fragrance you'd expect from fried cheese with a tomato-based sauce. Her verdict was that she'd eat them if someone else got them for her but wouldn't order them again herself. Red Robin's twists came in last place in her ranking of mozzarella sticks from eight different chain restaurants.  A Redditor posted that the twists were less palatable than what you'd expect from the average restaurant fried mozzarella stick. One TikToker loved the shape of the twists but wasn't pleased at all with the taste of the cheese. Another TikToker also thought the shape was interesting but remained unimpressed by the sticks. Her verdict was that they weren't the worst or the best, but the sauce and breading just weren't great.

The chicken sandwiches at Red Robin may not be the best thing to order, according to some rather consistent reviews. We have to be a little vague here because the sources themselves didn't specifically say which of the five chicken sandwiches on the menu were the problem. One Mashed writer took his family to Red Robin and noted that the grilled chicken sandwiches seemed to be rubbery and too tough to eat. He wrote that one of his children took only one bite before opting to eat something else.

She wasn't the only one to find the chicken rubbery. A Redditor said their wife had ordered a chicken sandwich — the exact menu item wasn't specified — and wasn't able to finish more than one bite because of how stringy and rubbery the chicken was. They said it seemed like the chicken was overmarinated, too. Yet another person posted about a Red Robin chicken sandwich in the r/foodsafety subreddit, worried because the chicken had a chewy, tough layer. The consensus was that it was likely woody chicken breast, which is a common condition in which the breast meat is tough and stringy due to the bird's excessively fast growth. This suggests it might be the quality of the meat at Red Robin rather than the way it is prepared.

Restaurant food quality can change quickly as experienced employees leave and new ones take over and as companies change suppliers and recipes. We wanted to be sure we had the most recent comments we could find, so we looked at reviews that were no more than one year old, from mid-December 2024 to the present. Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube were our main sources, along with some first-person reviews from other writers and a post on Quora. TikTok and Reddit proved to be the most abundant sources, which isn't surprising given how TikTok has taken over the restaurant review space, and Reddit has become the online equivalent of the town square.

Of course, just about every dish will have its supporters and detractors, so don't be surprised if you find the occasional positive review about these dishes. Terrible texture to one person is a comforting quality to a second, and what someone finds too salty could be nice and savory to another. And, as always, the proportion of negative to positive reviews for something depends on who decides to share their thoughts.

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