9 Restaurant Chains That Make Your Food Fresh To Order

Food made fresh when you order can taste so much better than food that's been sitting in a warming tray under a heat lamp. While many restaurants are notorious for making much of their food ahead of time and letting it sit around, others — including several fast-food and fast-casual outlets — are dedicated to preparing food fresh. These are not places where you'll find fully assembled burgers languishing as you decide on your order, and you're not going to have many, if any, ultra-processed foods on your plate.

Not everything at a restaurant can be made fresh right when you order, of course. Kitchens aren't going to start proofing dough for your one burger bun when you give your order to a cashier. Cooks may make dishes with a high turnover or that require a lot of steps in batches, too; think salsa or even a tray of lasagna that needs an hour to cook. But these restaurant chains still make those batch items several times per day, placing strict limits on how long they can serve from the batch before they have to make another. And some still stock frozen or pre-mixed ingredients to save time or to be able to serve something that's out of season, like fruit used in freshly baked pastries. If you're trying to eat more freshly prepared food, these nine restaurant chains are solid choices.

This one shouldn't be a surprise because In-N-Out's gimmick, other than the secret menu, is that its food is fresh. Nothing sits under heat lamps, and nothing sits in a freezer or cooks in a microwave. Obviously, the company doesn't make its own mustard (that's from Walker Foods) or hand-mix its own cocoa (that's from Ghirardelli), but employees do slice potatoes and other produce right in its kitchens. The company is clear about its commitment to providing freshly made meals, and its restriction of not opening restaurants unless they're within 300 miles of a distribution facility is legendary. The one exception the company has made to this is for its new Tennessee locations, which will get patties from a Texas facility until its new center opens in Wilson County.

The company does allow for a little pre-meal preparation. Burger patties arrive at restaurants already formed, but these are made in company-owned facilities and sent over in refrigerated trucks. They're never frozen. The buns are made at Puritan Bakery in Carson, California. And if you've ever watched the fry station in action when the restaurant is busy, you'll know that the employees make batches and batches of fries that they place in those paper trays without waiting for specific orders. However, you'll also notice that those fry orders don't sit around. If you order a secret-menu variation that requires a different cooking time, you'll get a freshly made tray of fries.

The Cheesecake Factory's menu is a spiral-bound wonder with 250-plus items that sees new dishes appear frequently. No way these could all be made fresh, right? Yeah, that sound you hear is the laughter of every Cheesecake Factory employee, especially the cooks and kitchen assistants who prepare all those dishes fresh daily. The exceptions are the cheesecake and other pastries, which are made in off-site, company-owned bakeries. That one change has allowed the company to serve cheesecakes that are consistent no matter what location you go to.

Preparing all those dishes each day is not an easy feat, and employees have to undergo an intense, two-week training that includes memorizing the entire menu. Food preparation is from scratch, down to shredding blocks of cheese and picking leaves off herb stems by hand before the restaurant opens. Some foods, like salsa, are made in batches ahead of ordering, but those batches are small, and cooks replace them a few times a day. With the exception of those cheesecakes and other desserts, you know that what you order for your meal there is not going to be a microwave special.

Raising Cane's is to fast-food chicken what the Cheesecake Factory is to, well, whatever entree you order. The Cane's Sauce, coleslaw, and iced tea and lemonade are all made fresh daily in-house. The fries and Texas toast are cooked when you order, too, although the company gets its bread and pre-cut fries from suppliers. Rumor (i.e., Reddit) has it that the bread is BBQ sesame bread from Klosterman Bakery, but the company won't say who supplies the fries.

But where Cane's really goes all in on preparing fresh food is the breaded chicken. The company states that its employees dip, bread, and fry the chicken fresh when you order. A conversation on Reddit gave a slightly different take, but one that still meant the chicken was prepared fresh, if the information is correct. According to some Redditors who claimed to work at Raising Cane's, the chicken is breaded and fried in batches that, if the crewmember working the fryer is good, will match the amount of customer traffic. The chicken can't sit for more than six minutes, according to these Redditors, before the crew has to throw it out. That would mean that, when you order breaded chicken, what you get is never more than six minutes old.

Ono Hawaiian BBQ is a chain with locations in California and Arizona. The recipes are made with fresh ingredients, and the company says grilling doesn't start until you've placed your order. Dishes like the macaroni salad are made on site every day, and each location even makes its own sauces and marinades from scratch daily.

This isn't a new strategy for Ono. When Joshua and Joe Liang, the company's founders, settled on Hawaiian plate lunches as the focus of their new restaurant in 2002, they created the menu with fresh cooking in mind. Their first restaurant had been in business for about six months at this point, and the brothers were struggling to find the right formula for success. Once they found it, they reduced the number of dishes on their menu to ensure the kitchen could make each one to order without taking too long. The freshness and from-scratch sauces have paid off for the company. Online comments talk about how creamy the mac salad is and how delicious the teriyaki sauce is, and the chain continues to expand, to the delight of fans.

Whataburger has made freshness a core part of its identity, and the company has doubled down on ensuring food is fresh as it opens in new states. The crew at each location doesn't start cooking your food until you order, and even if you order food for a scheduled pickup later in the day, the crew won't start preparing it until your pickup time is close. Like In-N-Out, the beef is never frozen, and produce is chopped and sliced at the restaurants daily.

Whataburger has looked beyond the kitchen, too, as it tries to make sure everything it uses is as fresh as possible. The company has focused on strengthening its domestic supply chain, using beef, milk, and produce from American farms. That means the meat in your burger wasn't shipped from an overseas ranch, and the company has tried to shorten the time the ingredients take to go from farm to restaurant. That helped the chain tremendously during the height of the pandemic, when supply chains across the world suddenly weakened.

Benihana is known for its teppanyaki meals, prepared at a tableside griddle while you watch. These are those meals where a chef doesn't just cook the food, but instead turns the preparation into a performance. While you don't have to sit at a griddle (many locations have separate tables and bars), if you do take one of these seats, you're going to get a culinary show unlike any other. By the way, you might hear some customers call the griddle a hibachi, but that's a different cooking surface. Hibachi cooking uses a grill with open grates that exposes the food to flames, while teppanyaki uses a flat griddle. Hibachi also doesn't have the eye-catching cooking show.

With most of the food prepared right in front of your eyes, obviously, what you get at Benihana is freshly prepared. Even the fried rice is prepared on the griddle as you watch. The restaurant locations also prepare many of their sauces in-house every day, including peeling and grating fresh ginger for the dressing. The restaurants have chefs dedicated to producing fresh sushi daily, too. You also get a say in the details of your meal preparation. Not only can you adjust the seasonings used in your food, but you also get to inspect the cut of meat you chose before the chef adds it to the griddle.

Culver's is another fast-food chain that doesn't subscribe to the world of pre-made food stored under heat lamps. Each burger is made to order, and even the custard is churned in small batches on-site as needed throughout the day. The company takes those burgers seriously, too, and doesn't allow just any worker to start flipping patties. Crewmembers have to train for several months before taking on the position of "grill master." The searing process they learn is part of what gives the patties their texture and flavor, and they're trained to flip the patty only once.

You will find some frozen foods at Culver's, but the crew doesn't do any cooking until you've made your order. For example, the fries you get might have been frozen when raw. But those fries don't hit the oil until it's time to prepare your order. One Culver's fan on Reddit pointed out that using frozen fries wasn't necessarily a bad sign because the freezing actually helped change the texture of the potatoes for the better. Using these frozen fries also helped ensure better consistency across locations. Another Redditor pointed out that the fries really had to be frozen because they were formed from a mash and weren't just a slice of potato. It would be difficult to make the raw fry pieces at the restaurant every day.

Freddy's steakburgers have large patties with tender centers and crispy edges, smashed thin onto a hot grill. And if you order one of those steakburgers, you're going to get one that's freshly made, as the company doesn't believe in cooking the burgers before someone orders. The raw meat isn't frozen, either. The vegetables you get on each burger are sliced each morning, so while they're not prepared right at the time you order, you're still getting slices of tomato and shredded lettuce that are still relatively fresh. The custard is churned daily at each restaurant in several batches, too, so that whatever flavor you order, you'll get something that was made only a short time before.

The fries aren't cooked until you order them, either, and Freddy's has been looking at ways to make that process more efficient. The company started testing an automated frying system called the RoboFry X4 (we're not making that up) that was supposed to allow employees to spend more time helping customers instead of manning vats of frying oil. The system underwent a pilot study and training during the summer of 2025.

Some of the dishes at Waffle House are made very fresh, such as eggs. Those don't hit any cooking surface until you order. But Waffle House is also one of those places that uses a number of pre-mixed or dehydrated ingredients in its food preparation. What counts here, though, is that the dishes themselves, the food you actually eat, are generally prepared fresh when you order. Take the hash browns, for example. These arrive at each location in dehydrated form, and employees have to rehydrate them before slapping them on the griddle. But rather than mixing them with water and then cooking up a bunch to serve as the day goes on, Waffle House employees rehydrate small batches that they plan to cook within a couple of hours. When someone orders hash browns, the employees take some of the rehydrated potatoes and fry them up according to the customer's order.

Other items are made from convenience ingredients, too. The waffles, for example, start as a proprietary mix. But then the cooks add some eggs and half-and-half to small batches of the mix and only cook them once you ask for waffles. The use of mixes and dehydrated ingredients makes sense as these are easier to store and give the cooks more time to actually prepare your food instead of worrying about whether they need to shred more potatoes.