Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen hit the scene in 1972 as a single restaurant in Arabi, a New Orleans suburb. In the beginning, it opened as “Chicken on the Run” before rebranding after a few months and reopening under the name that stuck: Popeyes. Four years later, the chain opened its first franchise and expanded to Canada in 1984. Before the decade was out, Popeyes reached its milestone 500th restaurant. In 2026, the chain has bloomed to over 3,150 locations, with Texas taking the lead at 438 restaurants alone.
It’s hard not to love a meal from Popeyes. The chain is known for its flavorful, crispy chicken positively steeped in Southern comfort and tasty sides. Although I adore nearly every Popeyes side dish, for this ranking, I set my sights on the chain’s chicken items. My goal was to determine the best of the collection when they were pitted directly against one another.
9. Bacon & Cheese Chicken Sandwich
The Popeyes Bacon & Cheese Chicken Sandwich is a perfect example of the concept “less is more.” With this overdone sandwich, Popeyes took everything that is good about its Classic Chicken Sandwich and added bacon and cheese. On the surface, that doesn’t sound like a bad addition, but in execution, it definitely detracted from the experience.
With the added bacon and cheese, I found that there wasn’t enough mayo to really coat everything the way I wanted it to. Of course, the chicken patty itself was still delicious and worked well with the mayo, but that bacon and cheese just felt completely unnecessary. The smokiness from the bacon went out of its way to cover up that chicken flavor, and the cheese didn’t add much more than a bit of visual appeal. Not to mention, the cheese wasn’t melted very much at all. It was melted to the point of being more pliable, but definitely didn’t cling to the ingredients the way you would want a cheese on a hot chicken sandwich to do…