Sampling QuikTrip’s new made-to-order menu

Ten minutes after arriving at the new QuikTrip on Little Blue Parkway in Independence, I was working on a 2,000-calorie dinner. At least, that was my best guess — the only numbers I found on the menu were prices.

At the chain’s invitation, I’d come to sample its new made-to-order food items — from its QT Kitchens line — that are being readied for deployment at most QuikTrip locations by the end of the year. The company said it wanted media types to test-drive these latest permutations of cheese, fried bread, bacon, ice cream and sausage. The mood was cautiously festive: A human dressed as a wide-eyed strawberry shake hugged a small child near the pastry case. Oh, right — I still hadn’t tried dessert.

I asked one of the jovial-seeming employees whether nutrition information was available. He laughed.

“We don’t list it on the menu because we want people to buy it,” he said. “But it’s all diet food. It just depends what kind of a diet you’re on.”

Fair point. People associate QuikTrip with taquitos and clean bathrooms, not salad.

Clad in black polo shirts and khakis, several employees converged on me as I approached the kitchen at the back of the store.

“Try as much as you like,” a smiling man in a QT visor said. He pointed encouragingly at an array of samples.

“What’s your favorite thing to eat here?” I asked him.

“Oh, I like all of it, but if I had to pick, I’d say either the chicken, bacon and ranch flatbread or the sausage kolach. They’re great in the morning.”

This ignited a conversation between two employees about how to pronounce kolach. They determined, according to customer feedback, that one pronounces the name of the semisweet central-European pastries with a hard ch, as in cheese, not the softer sound of, say, brioche. I decided to try one.

I placed my order on a touch-screen computer at the end of the walk-up counter. Like everything at QuikTrip, the kitchen’s process is simple and efficient: You pay at the register up front, and within a few minutes, someone calls out the number on your ticket. The main variable is the speed with which, rewarded with your food, you rush out the door, devour the food behind the wheel of your car, wipe your hands on your pants, and stuff the trash under the passenger seat.

That said, the kolach I ended up with tasted quite good for what it was. The bread was soft and sweet, the sausage mildly spicy. I’ve eaten far more shameful things.

“Have you tried anything you like?” an employee asked me.

“Mmm,” I said, my mouth still stuffed with kolach. I took a sip of chocolate frappé, which tasted like Starbucks, only sweeter. I tried again to turn the tables. “What’s your favorite thing to eat here?”

“I like all of it,” he said. “But I think our chocolate milkshakes are the best anywhere. And that mocha frappé — if you put an extra shot of espresso in that, you’re good to go all day.”

That reads more ominously than he said it.

In fact, it’s worth noting that the espresso-based cappuccinos I tried from QT Kitchens’ coffee bar totally trump the sugary-sweet sludge that comes out of the automated machines. And now that we were on the subject of blended drinks, I asked whether the “real fruit smoothies” were legit or from concentrate.

“It’s frozen, but it’s real fruit,” the employee reassured me.

When I finished my kolach, I tried the American bacon cheddar sandwich, which is served toasted on sourdough bread. It was crispy and surprisingly tasty, but not something I could eat every day. The buttery pretzel with cheese sauce was similarly warm, salty and indulgent. But it was nothing compared with the bacon shake.

I was told that the flavor of the shake, a diet-fucking mixture of bacon, maple syrup and vanilla ice cream, started off sweet, then morphed into a pancake or a waffle, then finished off with salty bacon goodness. I placed my order and watched the cooks get to work. They threw four full slices of bacon into the blender.

“Holy shit,” I said.

And how did it taste? A lot like throwing a traditional breakfast, sans eggs, into the blender with some Ben & Jerry’s and drinking it through a straw. This was something I could have invented jacking around in my parents’ kitchen at age 12. My mother would have been very angry because she didn’t run a QuikTrip.

Of course, that’s exactly the point, and I enjoyed my bacon shake immensely — at least until I got halfway home and was overtaken by a desperate need to brush my teeth while doing crunches.

I was told that the chef who developed QuikTrip’s new menu is still trying to perfect a bacon-maple doughnut. I look forward to that day, even if my body doesn’t.