Discontinued Cracker Barrel Menu Items We'll Probably Never Eat Again

Cracker Barrel, or as it's known in full, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, may be a chain restaurant with more than 650 locations across the United States, but it can stake a claim to the culinary and historical authenticity it radiates. With its restaurants (and sprawling gift shops) designed to resemble a Southern homestead, complete with a big porch, rocking chairs, and old and homespun cultural relics filling the walls of the customer seating areas, Cracker Barrel evokes big family homes that serve tremendously generous and gut-busting family meals. Founded in Tennessee, Cracker Barrel made its name with a menu full of foods developed or beloved nearby, including straight from the farm breakfasts, decadent desserts, and slow-cooked Sunday dinners.

But Cracker Barrel is a modern restaurant, and it has to compete with other family-friendly sit-down chain eateries. It routinely brings in new menu items at the expense of other products. Popular choices have frequently disappeared from the menu as Cracker Barrel attempts to keep up with changing tastes while keeping its Southern flavor and homespun appeal intact. Here are some of the most popular items in Cracker Barrel history that have since been discontinued by Cracker Barrel that likely won't be making a comeback.

A menu item so reliable and long-standing on the Cracker Barrel menu, the chain received a registered trademark for the name of its popular, customizable, and always available breakfast foods combo meal. Uncle Herschel's Favorite provided a lot of morning food, served standard with two eggs, grits, and biscuits and gravy, along with the customer's choice of fried apples or hash brown casserole, and cured ham or a hamburger steak. The breakfast meal is named after a real person who figured into the formation of Cracker Barrel.

The maternal uncle of restaurant creator Dan Evins, the actual Uncle Herschel was a former flour salesman who serviced Southern general stores and served as the company's first goodwill ambassador. The breakfast meal memorialized him, as does a statue at Cracker Barrel's headquarters in Lebanon, Tennessee. At least the statue remains. Customers started reporting on social media in October 2022 that Uncle Herschel's Favorite was no longer being offered at various Cracker Barrel locations.

The Sunrise Sampler included a little bit of many Cracker Barrel breakfast items, both signature products of the restaurant and morning stalwarts, and that was a lot of stuff altogether. Customers started out with two eggs prepared in the fashion they prefer, as well as generously portioned side orders of grits, fried apples, hash brown casserole, and biscuits and gravy. There was no need to choose a breakfast meat, because the Sunrise Sampler came with a little bit of three — thick bacon, smoked sausage, and country-style ham.

A staple on the menu for many years, diners noticed that the Sunrise Sampler was no longer up for purchase at different locations throughout 2022 and 2023. Cracker Barrel made no announcement regarding the hows and whys of the combo platter's discontinuation. The most likely explanation is that it was a casualty of an ongoing menu reboot operation undertaken by Cracker Barrel in the early 2020s.

A new seafood entree made its way to the Cracker Barrel menu in 2015: the Haddock Dinner. The heaping platter of food was centered around a large filet of haddock, a delicate and mild white fish, breaded in cornmeal and flour that was then grilled rather than fried. Served with the usual Cracker Barrel accompaniments of three vegetable side dishes and a plate of biscuits and muffins, the Haddock Dinner was a relative bargain at just $9.99.

Sometime in 2019, Cracker Barrel abruptly pulled the Haddock Dinner off its menu, as indicated by reports from customers on TripAdvisor. Various permutations of more homestyle-skewing seafood like trout, fried shrimp, and catfish remain available, but Cracker Barrel never did restore the Haddock Dinner. The elimination of the dish in late 2019 looked like a warm-up for a more rigorous menu overhaul in 2020. "We delete menu items from time to time to make room for new signature, craveable menu items that our guests love," Cracker Barrel's vice president of Culinary and Menu Strategy Cammie Spillyards-Schaefer explained to Nation's Restaurant News.

The simple chicken salad can be turned into a gourmet offering, and Cracker Barrel certainly gave that a try. In between the day parts when it sells multi-tiered breakfasts and big Southern dinners, Cracker Barrel rolls out a lunch menu. Historically, it has included several options for a light meal in the Southern tradition, including the luncheon favorite of chicken salad. A choice on the Country Sandwich Platter section, the concoction (heavy on the mayonnaise, grapes, and apples), was heaped onto the customer's bread choice of seared white or wheat sourdough and came with some creamy coleslaw as well as a small serving of soup or french fries. In 2014, Cracker Barrel allowed diners to sub out the bread for lettuce wraps to make a sandwich-like meal that was much lower in carbohydrates.

Cracker Barrel's chicken salad, in all of its forms, apparently exited the restaurant's lunchtime menu sometime around 2018. "Cracker Barrel doesn't have chicken salad sandwiches anymore," one customer reported on X, formerly known as Twitter. "It's 2019 and I'm still upset about this," another fan wrote a year later.

If Cracker Barrel was going to proclaim itself the top spot for old-fashioned Southern food available across almost the entire country, except for the only U.S. states where you won't find one, red-eye gravy was going to be a must-have menu item and always-ready condiment. According to legend, Southern-born President Andrew Jackson asked his hungover cook to make some country ham with gravy that was red like the kitchen worker's eyes. It more likely it gets its name from the eye-like imagery that forms when its chief ingredients come into contact. When a pan used to fry ham is deglazed with black coffee, the liquids coalesce into the shape of an eye while also turning into a salty, velvety gravy (that gets thickened and bolstered with the addition of flour).

Cracker Barrel serves a lot of ham and other breakfast meats, and until 2017, customers could order those items and more with a side of red-eye gravy. The chain serves Sawmill Gravy, a peppery pork fat-based sauce that's also authentically Southern and used on biscuits and gravy, but the red-eye version hasn't found its way back to Cracker Barrel.

In 2015, Cracker Barrel launched a special summer-centric menu, with the star of the bill of fare its Strawberries n' Cream French Toast. French toast is a breakfast classic, but it's also well suited for variation, adaptation, and addition. This dish was made with sourdough bread pockets packed with sweetened cream cheese, powdered sugar, and strawberry-flavored syrup, and then abundantly covered in sliced, seasonal strawberries. The Strawberries n' Cream French Toast was available a la carte or as part of a breakfast platter with the customer's choice of bacon, sausage, turkey sausage, or turkey bacon.

But like the summer season the Strawberries n' Cream French Toast aimed to embrace and celebrate, this breakfast item couldn't last forever. From the outset, it was designed and marketed as a strictly seasonal item. As of mid-August 2015, Cracker Barrel no longer served Strawberries n' Cream French Toast — nor anything else from its limited-time-only summer menu — at any of its restaurants. Strawberries n' Cream French Toast also never returned for any subsequent summer.

Drinks meant to be served cold can be kept chilly for a reasonable period of time by pouring them into a glass full of ice. But the longer that iced beverage sits out, it increases the likelihood or inevitability of dilution: Ice quickly and gradually melts into water, and that water mixes with the drink and robs it of its flavor. In the 2010s, Cracker Barrel presented one solution to this problem: It served drinks in clear mugs stored in freezers in the restaurants' kitchens. The Frozen Mugs worked like hollowed out ice cubes — the drinks went in cold and stayed that way until they were consumed or came up to room temperature. With no ice to melt, the drinks never got watered down. That simple technology was a chief selling point in a late summer 2016 menu addition: Frozen Mug Apple Cider. Often served hot, this cider was served ice cold, and made for a nice way for Cracker Barrel customers to enjoy the transition from summer to fall.

Not only did the Frozen Mug Apple Cider leave Cracker Barrel, but so did all of the chilled mugs. Cracker Barrel eliminated that program in 2018. It now uses ice for serving cold drinks.

Apple dumplings didn't originate in the South. First made centuries ago in England, the modern version of the dish is based on a dessert prepared by Dutch settlers in Pennsylvania. Historically, an apple dumpling is made from a cored and peeled whole green apple that's been enrobed in pie dough, slathered in spiced butter, and then baked. Despite its northern United States background, the Southern-centric Cracker Barrel once sold a variety of the treat on its menu, the Baked Apple Dumplin'. Introduced to the restaurant chain in 2014, the dessert was built on a foundation of sliced apples and pecan streusel baked in a pie crust and then topped with a thick and sweet apple sauce and some scoops of vanilla ice cream. It was a cheap extravagance, too, costing just $3.99.

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, Cracker Barrel temporarily stopped making and selling many products for economic reasons. While some items eventually returned, some cuts became permanent. Among the forever cut favorites from that time: the Baked Apple Dumplin'.

Real camping food is unglamorous, easy, and ugly; that wasn't the case at Cracker Barrel. Over the course of a few summers in the 2010s, Cracker Barrel moved away from traditional homestyle favorites cooked in traditional ways to offer up a line of meals wildly different from its usual fare. Its "Campfire" entrées were cooked and presented as if they'd been made outside on a camp stove or over an open flame. Big hunks of meat, along with vegetables like red potatoes, carrots, corn on the cob, tomato wedges, and onions, were seasoned in a proprietary blend and then roasted slowly in aluminum foil until everything was tender. After Campfire Beef, made with chuck roast, proved to be a hit, Cracker Barrel introduced glazed chicken and barbecue pork options.

That expansion for the summer of 2018 would be the last time that Cracker Barrel made campout food. When fall arrived, Campfire Meals disappeared, never to return for subsequent summers.

There are always new sweet potato recipes to try, and Cracker Barrel attempted one in the 2010s. There are numerous holidays invented and established by companies and industry boards to promote their particular products, including National Sweet Potato Month. February is set aside for this observation of the sweet-and-savory root vegetable, and in 2012 Cracker Barrel utilized the occasion of the fabricated observance period to launch a brand-new entrée to its breakfast menu: Sweet Potato Pancakes. Made with sweet potatoes instead of usual pancake batter fodder like wheat flour, Cracker Barrel's version was served three large flapjacks per order and topped with cinnamon butter, alongside eggs and a breakfast meat of the customer's choice. Cracker Barrel was so confident that customers would enjoy the product that upon launch it also started selling boxes of Sweet Potato Pancake Mix in its restaurant adjacent gift shops.

And almost as quickly as Cracker Barrel rolled out pancakes made from sweet potatoes, it took them away. While it never really said the item was temporary, it was. The Sweet Potato Pancakes were gone for good after about just a few months of sales.

The most overlooked part of the chicken is the most delicious: the chicken liver, extremely rich in flavor and physically dense. Breaded and fried organ meat isn't the most crowd-pleasing of foods, but it's an authentically Southern delicacy, which earned it a spot on the Cracker Barrel menu, served as the main part of a dinner along with all of the usual sides and bread.

Cracker Barrel customers began mentioning on TripAdviser in early 2021 that the livers weren't being cooked up anymore. In June 2021, a Cracker Barrel representative fielded a comment on Facebook from a customer inquiring about the sudden non-availability of the chicken livers dinner specifically. "Although Chicken Livers are no longer on our menu, we will gladly share your request with our CulinaryTeam," the rep said. No reason was given why chicken livers can't be found at Cracker Barrel anymore, but the deletion closely followed a chain-wide menu reboot as well as a food-borne illness outbreak centered around chicken livers.

Lima beans have a common and casual reputation as one of the most-hated vegetables of all time, particularly by children. Despite the detractors, those big, sort-of-crunchy, sort-of-creamy, and very starchy legumes are such an indelible part of family meals that Southern restaurant chain Cracker Barrel once offered lima beans as a side dish, one of the options diners could use to fill out their required two or three vegetables on dinner entrées.

Cracker Barrel at least made its lima beans taste as good as they could, seasoned and cooked along with big pieces of bacon. Customers who actually like lima beans raved about the restaurant's preparation online as recently as 2020, just before a system-wide menu truncation took effect. In response to a customer's complaint on a Facebook post about the sudden absence of lima beans from the sides menu, a Cracker Barrel customer representative revealed that the restaurants had gotten rid of the vegetable.

One of Cracker Barrel's main lines of business is serving big plates of familiar, hearty, Southern and generally American entrées. Along with fried chicken, meatloaf, roast turkey, fried pork chops, and other homemade-approximating standards, Cracker Barrel used to sell beef stew, which fit in nicely with the rest of the lunch and dinner menu. A standard, crowd-pleasing preparation, Cracker Barrel's beef stew was a hefty blend of beef chunks, big pieces of carrots and potatoes, and peas, all in a savory gravy-like sauce.

It would seem that the restaurant stopped cooking up beef stew around the fall of 2013. "Okay, so I just found out that Cracker Barrel got rid of their beef stew and I am so upset," one fan wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter in September 2013. "Stopped by some only to find they took it off the menu last month," another customer reported. A grassroots effort to bring back beef stew to Cracker Barrel wasn't successful — a petition on Change.org didn't persuade the restaurant to change the menu.

In addition to gigantic farm-style breakfasts and Southern and homestyle comfort foods, some Cracker Barrel locations, where the law allows, serve alcoholic beverages. In addition to a variety of wines, beer, and bottled cocktails, the chain offers classic and specially crafted mimosas, and the exact lineup is subject to seasonal change. For the early winter and holiday season of 2021, Cracker Barrel introduced the Sugar Plum Mimosa. A sweet but boozy drink, it was a combination of sparkling wine with a proprietary "Sugar Plum" syrup made up of winter fruit flavors, particularly cherry, and cost $5.99 in most locations. It didn't involve in any way real sugarplums, which are actually candy-coated spice pieces.

After the holidays came and went, so too did Cracker Barrel's Sugar Plum Mimosa. The restaurant chain kept around the sugar plum flavoring for a non-alcoholic Sugar Plum Tea, but it moved on with other styles of mimosa. When Cracker Barrel announced its 2024 special winter menu, the Sugar Plum Mimosa wasn't on it, but the Sparkling Plum Mimosa — made with wine and plum syrup and edible glitter — was.