The Impossible Terribleness of the Panera Chipotle Chicken & Bacon Flatbread

A review

It is not often that a single dish moves me to verse.

Every now and then though, we are presented with a plate upon which magic has happened. Before its arrival, somewhere unseen behind swinging doors, its ingredients were peeled, chopped, combined, and folded. They were then exposed to the sorcery of heat before being pulled free of the inferno. The result, as if almost by alchemy, is a symphony of flavors from what were first soloists.

Those kinds of dishes are so special, they transcend the very concept of taste and remind us that God loves us and wants us to be happy (unless we are atheistic or agnostic, in which case, they just remind us that food can be fucking amazing with or without divine intervention.) A dish can be so special, it feels almost spiritual. That is my point.

The Panera Chipotle Chicken & Bacon Flatbread is not one of those dishes.

No. My god, no. It is not one of those dishes.

It is something so opposite it is as if it was conceived as a punishment for our sins.

Before going farther, as context, I should inform you of the conditions under which I encountered the subject of this review:

It was nearly noon. I had eaten nothing more than a miniature slightly stale hotel buffet apple turnover sufficient in size to satisfy a human weighing no more than eleven or twelve pounds. Imagine a pastry the size of a bar of soap and only half as high. That had been breakfast six hours earlier. It wasn’t bad as lilliputian baked goods go; it was simply very small and had been eaten long prior.

With a busy morning behind me and a busier afternoon ahead, I found myself pulling up at the vexing intersection of great hunger and Panera Boulevard. It was a chance crossing of paths. Pressed for time, I made what I now know was akin to steering my Streetcar of Desire onto the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

I’d just get a sandwich. One of those toasted ones maybe. Something not too heavy. Perhaps the chicken one which they inscrutably overname as the Roasted Tuscan Medley or some shit.

They were out of bread.

Panera.

The chain whose name is a brand-y vaguely European-sounding bastardization of the Spanish and Italian words for bread - pan and pane respectively - was out of bread.

Thus left no choice but to scan the self-service kiosk menu for an alternative, I was vulnerable to a great and terrible deceit. When really hungry, we are weak to manipulations of sight and smell. Things can appear tasty beyond their measure. Their aromas can lure us headlong into the rocks.

I was hungry. The place smelled vaguely of pizza. The flatbread pictures looked amazing. I had no idea what I was walking into.

Look at this.

Even a person of great discernment could be waylaid by the item allegedly captured in that photo. And worse, I, being very hungry, was not a person capable of great discernment at that moment. I was weak. Hurried. I did not have my faculties about me.

In that state, my mind clouded, I thought “Why, yes. I shall eat that! And I shall enjoy a charged strawberry lemonade as an accompaniment!”

Then I placed my order; got my drink; and awaited the buzzzzzzzzz of my little Panera pager. And then it went off and there it was: my Panera Chipotle Chicken & Bacon Flatbread! At last, we sup!

Found a table. Sat down. Gave the flatbread a couple minutes to cool off.

And then I took my first bite.

It was what I can only describe politely as… an immeasurable departure from expectations.

It was a deviation akin to your plane to LaGuardia forgoing final descent in favor of instead crashing into the side of a mountain. A mountain that hates you and wishes you harm.

I was not prepared.

I couldn’t even put my tray table up because on it was The Panera Chipotle Chicken & Bacon Flatbread.

I will say this: it makes an immediate impression.

The flavor profile of the Panera Chipotle Chicken & Bacon Flatbread arrives on a diner’s palate with a concussing ferocity. It is as if the chef has carefully stuffed each of the ingredients into an oversized cartoon boxing glove and punched you in the face.

So many flavors. None of them familiar. None pleasing individually or in combination. It is a symphony of screaming cats trying to claw out your tastebuds so they can bat them about the high-wear industrial carpet.

It tastes like the chef is angry at food - as if they had dated briefly once long before you came along; even though food has moved on, the chef still harbors some active malice which you are now caught up in.

Over the course of my previous 52 years of lived experience, I had come to believe that pizza and its cousin - the flatbread – by virtue of their simplicity - could only fall within a narrow band on the Enjoyment Scale spanning from the midpoint to the high end: from Okay to Wonderful.

I did not know pizza could actually offend.

I do now.

My friends, I am several hundred words into this and am committed to wrapping this review up by 1,500… but as I type, I am deeply afraid that neither language nor explanation will fully convey to you the impossible terribleness of this oven-roasted abomination.

I fancy myself a person capable of evocative depiction. I like to believe that at my brightest and best, I can paint pictures with words which may not be Monets’ but nonetheless illuminate what it is to see the gardens of Giverny.

The Panera Chipotle Chicken & Bacon Flatbread is so very awful, I fear it exceeds my language. Or maybe language altogether.

It is a war crime.

Under the Geneva Convention, a prisoner of lunch has certain rights.

Mine were violated today.

The food it was alleged to resemble - pizza - is an absolute gift. A simple treasure. A dish makeable with only the most basic of primary ingredients. Dough. Cheese. Tomato. And even that third one is not requisite for it to be delicious.

You can make a margherita pizza with only cheese and dough as the leading actors; and to live in a world where something so simple and yet so delicious exists is to exist in the presence of everyday magic. It is a pleasure that satisfies beyond its difficulty.

The margherita pizza is a sorcery accessible to nearly any spellcaster. We ain’t talking Hogwarts shit here. A muggle can make a decent margherita pizza.

And that is precisely what makes the item I experienced today so startling an assault.

It was a sensory pummeling the source of which I fail to even grasp from its alleged ingredients.

Eight ingredients: Six of them theoretically unadulterable to be somehow terrible and two sauce formulations which, while of opaque recipe, seemed unlikely to throw an entire airplane into the side of a cliff face.

My friends, whatever the mad scientists at Panera did to those poor foodstuffs, it was ruinous.

The finished product tastes like it was conceived by an alien life form which had never had even the most fleeting of encounters with the concept of human taste. It is liek someone typed ‘fancy pizza’ into ChatGPT.

Let us first observe the offender as delivered.

Now, regrettably, let’s dive in.

That brownish squiggle, as best as I can figure, is the alleged “chipotle aioli”.

It has a taste that suggests someone took a spice bottle marked only ‘southwesty powder’ and sprinkled it into an already prepared five-gallon bucket of creamy balsamic dressing.

I hated it. It made me think angry thoughts. Angry, angry thoughts.

Beneath the alleged aioli were slices of tomatoes which had somehow been produced to maintain the dimensions of an actual tomato but without even the faintest hint of one’s flavor. In isolation, those tomatoes would make a person think they had COVID.

Beneath the tomatoes – entirely inscrutably – were red onions - an ingredient not even listed as belonging on this already overcrowded school bus of the damned.

What were allegedly ticketed on this doomed ride, on the other hand, were applewood smoked bacon, cilantro, chicken, and fontina cheese.

My friends, if any of the four were indeed present at all, their impact was entirely obscured by a malevolence that lurked beneath them but we will come to that.

And this brings me to the apparent ringleader in this disorganized crime: the alleged garlic cream sauce.

It is absolutely diabolical.

It is overpowering.

I mean ‘overpowering’ in the sense of a summer music festival port-a-potty on a very hot day visited on the way out after the closer.

It offered no assurance whatsoever that garlic were even consulted in its preparation.

I don’t know what it was even trying to be.

I understand its impact; I do not understand its intention. All I can do to make sense of it is to imagine what the people responsible might have been aiming for… or who they were aiming for maybe.

The creamy garlic spread tastes like it was conceived specifically to appeal to people for whom there is no recipe in which Miracle Whip cannot only be insinuated but also promoted to a leading role.

It tastes like someone said “Hey, what if made a sauce for people who would buy a canned soda that tasted like mayo?”

After one bite, I tried to scrape off all of the solid ingredients… but that infernal garlic cream sauce left even the denuded crust no more edible.

So, I tried to scrape it off with a crust from one of the other pieces. And then I tried to wipe it off with a napkin. Nothing worked.

The garlic cream sauce somehow clung to the flatbread like a petroleum spill coating a baby harbor seal.

The flatbread just sat there helpless, its pleading eyes looking up at me… but there was nothing I could do…. There was nothing I could do.

I had no choice but to abandon the soiled beach. I threw the flatbread away.

That simple crust’s look will haunt me.

The Panera Chipotle Chicken & Bacon Flatbread wounded me. I think I have PTSD with the ‘P’ standing for ‘pizza’.

That flatbread stole my innocence. It robbed me of joy.

Will I ever even love again? I don’t know.

It is going to take time. I am going to need to heal.

When someone… something… a flatbread… hurts us though, we have to find a way to go on. To retreat is to surrender. We deserve to find happiness.

So, tonight, I am going to steel myself to my fears somehow and try.

I am going to pry open my heart to love again.

There is a place called Giuseppe’s I heard was good.

I think I will have the margherita.