It’s 9 a.m. on Saturday, April 20. I am about to eat 11 breakfast sandwiches. I am stone-cold sober.
A drive-through coffee and accompanying breakfast sandwich is a quintessential part of commuter life in the Pacific Northwest. And why shouldn’t it be? We have a positive glut of coffee stands, all with their accompanying fanbases.
So on this sunny April morning, I am going from coffee stand to coffee stand to hopefully answer the question: Who makes the best breakfast sandwich?
The ground rules are fairly straightforward. This is restricted to drive-through coffee stands within the city limits of Bellingham. They also (obviously) have to offer breakfast sandwiches.
Following a bit of a deep dive into grainy Google Maps photos of menus, I conclude that the most common denominator is a breakfast sandwich with sausage, served on a bagel. There’s a few outliers, but for the most part, that’s an easy find.
The contenders
We start our crawl at…. McDonald’s. I can hear the boos and the hisses — but please, reader, allow me to explain myself. Everything else on this list is a smaller, local brand, worthy of highlight, but the Golden Arches serves as a great benchmark.
Up today is the McDonald’s bagel and sausage sandwich, for $5.99. Yes, McDonald’s has bagels again. And you know what? The sausage bagel isn’t very good. It uses a folded egg and a strangely yellow sauce that appears to fluoresce in daylight. The sausage is fine, but is overwhelmed by the flavor of that sauce — a flavor not entirely unlike margarine.
Next door is one of the many Cruisin’ Coffee locations. With its iconic round buildings, Cruisin’ is a major player in Whatcom County — but how’s the bagel? At $5.15, it’s cheaper than McDonald’s and features a soft, sweet, cakey bagel of the type so common in grocery stores. The bagel showed signs of being toasted, but was soft and uniformly hot enough that it’s clear the whole thing was microwaved after being built. The sausage is mild and peppery, the egg in puck form, cheese American. It is comforting in its basic-ness. For speed and ubiquity, this is a great option.
Across the street at Little Dog Coffee Co., the breakfast sandwiches take the tack of “artisanal” very seriously — starting with price. A base breakfast sandwich is $7.99, and the use of a bagel adds upwards of a dollar depending on the type. Plain is on the lower end, but this is still functionally a $10 bagel sandwich. What you get for that money is a properly toasted sandwich. The cheese is bubbly and browned, the bagel crispy on the outside and soft inside. Flavor-wise, it’s pretty much the same as the Cruisin’ Coffee bagel.
Woods Coffee, everyone’s favorite forest-themed coffee shop, sadly does not have a bagel sandwich — but it does have a biscuit. For the sake of covering my bases, I gave it a try. At $6.70, it stings, especially since it’s fundamentally the same egg puck/sausage patty/American cheese combo seen at the last three drive-throughs.
Brewed Awakening was up next. It has an excellent breakfast burrito, but I was here for a bagel — which come from the Bagelry, much to my surprise. At only $4.50, it’s also incredibly affordable. A slight miscommunication resulted in my receiving a bacon bagel breakfast sandwich. Bravely, I championed on. All that to say, the actual filling of the bagel was no different than every other spot we had been to so far. The Bagelry bagel alone propels this sandwich to the top of the leaderboards.
Upon arrival at Zoom Zoom Espresso, I made ready to order The Hockey Puck ($4.85), their amusingly named bagel and sausage breakfast sandwich. Alas, their oven had just gone down. While they get no points in this competition on this occasion, they’re included in my list to head off the inevitable emails about how I forgot a spot.
The Lodge was up next. It had one option that mostly fit the bill: The Classic, for $6.50, includes not only sausage, but also bacon. It’s certainly bigger and heavier than the competition so far, with the addition of a couple of strips of crisp bacon to provide a textural offset and a bit more salt. The rest of it was pretty squarely in line with its competitors. This pulls ahead if you’re looking for something more hearty, or are a huge fan of pork breakfast meats.
The Bean Stop, up next, has one option on its menu, simply called Breakfast Sandwich. At $4.25, it comes in as the cheapest option I tried. The price was explained upon opening the foil wrapper. It is, to my highly attuned palate, identical to the croissant breakfast sandwiches that can be found in gas station fridges across America. If you’re not looking for that nostalgia hit, it may be best left alone.
Cool Beans‘ entrant comes in at $4.75, tax included. They get a point in my book just for having a “what you see is what you pay” menu price. The sausage patty on this specific sandwich was substantially larger than many of the others I had so far today, with functionally identical flavors across the board elsewhere. The bagel was very similar to the one at Cruisin’ Coffee — sweet and cakey.
I Wana Moka was the last stop on our crusade at $5.75. With a crispy toasted Bagelry bagel and the most uniform build of any sandwich I tried today, it pulls out to the lead. The presentation, sliced in half through the wrapping paper, isn’t just aesthetically pleasing — it helps you get to the tasty inside without having to bite through dry bagel first, as is so often the case with quickly-assembled breakfast sandwiches.
The winning sandwiches
While breakfast sandwiches might differ in price and name, my takeaway is the difference worth noting came down to the actual bagel used. I Wana Moka and Brewed Awakening both provide a tangible upgrade with their use of Bagelry bagels in place of the long-shelf-life, cake-like bagels commonly seen elsewhere.
But the decision to go to one coffee stand or another is not made solely on the quality of a breakfast sandwich — a convenient location, the quality of the coffee, alternative beverages like Red Bull Italian sodas and Lotus, or a particularly friendly barista do most of the heavy lifting. While patronizing my top two spots will be future preference, it’s safe to say that staying regular at your favorite coffee stand is probably not going to lead you astray.
Mark Saleeb is a frequent enjoyer of food. Find him at instagram.com/eats.often.
