Reviews of New Food: Panera Bread Salad Stuffers

Upon entering a Panera To Go restaurant, you’re greeted by barren decor: millennial-gray tiles, a row of tablets, and not a single human in sight. It’s the uncanny valley version of a fast-casual restaurant, and it’s unnerving.

As you approach the counter, it quickly becomes clear that there’s no one here to take your order; there never was. Only a menu boasting Panera’s unassuming delights sits over a long glass-enclosed case, with a sparse selection of baked goods and pastries to greet you. It’s hard to judge how long the pastries have been there, because there are no people. The blondies do look bitchin’, though. You spend a few moments observing them like fish in an aquarium before remembering why you came in here in the first place.

To make an order, you must select a food item from the array of fingerprint-smudged touchscreens. It’s eerily quiet, and you begin to wonder if this is the start of a horror film. Lord knows this wouldn’t be the first time Panera has killed (RIP, Panera Charged Lemonade). Enough time has passed that this would be just the time to strike again, you think.

The otherwise well-advertised Salad Stuffers are difficult to find. It feels like you’re scrolling through page after page of tiny images of food until, finally, you find the icon and select it. Surprise! The screen isn’t properly calibrated. You poke it three more times. Eventually, it selects the Caesar Salad Stuffer, and you move on to complete your transaction.

The screen lights up, requesting payment and a tip. You find it a little disconcerting to leave a tip for no one in particular, but you select 25 percent and tap your credit card on the payment terminal anyway.

Almost immediately, there’s a shuffling sound behind you, and you turn to see two saloon doors flapping near a countertop. There’s no one there, but a damp brown paper sack is now sitting, alone, on a tray.

You lug the weighty pouch to a booth and prepare to seal your fate.

You slide the wet bag down around the Salad Stuffer. It is indeed stuffed; some might say overly so. Not all of the salad seems to have made it inside the Stuffer; the remainder has covered the outside of the baguette-esque tube with Caesar dressing. You think, Et tu, Brute?

You lift the sloppy, engorged loaf to your lips. A crouton—bread inside a bread, like some kind of warped turducken—bursts free from its prison, leaving a goopy trail of dressing on your white pants as it slides to the floor. Your hands are wet and sticky. You take a bite.

It’s not that the Stuffer tastes bad; it’s just overwhelming trying to make your way through all this overdressed roughage. There’s more lettuce inside this roll than you’ve ever seen in one place. This is not the food product for leftovers—somehow, the longer the Stuffer exists, the wetter it seems to get, as though it’s generating its own moisture from within.

Bread cannot contain this much liquid, and it begins to disintegrate. You try to hold the Stuffer together, but it fights back against its own existence. You’re left wondering not whether you can eat this, but whether you can finish it before it becomes a heaping pile of lettuce-filled mush. Unfortunately, this Panera doesn’t seem to have forks.

Or napkins, you realize, as another crouton squirts out of the bread-chute and slithers gooily down your shirt. Out of habit, you search, but there’s no one there to ask for Stuffer assistance.

After another twenty-nine bites, finally, you’ve finished the Stuffer and every piece of lettuce that escaped onto the tray. You are, unironically, stuffed. You clear your tray, placing it on top of the trash can for a person you imagine must come through this space at some point, perhaps in the dark of night.

Finally, you depart the Panera penitentiary and waltz to the nearby bus stop, happy to be back in what feels like the real world again.

A delivery robot pulls up alongside you, and the screen reads, “Hi, my name is Poe.” Feeling full of bread and lettuce, but starved for human connection, you greet the bot. “Hi, Poe.” Its headlight eyes blink in response, and it makes a jingle jingle sound. You wonder, as it carefully begins to make its way across the street, if this is the only way people will consume food in the future, and what, exactly, we did to deserve this.