Arby's latest offering is a country-style rib sandwich that promises smoky authenticity. Does it deliver?
The privately held chain, best known for menu items like roast-beef sandwiches, curly fries and the Jamocha shake, recently rolled out a Country Style Pork Rib sandwich as a limited-time fall offering. There’s no mistaking what it’s about: a direct challenge to McDonald’s McRib — the ultimate exemplar of a popular menu item that returns with sudden fanfare, only to suddenly disappear.
But the chain is also trying to make the point that it aims to up what we think of as fast food — its devotees sometimes refer to it as America’s most underrated fast-food chain — and it can do so with a sandwich that has real barbecue pork, as in actual pieces of smoked meat. Or as Arby’s marketing executive Patrick Schwing told me: “We want someone to drive through the drive-through and say, ‘I can’t believe I got this from a drive-through.
Mind you, I like Arby’s new sandwich in some respects. It does have the meat — decent-size slabs of pork shoulder . And the meat tells us it’s been smoked: Even before I knew the exact details behind the sandwich — I learned the pork comes via Sadler’s, an East Texas smokehouse — I could tell this was the genuine thing just from its deep, kissed-by-burning-wood flavor. If anything, the sandwich suffers from being too smoky taste-wise.