20 Restaurant Salads With More Than 1,000 Calories
If you’re at a restaurant ordering the grilled chicken salad in lieu of the cheesy cheddar burger to keep your weight in check, you may want to rethink your options. Many of your favorite chains’ salad offerings aren’t any better than the entrees you actually crave. In fact, a striking amount of restaurant salads hide more than 1,000 calories in between the leafy greens, grilled proteins, and creamy dressings.
Next time you’re eating out, make sure to avoid the bowls here—they all pack in over a grand of calories!—and opt for the #1 healthiest menu option at 40 popular restaurants instead.
California Pizza Kitchen The Original BBQ Chicken Chopped Salad
We can’t justify noshing on 10 small packets of McDonald’s fries—the sodium equivalent of this salad!—so why order this CPK calorie bomb?
The Cheesecake Factory Cobb Salad
Leave it to The Cheesecake Factory to sneak in more than a gram of artery-clogging trans fat into its healthy-sounding salad.
The Cheesecake Factory Santa Fe Salad
This mashup of lime-marinated chicken, corn, black beans, cheese, tortilla strips, tomato, mixed greens, and a spicy peanut-cilantro vinaigrette packs in about double the fat than the joint’s Old Fashioned Burger.
The Cheesecake Factory Barbecue Ranch Chicken Salad
The salad starts off healthily with avocado, tomato, grilled corn, black beans, cucumber, and romaine until the calorie bombs hit the plate. Never order a salad that’s “topped with lots of crispy fried onion strings” and a generous dousing of barbecue ranch.
California Pizza Kitchen Waldorf Chicken Salad
Two days’ worth of sugar sneaks into this salad via grapes, green apples, candied walnuts, and a sweet vinaigrette. Stick with the full Caesar salad instead.
California Pizza Kitchen Grilled Steak Salad
CPK grills its steak to medium doneness and tops it over greens, Nueske’s applewood smoked bacon, jicama, red cabbage, charred red onion petals, tomatoes, and Gorgonzola tossed in bleu cheese dressing. However, the calorie content is absurd, and you’ll get just 240 milligrams short of your entire day’s worth of sodium.
California Pizza Kitchen Thai Crunch Salad
Forget the slew of wontons and rice sticks and go for the half serving of the Italian Chopped Salad instead.
Buffalo Wild Wings Santa Fe Salad With Cilantro Lime Ranch Dressing & Soft Tortillas
If you’re already at Buffalo Wild Wings, you might as well stick with ordering the wings instead of a caloric salad. Nosh on the small size of traditional wings, and you’ll save 430 calories, 26 grams of fat, and a staggering 2,330 milligrams of sodium.
Romano’s Macaroni Grill Parmesan Crusted Chicken Salad
Consider Romano’s cheesy chicken salad one of the lesser evils on this list. While it’s got over 1,000 calories, it also packs in under 1,000 milligrams of sodium and not too much heart-harming saturated fat.
The Cheesecake Factory Chinese Chicken Salad
The dinner-sized Chinese Chicken Salad comes packed with more than a day’s worth of blood-pressure-spiking sodium and two-and-a-half days’ worth of sugar. Opt for the lunch-sized salad, and your meal will still clock in at over 1,000 calories.
Buffalo Wild Wings Honey BBQ Chicken Salad With Honey BBQ Ranch Dressing
BBW’s honey BBQ chicken salad boasts 386 Rold Gold pretzel sticks worth of sodium!
Buffalo Wild Wings Buffalo Chicken Salad With Buffalo Bleu Cheese Dressing
While this buffalo chicken salad boasts a calorie count that’s not as inflated as some of the other bowls of greens on this list, it still manages to pack in 230 more calories than McDonald’s Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
IHOP Chicken & Spinach Salad With Grilled Chicken
You’d think a spinach salad with grilled chicken wouldn’t do much damage—however, IHOP’s rendition is an exception. The joint packs in over a full day’s worth of sodium and sugar into its leafy meal.
Applebee’s Oriental Grilled Chicken Salad
If you wouldn’t order a mini Oreo Cookie Blizzard from Dairy Queen for dinner, why bother forking into this salad? Applebee’s manages to pack in five more grams of sugar than the cookies ‘n cream treat.
The Cheesecake Factory Caesar Salad
This Caesar salad packs in almost two-and-a-half times more fat than a Big Mac.
Applebee’s Southwestern Salad With Grilled Chicken
Chalk this disastrous nutrition panel to the salad’s chimichurri sauce, blend of cheddar cheeses, crunchy tortilla strips, and house-made cilantro ranch dressing.
The Cheesecake Factory Sheila’s Chicken and Avocado Salad
Who would’ve ever thought that a chicken and avocado salad would have more calories than an order of The Cheesecake Factory’s infamous fried avocado eggrolls?
IHOP Crispy Chicken Cobb Salad With Grilled Chicken
A grilled chicken salad seems like a safe bet—especially when you’re dining at the house of pancakes—but this low-carb bowl is anything but sound for your waistline. You’ll find the salt equivalent of 16 small orders of McDonald’s fries in this salad.
The Cheesecake Factory Chicken, Mango, and Avocado Salad
This fruity salad packs in 2.2 Snickers bars’ worth of button-busting sugar. You can do without it.
California Pizza Kitchen Italian Chopped Salad
Julienned salami lends CPK’s Italian-inspired salad a slew of sodium in addition to the mozzarella, which also endows a hefty dosage of saturated fat.
