McAlister's Deli

Love their harvest chicken salad. They also offer gluten free bread. Great staff and service

Corporate Strikes Again We have eaten here regularly over the past year and have watched as the experience has deteriorated over time. Our visit yesterday confirmed our suspicions that something was afoot. Apparently, someone in corporate has decided that the ingredients that they used to use were inappropriate on some level, so now they have: replaced caramelized onions with raw ones; eliminated their signature cole slaw and substituted some "healthy" undercooked chopped green, slimy-looking salad for it, while replacing it on certain sandwiches with sauerkraut: instructed the staff to ask if you actually want your pickles (a profit-saving question, I was told); and started using laminated menu cards instead of the paper ones that you used once and could keep in your car. This last probably sounds like a minor choice, but in an area where people from all over the world come in during flu season, it's a disaster waiting to happen. Yuck! It's as bad as handheld sign-in pads at doctors' offices. Who cleans those things? The main reason we have dined at McAlister's in the past was that they served a fine sandwich on gluten-free bread that wasn't soggy. Now, in addition to changing the contents of our favorite sandwiches, they no longer grill them; they just warm them. Warming turns gluten-free bread into a gloppy mess, so now we have to special request toasting. Even so, I think they may have changed the brand of their GF bread because it was bland and I couldn't eat it. The best element of our lunch for me was the potato salad. It was creamy, well-flavored, ice cold and delicious. My fear is that once corporate discovers that those tasty calories have slipped through the cracks, they will eliminate them, too. It doesn't matter much, anyway. We won't go back just to have a side dish. What a disappointment.