The lowdown on 8 mac and cheese options at Whole Foods
There’s been a lot of hype surrounding the Union Station Whole Foods Market’s mac and cheese bar. During the first 36 hours that the store was open in November, hungry mac and cheese lovers devoured 1,500 pounds of the gooey goodness. After three weeks, 15,000 pounds had been sold.
We wondered how the bar is doing now, three months in, so we headed down to Union Station with a noble, ambitious mission: taste-test all eight of the selections at the mac and cheese bar to determine which ones deserve your valuable stomach (and credit card debt) space.
As we mulled over the selections, a fellow bar-goer volunteered tips: “Oh, that one was better last night,” she said of the vegan mac. (Yes, some of our fellow residents are so into the mac and cheese bar that they visit it nightly.) “But really, you can’t go wrong.”
Clearly, enthusiasm is high, and store representatives say that most Whole Foods in the region now run a variation of the bar, with just a couple of options or as many as eight. When we pulled up to the cashier with a cart full of generic Whole Foods to-go containers, she just assumed they were all mac and cheese because the bar has become such a customer favorite.
Because the bar at the Union Station Whole Foods has been such a hit, the folks at the Cherry Creek store decided to get in on the action. For Super Bowl weekend, prepared foods manager Nicole Donovan created a “tacho” bar full of blinged-out tater (and non-tater) tots like chicken shawarma millet tots, spicy buffalo sweet potato tots, and bacon mac-and-cheese tots.
The bar was so popular they couldn’t keep it stocked.
Those Whole Foods people are no fools — they’re going to ride this food bar craze for as long as it’s selling — and so the tacho bar will be available at the Creek store at least through March and probably in other Whole Foods stores, too.
But if it’s the much-ballyhooed mac and cheese bar you want, then you’re going to need a game plan. Here’s our guide to the 8-foot-long bar, so you know what to skip and what to load up on. And at $9.99 a pound, you need to be choosy.
Note: Whole Foods rotates the mac and cheese selection, so these are the eight choices that were available when we visited.
Regular mac and cheese What it is: A cheddar/
Romano blend that’s a little creamy, a little tangy and a little chalky.
Comments: “It feels cheesy. Like real cheese. The kind you’d get at Whole Foods.”
Would we eat it again?
Yes, but if only it had BBQ pork or Buffalo chicken or broccoli or hatch chiles or carnitas or bacon or ground beef placed in a neat line on top of it. But wait ...
Mac and cheese with BBQ pork What it is: The same
cheddar/romano blend as the regular mac, topped with a strip of pork and sweet BBQ sauce.
Comments: “It feels like an afterthought. Like, ‘We need eight, so go grab some BBQ pork and throw it on here.’ “
Would we eat it again?
Sure, why not?
Hatch chile mac and cheese What it is:
According to its ingredient list, this one is Romano-less, so just cheddar mac topped with hatch green chile peppers.
Comments: “The burn is too quick. It needs more hatch.”
Would we eat it again?
Yes, but we’d be sure to snag all the green chile toppers, leaving everyone after us with plain mac. Sorry.
Vegan mac and cheese What it is: Penne (the
only macaroni-less mac) and “cheddar” sauce (which involves potatoes, cashews, carrots and onions).
Comments: “The penne is gooey. It’s a step away from soup, but not in a good way. Still, if I was a vegan, I wouldn’t be mad.”
Would we eat it again?
Not unless we turn vegan.
Buffalo chicken mac and cheese What it is: Again, it’s the
same cheddar/romano base, with chicken and a slightly kicky sauce on top.
Comments: “It may be the same mac and cheese, but because of the buffalo sauce you can’t tell. So that’s something.”
Would we eat it again?
Yes. This is the one mac that we all agreed we’d fill up on again.
Bacon cheeseburger mac and cheese What it is: A strictly
cheddar mac and cheese with ground beef and miniscule amounts of bacon sprinkled on top.
Comments: “How do you even make the beef look like that? They took two good things — cheeseburgers and mac and cheese — and ruined them.”
Would we eat it again?
Nope.
Broccoli cheddar mac and cheese What it is: Cheddar,
Romano and Monterey Jack cheeses. Broccoli is the last listed ingredient, so it doesn’t ruin it or anything.
Comments: “I would get this one to feel good about my life choices.”
Would we eat it again?
There’s so little broccoli that there really wouldn’t be much point.
Carnitas and smoked mozzarella mac and cheese What it is: It’s the exact
mac and cheese in most of the others, but with carnitas, smoked mozzarella and crispy onions thrown on top.
Comments: “It’s pretty coy. I don’t know if these macs have the right to be coy.”
Would we eat it again?
Not if the BBQ pork or Buffalo chicken are available.
Bottom line: At the risk of inciting the wrath of the WF mac and cheese devotees, we thought the offerings were pretty ho-hum. Nearly all of them involve the exact same base recipe crowned with a strip of toppings. Still, our favorites were the Buffalo chicken, green chile and BBQ pork variations.