No. 11 Combo: Grilled chicken sandwich with lettuce and tomato, no mayo, no Whatasauce. Diet Coke.
I may be slowly going pescatarian—bacon and chorizo don’t count in my mind—but you will have to pry my favorite Whataburger order out of my cold, dead hands. No place else has anything like it, especially not a fast-food chain with a drive-thru that’s reliably open 24 hours a day. The chicken breast is tender, juicy, marinated, grilled. The veggies are crisp and fresh. It’s served on a toasted wheat bun. I’m not a fan of most condiments, and this sandwich doesn’t need them.
Sure, in my almost five decades of life I’ve ordered other things at Whataburger—burgers, of course, and chicken tenders, grilled chicken salads, egg and sausage biscuits, and lots of coffee. But at my current pinnacle of wisdom, the No. 11 combo is everything.
Last spring, I attended a one-day symposium at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. I hesitate to say it was on purpose, but I ended up sitting at a lunch table full of Texans—brilliant grad students, dedicated faculty, award-winning poets, one eminently respected elder academic scholar—and two wholly unprepared non-Texans. We could have talked about so many things, shared so many different stories, but somehow the slightly awkward getting-to-know-each-other conversation ignited when the subject of Whataburger came up. One of the grad students shared that her father had retired from a career as a middle school English teacher after more than 20 years and was now in South Texas living his lifelong dream of managing a Whataburger. The elder scholar confessed that the most painful part of his exile to sunny California was the absence of Whataburger. The non-Texans thought we were saying Waterburger. They looked taken aback as we tried to answer in unison when they asked what was so special about the homegrown chain.
Last summer, I spent
