The Secret Menu Item At Cracker Barrel You'll Want To Try This Summer

Although many restaurants can lay claim to selling popular American food, Cracker Barrel is unique in the sense that it serves food that's more American-style comfort food than anything flashy or outrageous. In keeping with the chain's theme of being an old country general store from yesteryear, many menu items focus more on being nostalgic and simple — meatloaf, turkey dinners, fried chicken, biscuits, corn muffins, pancakes, and so on. 

With a menu that is built around simple, made-from-scratch food, it would be hard to imagine that Cracker Barrel would have a secret menu — or a menu of items that are usually made-to-order or often not usually sold on the mainstream menu. In a sense, you would be right. Unlike fast-food restaurants like In-N-Out or Five Guys, whose secret menus are all but secret, Cracker Barrel's menu is pretty straightforward and doesn't allow much room to explore different options. In short: What you see on the menu is what you get.

But that doesn't mean there isn't one particular item you can order that Cracker Barrel keeps off the menu. It's nothing as wild as a fried chicken sandwich with pancakes as the buns or deep-fried meatloaf. Instead, it's actually something that's surprisingly pretty conventional considering how secret an item it is: milkshakes. Just by knowing what to ask for, you can enjoy a tall, frosty glass of a Cracker Barrel milkshake— complete with extra ice cream and chocolate sauce to boot.

A Cracker Barrel milkshake is most commonly described as being a vanilla milkshake, prepared using the same vanilla ice cream you'd get on your cobbler or pie, topped with grated chocolate and an extra scoop of ice cream. Although Cracker Barrel doesn't offer it on the menu in the same way they advertise lemonade or Coke, that doesn't mean you can't try it for yourself.

If you want to try the Cracker Barrel milkshake, all you have to do is ask your server if you can order one. That's it; that's all you have to do. So long as you're polite about it, your server may just as easily tell you that the kitchen can prepare one for you, no problem. If they can't, then there's no harm done. Other individuals have found that their local Cracker Barrels will prepare a milkshake for them so they give them good reviews.

"Nice milkshakes," wrote one Tripadvisor user regarding their visit to a Nashville Cracker Barrel in 2016. "With diluting it with lots of milk it arrived to the right sweetness level." Another Orlando Cracker Barrel is said to serve milkshakes, according to one Foursquare user. The only way to find out if your local Cracker Barrel will prepare you a milkshake is to ask.

Although Cracker Barrel doesn't "officially" sell milkshakes, this doesn't mean it doesn't sell any ice cream-based desserts. We mentioned earlier that Cracker Barrel usually includes a scoop of vanilla ice cream on desserts like peach cobbler or apple pie, but the restaurant has on occasion experimented with different ice cream flavors and desserts in the past few years.

In 2018, Cracker Barrel rereleased Salted Caramel Nut Ice Cream in conjunction with its holiday pies. The chain had released this ice cream flavor before when it also introduced, for a limited time, its version of a blondie brownie. This Salted Caramel Blondie not only included the aforementioned salted caramel ice cream on top of a warm chocolate chip blondie brownie but also a drizzle of butterscotch caramel and caramel popcorn. For the spring of 2022, Cracker Barrel brought back its strawberry shortcake, which included slices of pound cake topped with vanilla ice cream, strawberries, and whipped cream. 

While Cracker Barrel has had many ice cream desserts in the past, and is sure to have some more in the future, its main focus for desserts is mostly just cakes and pies. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you can enjoy a slice of pie with vanilla ice cream alongside a tall, cold glass of a Cracker Barrel milkshake.