Farm Basket is back. Okay, it didn’t go anywhere, but it’s “back” as in upgraded or, more specifically, retrograded. Local developer J Dapper recently bought out the local fried-bird chain and announced a menu overhaul that would return the Gobblers and Cluckers to their glorious original recipes after years of culinary drift into mediocrity. Hurray for the OG Farm Basket that longtime locals fondly remember.
Uh, actually, I don’t remember. Which is weird, because I have a defensibly accurate sensory recall of Western fast-food chains of yore that stamped their presence on the Las Vegas Valley in the ’80s and ’90s — the odd, smoky richness of Naugles tacos, the crispy crinkle fries at A&W, the perpetual lazy Sunday beerhall vibes of Shakey’s Pizza. It’s entirely possible that part of my hippocampus has been compromised by a lifetime of high sodium intake, but I’ve always known and enjoyed the sandwiches at Farm Basket for the admirably mechanical rigor of their shape (oblong rectanguloid) and uniformity of flavor (bracingly salty, redeemed with a scrim of mayo), all optimized for rapid, unthinking, utilitarian, decidedly unfarmlike consumption. Perhaps I never paid close enough attention to take note of the menu’s gradual decline. Perhaps, scary thought, I’ve been eating Late-Stage Farm Basket all this time, mistaking it for Original Recipe Farm Basket. Or perhaps in 2025 no one remembers anything anymore and this play at nostalgia is just a marketing hook to draw attention to the buyout and give the Basket a fresh boost.
In any case, after a recent visit, I’m happy to report that things are certainly better at the new/old/whatever Farm Basket. For the sake of purported objectivity, I wanted a broadband, multiform protein-sampling experience, so I ordered approximately 11 pounds of food in the form of a Clucker Meal and a three-piece Chicken Finger Meal. Good news on The Clucker: The functionally templated poultry-tab sandwich objects have been replaced by actual sandwiches, with tender fried-chicken chunks hugged in a Hoagie roll, layered with fresh lettuce and an evocatively Proustian slice of yellow cheese. (Miracle Whip packet and cranberry sauce cup on the side for personalized saucing.) The contemporary Clucker is, well, sandwichy in the best way — appetizingly unwieldy in a manner that dares you to engage it with your mouth. The fries are the kind I like: crispy, salty, skinny, spilling out all appropriately cornucopia-ish from their waxy white sleeve. The Chicken Fingers aren’t so much fingers as chunky thumbs of chicken (this is a good thing), and the crumbly fried coating is a fine flavor actuator for the dipping sauces.
I topped it all off with Farm Basket’s comeback carb de resistance, a swirly, buttery, citrus-kissed Orange Roll, which, the story goes, had vanished from the menu years ago and is now triumphantly returned.
Everything is as good as I don’t quite remember. But I can confidently affirm one classic constant: Farm Basket’s interior décor maintains its Wes Anderson barn charm, an eerily placid berth of burnt-umber wood paneling and harvest-gold plastic booths that touches on the suspect nostalgia that’s always woven into the fast-food experience. Is this live, is this memory? The answer’s on the tip of my tongue.
