Taco Bell fills a flour tortilla with melty pepper jack, fries it, paints it with nacho cheese, and wraps it around a mess of soft scrambled eggs, (over-smoked) bacon bits, and extra-spicy potato nuggets. And while the dinnertime Quesalupa with ground beef is a study in mediocrity, the breakfast analogue shines like few other American fast-food creations. How does a national chain make an El Salvadorian pupusa - a corn tortilla stuffed with cheese - palatable to consumers who can’t find that country on a map? Easy, by turning it into a taco and parading it around on commercials as if it were a Tex-Mex riff on a stuffed crust pizza. Savory Breakfast Items Breakfast Quesalupa Here's my guide on what to get, and what to avoid. My take as a critic is that I hope Taco Bell’s breakfast service succeeds, because by fast-food standards, what it’s serving is pretty darn good. “There are only two of us here,” he explained, and indeed there were only two staffers during breakfast during all three of my visits, a heck of a staffing policy for a billion-dollar chain. When I returned to my local Taco Bell, with that eager menu flipper, a few minutes earlier the following day, the menu had already been flipped to lunch. Keep in mind that Taco Bell hasn’t espoused the McDonald’s all-day breakfast ethos many of these items are only available until 11 a.m., or even earlier, depending on your location. So whether Taco Bell succeeds in this nationwide experiment could very well inform how other chains and chefs approach breakfast going forward. Even at the high-end, there really aren’t any chefs selling avant-garde tasting menus at 8 a.m.īut many ambitious restaurant groups - most notably the Major Food Group in New York - are in fact dipping their toes into the breakfast market more regularly, both as a way to shore up profits with lower food-cost items, and to see if their individual approaches to gastronomy will work as well as Eggs Benedict does in the morning. What's surprising, however, is that Taco Bell sticks to that mantra of pushing the envelope at breakfast, a time of day when Americans of all stripes aren’t concerned with the culinary “wow” factor as much as they want quick, familiar nourishment to fill them up for the work day. I hope Taco Bell succeeds, because by fast-food standards, what it’s serving is pretty darn good. If Taco Bell were a New York restaurant, it would be Christina Tosi’s Momofuku Milk Bar. This is the restaurant group that, amid our era of organic everything, rode a wave of pop-culture relevancy by indulging in our nostalgia for junk food, coating taco shells in Dorito dust and making Cap’n Crunch-flavored doughnut holes. "We make bold food you can’t get anywhere else," Taco Bell’s website reads, and indeed it’s hard to think of any other fast-food chain with culinary risk-taking so ingrained in its DNA. The menu offered classic breakfast burritos alongside innovative creations like egg-stuffed Crunchwraps and the famously derided (and discontinued) waffle tacos.Īnd perhaps even more eyebrow-raising were the omissions: pancakes, French toast, yogurt, granola, cereal, or fresh fruit. huevos, tortas, and caldos, but Taco Bell, around since the 1960s, only launched breakfast in 2014, in an effort to chip away at McDonald’s longstanding dominance of that meal. Tex-Mex and Mexican restaurants have a long history of slinging A.M. In fact, I’ll go even further: The Quesalupa is arguably the finest new fast-food innovation since McDonald’s debuted the McGriddle in the early aughts. My advice is to look past it all, because Taco Bell’s limited-time Quesalupa - which will allegedly only be available for the next 15 weeks is one of the country’s finest new breakfast sandwiches. None of this is the type of atmosphere in which hungry, bleary-eyed diners might choose to enjoy their morning meal, in this establishment that doesn’t smell any more like hot sausage than an H&M. There’s more formal entertainment too a TV is showing a documentary about Oakley-wearing border guards who tear apart cars to seize marijuana. Another guy asks permission to use the restroom. A staffer asks him and his crew to leave. A gentleman at one of the tables then starts shouting about how he was a pre-original gangsta, an “O.O.G.,” he says. He waves at a cashier, who then buzzes him in. A guy tugs at the restroom door behind me, which is locked for security. As I’m putting in a breakfast order at my local Manhattan Taco Bell, the pre-Chipotlean Tex-Mex chain that’s a staple of game day commercials, Sylvester Stallone’s Demolition Man, and highway rest stops everywhere, one of the staffers starts flipping the overhead menus to display the lunch offerings.
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