It’s weird, but it works. | Taco Bell
The chain’s latest menu gimmicks are improbably good
After a decade or so of writing about food, I am relatively immune to a fast-food gimmick. I no longer trust that a chain’s decision to make a sandwich that uses fried chicken instead of buns, a la the KFC Double Down, is actually going to be good. The key exception to this rule is Taco Bell, a chain that always seems to stick the landing when it comes to an absurd culinary mash-up. The latest, a giant Cheez-It cracker transformed into a tostada, is an absolute revelation.
I made the trip to my usual Taco Bell at 9 p.m. on a Saturday, the perfect time to indulge in what is essentially a fast-food fever dream. I ordered both the new Giant Cheez-It Tostada and the Giant Cheez-It Crunchwrap. The Cheez-It tostada is pretty straightforward — a pile of beef, lettuce, taco sauce, and sour cream atop a Cheez-It that is shockingly large. I was surprised by how much it looked like a Cheez-It you find in the box in the grocery store, even though it’d been blown up to 16 times its original size. As I bit into the tostada, it was immediately clear that Taco Bell was onto something — the cheesy, crunchy cracker was the perfect foil for the spiced beef and crunchy lettuce, especially after several lashings with a packet of hot sauce.
I was one of the first, according to my Taco Bell app, to try the Giant Cheez-It Tostada and Crunchwrap (members of the chain’s rewards program got early access last week, and both items are set to hit menus nationwide on June 6). It’s unclear exactly how long it will be on the menu, but for however brief a time, the Giant Cheez-It Tostada is a very logical — and surprisingly compelling — extension of Taco Bell’s decade-long dedication to nailing the bit.
Think all the way back to 2012, and consider, for a moment, Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos taco. What was arguably the original fast-food gimmick has become a 12-year-old menu stalwart at Taco Bell, its nuclear-orange nacho cheese shell now a staple of many Taco Bell enthusiasts’ regular orders. Within a year of its release in 2012, the chain had already sold more than 400 million Doritos Locos tacos and was forced to hire thousands of new workers to keep up with the demand. It launched a fast-food gimmick arms race, where every chain was looking to get in on the magic, which is how we ended up with fast-food options like the Grandma McFlurry at McDonald’s and Mountain Dew chicken wings at Buffalo Wild Wings.
The difference between Taco Bell and these other chains, though, is that the Bell knows how to make a gimmick that will endure because people actually like it. Few fast food brands are as plugged-in to what their customers want. (Did anyone actually enjoy eating the Double Down?) And what they want, for the most part, is cheesy, meaty absurdity that actually tastes good. When the fans demand the return of the Mexican Pizza, Taco Bell happily (if slowly) indulges them. It knows that it has the trust of its loyalists, people who are genuinely willing to believe that even if it sounds absolutely absurd, Taco Bell will figure out how to make it work.
