Critic's Review
Here we go again. Drawn in by advertising. Running late with no time for lunch, I decided to try the Doritos tacos. Could putting taco stuff inside a giant Doritos chip be the greatest idea since someone decided to fry a cheese sandwich in butter? I was going to find out.
I made the mistake of going inside the last time. Today was a drive through day.
I couldn't decide between cool ranch and nacho cheese so I got one of each. The damage? $2.95 including tax.
Fancy wrappers, you have to admit. Full discloser, I'm a soft taco guy (back in the day when Taco Bell was a regular 2am stop). These things were totally measured. No love went into making these.
Tip 1: Don't use that sauce. It's awful. Here's the low-down on these; First, they're not as crispy as I'd hoped. They're not the same as the chips. Second, the cool ranch is barely discernible. If you gave me that taco and didn't tell me it was a Dorito's cool ranch, I wouldn't have known. The nacho cheese taco was, well, better than a regular hard shell taco, but I'd rather have a soft shell chicken taco, which is what I'd usually get at Taco Bell.
There you have it, in case you care.
Review 11/19/12
I don't usually do fast food, mainly because I don't like to eat fast food, and also because everyone knows what you get with these places. But Taco Bell has been advertising their Cantina Bell menu, which are meant to compete with the ultra successful Chipotle restaurants. For me, Taco Bell was a place I picked up a late night snack and not a place I'd ever go for lunch or dinner.
As we all know, Taco Bell is fast food and the place certainly looks like it.
It didn't take me long to figure out why Chipotle is so popular and why Taco Bell is Taco Bell. The Cantina Bell Bowl is a fixed dish; there are no variations allowed. I didn't want rice, but there was nothing I could say to get it subbed out. They wouldn't give it to me without the rice, and they wouldn't replace it with anything else. Fantastic. The counterperson acted like I was the first person to ever ask for something different, and maybe I was. Ok, I'll just take a Chicken Cantina Bell to go. I has no idea how much it cost. Turned out to be $5.08. So it's $1.50 less than Chipotle, and I can't get what I want.
The bowl is about the same size as Chipotle's. No cheese or sour cream, but you do get guacamole. I scraped off the stuff I wanted to eat to find that about 1/2 of the bowl was rice.
They call it "cilantro rice", but the rice itself was just plain white rice. The bowl has a cilantro dressing that's works nicely with the rice; but I didn't want to eat rice.
This is what I got from the bowl that I could eat; a few strips of chicken, a small amount of beans, some corn and a lot of lettuce. As with most Taco Bell stuff, it was pretty tasty. But not a lot of food.
There's really no competition between the Cantina Bell Bowl and the Chipotle Burrito Bowl. At Chipotle you can get what you want; lots of beans, vegetables, cheese; rice if you want it, in any configuration you want. The only real restriction is the amount of meat that you get. For only $1.50 more, Chipotle wins hands down.