By Sasha Elenko, Food Columnist
For anyone wondering why I took an hour-long trip (by transit) from Vashon to the White Center Taco Bell, I did it for the Naked Egg Taco®.
I learned about the Naked Egg Taco® from a radio ad a few weeks ago. It’s basically a taco, except instead of being held together by a normal taco shell, the contents are encased in a single perfectly discoid fried egg. Pretty eggciting, right?
Well, if you want to learn more about the Naked Egg Taco®, I’m afraid you’ll have to either try it yourself or visit Taco Bell’s website for a very strange, in-depth description, complete with a 13-sentence paragraph in which every single sentence references dreams (I can only wonder which of the three words in the item’s name most strongly inspired that paragraph).
If you choose the former, just make sure to go in the morning, because — as I learned after I arrived at the fast food restaurant at 4:31 p.m. — that’s the only time it’s served.
This was my first time going to Taco Bell, and since I didn’t get the taco I wanted — and since I did learn enough from the two tacos that I did get to decide that the Naked Egg Taco® wasn’t worth coming back for — this column will focus on the less avant-garde items that Taco Bell has to offer, namely, the Naked Chicken Chips®, the Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Tacos® and the Cheesy Gordita Crunch®.
When I walked into the restaurant, I joined a small, awkward group of customers standing six feet back from the counter in order to look at the adrenaline-inducing overhead LCD menu without taking up a place in line.
The two female cashiers in their early 20s wearing black Taco Bell visors stood just as awkwardly behind their two registers.
I decided on the three aforementioned items and went to sit down, but was forced to stand up about 20 seconds later when the very large smiley cook, also wearing a black Taco Bell visor, plus an electronic headset, bellowed the following phrase:
“Sasha man, your meal’s ready.”
As it happens, “for here” at Taco Bell can basically be defined as “to go” with a plastic tray. The Doritos Locos Tacos (DLT) and the Gordita were each wrapped haphazardly in advertisement-laden paper, while the Chicken Chips® came in a strangely shaped paper cup with about a hundred psychedelic iterations of the Taco Bell logo inscribed in one large bell.
Chicken Chips® are exactly what they sound like — chicken tenders in the shape of tortilla chips, only they are about one centimeter thick and stacked parallel to each other, making the “chips” in the bottom half of the cup rather soggy.
They came with Nacho Cheese Sauce®, which has a disturbing polyethylene-like odor that seemed to vaporize in my mouth, which was a little bit uncanny.
Interestingly, the DLT actually shared a lot of the same qualities. Just as the Chicken Chips® are pieces of chicken in the form of tortilla chips, the DLT is a tortilla chip in the form of a taco.
Also like the chips, it was one centimeter thick, soggy at the bottom and served with cheese from a plastic cow (this cheese was solid and grated, not melted, but was nonetheless devoid of any earthly flavor).
The hard shell was cracked-on-arrival, which was quite impressive considering the most harrowing conditions it ever faced was a 7-foot stroll from the counter to my table. Maybe it needed some soft outer layer to protect the hard shell.
Incidentally that’s exactly what the Gordita was: a DLT with ranch sauce wrapped in flatbread that was basically industrial naan and definitely did not have any connection to Mexican cuisine.
The flatbread was fused to the hard inner taco shell (also one centimeter wide) with an adhesive white substance that was probably cheese, but just as easily could have been Elmer’s Glue.
Upon finishing my Gordita, I became curious and ventured toward the public restroom. It required a password, so I asked one of the cashiers, who mumbled a series of numbers, then laughed at me condescendingly when I failed to understand her the first two times.
In case anyone’s curious, the password for the men’s restroom is 9843. A sign on the inside of the door assures customers that the bathrooms are checked once every 30 minutes “to make sure they are always ready.”
And strangely this was actually believable; the bathroom was relatively clean and well functioning if you ignore the lopsided three-layer urinal cake (or was it three different cakes stacked on top of each other?) and the automatic soap dispenser that ejected a two-inch long strand of soap not unlike dental floss that simply clung to the dispenser, forcing me to separate it myself.
For the record, hard-shell tacos are supposed to be more than a centimeter thick; naan is not Mexican; and chicken strips will never, ever pass as tortilla chips. Considering that Taco Bell’s motto is “Live Más,” I definitely could have lived with a little más.