TV ads work: After about the 50,000th exposure to Taco Bell proclaiming the glories of its quesalupa, I decided I had to have one. I grew up eating Taco Bell, back when its slogan was the now inadmissible “make a run for the border,” and I’m not sure I want to estimate how many pounds/calories worth of it have gone into me over the years. But I rarely if ever have it now — New York City’s Taco Bells are generic outposts which call to mind the Simpsons episode where one of Springfield’s teens slaps unrecognizable glop on a plate for repackaging by all of its fast-food franchises. There’s nostalgia and then there’s guaranteed disappointment; New York City Taco Bells provide only the latter.
But yesterday I was on the road, driving from New York to Virginia, and knew this was my moment. So I stopped off in Bel Air, Md., to experience the magic of the quesalupa firsthand. (With a side of cinnamon twists, because in for a penny and all that. The nice kid behind the counter even gave me a free Mountain Dew.)
The quesalupa, I can report, is an experience both majestic and horrifying, sublime and tawdry.
It’s good. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s good in ways that made me feel kind of bad.
The quesalupa itself isn’t a hard concept to grasp, and if you care enough to read this you’re probably familiar with it: Its core is a Taco Bell chalupa (I got mine with steak), with the generic little cubes of depressing tomato that I should have asked them to leave out. (I have to admit here that I’m a little foggy on the terminology; I stopped being a Taco Bell regular before its Chalupa Revolution and my last reliable memories of the franchise involve the then-innovative soft taco.) Anyway, that core is then wrapped in another soft shell, with pepper jack cheese layered between the two. The pepper jack cheese is bland, county-fair stuff, but still perfectly acceptable, sweet and rubbery the way you’d expect.
It’s about as Mexican as I am. But of course that’s not the point. The quesalupa is so all-American that if you set one down on Omaha Beach it would probably snap off a salute. (BTW don’t do this; it seems disrespectful.) It’s the kind of thing you could use as fodder for a grad-school thesis about cultural appropriation, except no one involved in its genesis would do more than shrug about the term. The quesalupa is a wise calculation from a corporate food/marketing lab: Everyone likes cheese and everyone likes getting something extra, so why not wrap a chalupa in extra cheese? Let’s make it go to 11!
And because I’m pretty all-American myself, it sure as hell worked for me. I tried to make the first couple of bites part of some half-assed scholarly disquisition, but then the CHEESE center of my brain lit up and I devoured the rest in approximately a quarter-second. However, a word to the wise: The effect of the quesalupa on one’s, um, internal weather can be compared to swallowing a tornado. I felt satiated and happy but also rumbly and mildly ashamed.
Still, as I sat down to write this, I found myself musing idly about the drive back to New York and pit stops and just maybe a quesalupa. And I know myself well enough to figure out how that one’s going to end.