A Review of Taco Bell’s Breakfast Menu (From Four Years Ago)

This past Thursday Jim Tews reported on fast food giant Taco Bell and their entry in to the world of breakfast foods. Taco Bell will be slowly rolling out their breakfast menu within the next couple of years, but those of you living in America’s western states have a chance to become test subjects in this experiment called Breakfast.

None of this is news to me. Four years ago a friend and I visited another friend in Tampa, Florida. We had a lovely weekend. I slept on a hardwood floor and I didn’t come close to getting laid. You know, the usual.

After we said our goodbyes on the morning of our departure, my friend and I drove by a Taco Bell that claimed it was serving breakfast. We knew this because the Lisa Frank-inspired window dressing that Taco Bell uses as advertising was screaming at us like a pissed off rainbow that loves tacos in the morning.

We entered, we ordered, we ate.

I am now going to review something I ate for breakfast four years ago at 8 AM on a Sunday while hung over. But that’s not to say this wasn’t a memorable meal. It most certainly was. To this day, my friend and I still discuss it. Since then we had never heard of a Taco Bell anywhere serving breakfast, until last week. For four years we thought this Taco Bell came out of thin air, maybe from an alternate earth in an alternate timeline via a crack in the infinitely thin fabric that separates our worlds, like the show Fringe but with tacos.

I have no clue if the breakfast we ate that morning was a part of a small test run, just Taco Bell flirting with the idea of a breakfast menu. It could have been one individual Taco Bell going rogue, throwing caution to the window as their manager’s mind slipped in to madness whilst barking deranged orders, commanding his taco minions to “cram those tortilla’s pussies with eggs.” I don’t know. That could very well have been the case.

All I know is this: we ate breakfast at Taco Bell long before any of you got a chance to, which makes us special. That specialness was negated the moment we started chewing and realized we should have just eaten our shoes instead.

I should also mention that none of the pictures below are in anyway indicative of what the actual products looked like. I didn’t take pictures of anything I ate, so I found generic pictures of what an ideal version of these foods would look like.

Egg and Bacon Taco Thing

I want you to imagine some bright yellow scrambled egg. Now imagine some savory bits of browned sausage. Imagine some light, pillowy flour tortillas. Now imagine all of those things together and in the shape of a delicious taco. Now imagine if that delicious taco got a role on CSI: Miami playing a greying corpse on a morgue slab, originally found half-eaten in gator nest in the Everglades.

The taco looked…sickly. The way you look when you catch a bad cold and you don’t leave your house for a week and then you go to a party and everyone says “man, you look like shit” and you hate them all for saying that. You hate them so much. It is for that reason the breakfast taco I ate hated me. It hated me because it was sick and I was being an inconsiderate asshole as I criticized it to its face. It showed its hatred by being passive-aggressively awful.

If you could stuff scrambled eggs in to a toothpaste tube and use a Q-Tip to pop in individual grey chunks of what I’m assuming are sausage, and then squeezed that tube on to a tortilla, that would be an adequate way of replicating the entire breakfast taco experience.

It tasted like all of the visual descriptions mentioned above.

Egg and Sausage Burrito Thing

Hey, did you just finish reading my review of the breakfast taco? Are you ready to read my review of the breakfast burrito? Okay, go back and re-read everything I said about the taco and just replace the word “taco” with “Jesus Christ, this shit again?” The two are essentially the same thing, but the burrito is made by that one Taco Bell employee that is extremely dedicated to folding things all the way; none of this “folding tortillas in half” bullshit. This employee doesn’t screw around when he shoves eggs and some other stuff on to a flour thing. He rolls, he folds, and he shoves floury flaps inside and underneath other flaps with expert precision.

That was the only advantage to choosing the burrito over the taco — getting a chance to appreciate the hard work of someone that dreams of one day opening an origami burrito joint but is frustrated that in his current position he is only allowed to innovate and forever alter the burrito wrapping landscape.

And holy shit I just remembered that it was filled will refried beans. It was like eating yellow Styrofoam laid atop a bed of brown/purple paste.

Quesadilla Thing

Imagine if you stuffed a Netflix DVD sleeve with toothpaste eggs and sad sausage and then you smashed that between two hot slabs of metal. That’s what the breakfast quesadilla was. It was a sweaty waxing-crescent moon of eggs fleeing from the edges of the tortilla, as if in the short time they were on the tortilla they formed a society and developed a myth of the large shiny hot thing in the sky that would one day kill them all. Not all of the eggs believed it, though. “It’s only an urban legend”, the skeptic eggs said. But they were wrong; so very wrong. When they saw that sandwich press crashing down around them .48 seconds after they formed a society, even the non-believers ran, ran for their lives.

None survived.

That, folks, is what silly bullshit looks like in print. That was all a really elaborate way of saying “the egg stuff was slipping out everywhere.”

I can’t comment on the taste because I wasn’t the one that ordered it, but to quote the friend that did, “As I ate it, it felt like it was crying.”