Now from Taco Bell, a hybrid food with a hybrid (portmanteau) name. You can critique the food — a double-Mexican combo, of quesadilla and burrito — or the name (Quesarito, which strikes me as reasonably euphonious, unlike cronut or Flatizza), or both. (Links to foodmanteau postings, up to mid-2013, here.)
Not everyone has found the Quesarito tasty, however.
Here’s Will Gordon on the Deadspin site yesterday, with “Taco Bell’s Quesarito: A Fast-Food Love Affair Gone Awry”:
Hybrid foods are hit or miss. When they’re honest attempts to expand the human dining experience by combining the virtues of two or more complementary yet previously segregated items, the results can be extraordinary. Pizza bagels, peanut butter cups, and Jell-O shots are classic examples of disparate foods joining forces to increase global happiness. [For me, peanut butter cups are at the top of the pop-food pantheon. Pizza bagels are ok. And I've never done Jell-O shots, because I don't care for Jell-O, and I want my alcohol to have an attractive taste of its own.]
But far too often, you end up with a worthless joke of a Frankenfood that was clearly cobbled together just for the sake of novelty. Ramen burgers, turduckens, and car bomb shots are prime examples of compound foodstuffs that would have been better left to their own devices.
… Now [Taco Bell is] coming at us with the Quesarito, a half-assed collision of preexisting conditions masquerading as the cronut for the Mountain Dew-in-the-morning set. A Quesarito is a quesadilla wrapped around a burrito. This means that instead of having cheese inside a normal burrito, you have it trapped inside the double-hulled tortilla of your burrito. The innovation here is to give you more bland, pasty tortilla to chaw through on your way to the underwhelming mess of rice, meat, sour cream, and not-hot sauce trapped inside.
Gordon seethes on from there.
Meanwhile, I have
Ay, ay, ay, ay …
Quesalito lindo
