Taco Bell
Fast food restaurant · Sherman Oaks
14115 Ventura Blvd, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423
Highlights
Fast-food chain offering tacos, quesadillas & nachos.
Fast-food chain offering tacos, quesadillas & nachos.
"A national fast-food chain partnered with the frozen-dessert maker earlier in the year to offer Choco Tacos at 20 of its locations as a limited promotion, a move that highlighted how chains can revive nostalgic items and fueled skepticism about whether the product’s discontinuation is permanent. The chain’s recent history of pulling and then successfully relaunching fan-favorite menu items helped shape public expectations around the Choco Taco’s future." - Bettina Makalintal
"The writer describes a national fast-food chain as their unequivocal favorite, preferring its familiar, lowbrow comfort food even over Michelin-starred dining. This preference underscores a fondness for accessible, nostalgic flavors and suggests that genuine pleasure from ordinary fast food can outweigh culinary prestige or pretension." - Jaya Saxena
"A quick-service chain that engaged with social-media-first music partnerships, commissioning an artist to create a short-form jingle for TikTok; the resulting content arrived with a notably muted level of enthusiasm from the performer, highlighting tensions between platform-driven marketing and authentic artist buy-in." - Shamira Ibrahim
"Has cultivated cultural cachet with younger consumers through celebrity merch collaborations, secret-menu appeal, and app-based rewards programs, helping it avoid the generational decline that has hurt other casual-dining brands." - Amy McCarthy
"A late-night drive-thru comfort, the chain's nacho fries — reintroduced in 2018 as an intermittent menu item — are battered, seasoned fry batons served with a tiny cup of neon-orange melted nacho cheese. They’re fiercely polarizing: some people adore them while others consider them among the worst fries, and the reviewer lands somewhere in the middle, calling them objectively flawed but irresistibly nostalgic. Execution is inconsistent (they can arrive flabby and soggy from undercooking or heat-lamp holding), and even when properly fried they tend to have a mealy interior and are a bit too thick to get truly crunchy. Despite these shortcomings, their cafeteria-style, fake-cheese nostalgia and guilty-pleasure appeal make them perfect for a cranky late-night craving, and the reviewer plans to keep returning to the drive-thru while they remain on the menu." - Amy McCarthy
