Triple Steak Stack at Taco Bell: A Review

With Taco Bell's new Triple Steak Stack, we enter the world of "meta-eats." What do I mean by that? Well, Taco Bell is nominally a Mexican fast-food chain, with fare that generally falls within the burrito and taco canon, plus a few we've-seen-them-before flourishes, like taco salad served in crimped taco bowl.

Now, struggling to escape the boundaries they've set for themselves, they've invented the Triple Steak Stack. What does the name suggest? Certainly not a sandwich. The thing consists of a flop of dough something like a Middle Eastern flatbread, rolled and baked to an anemic off-white, with a few symbolic brown spots that might just as well have been spray-painted on.

Inside, we find only two ingredients, and they are familiar to anyone who's ever eaten at TB before: "steak" and the combination of white and yellow "cheese." Nothing more, nothing less. Yet this newly invented contraption reads more like a sandwich than, say, a taco, burrito, or even shawarma on a pita.

The length may give it away: nearly 12 inches, with the meat and cheese oozing out the side. While the photo in the window shows slices of steak, the reality turns out to be mashed shards, looking like brisket beaten with a claw hammer. The flavor is bland in the extreme, with the exception of an overwhelming saltiness. Still, I ate nearly the whole thing before I came to conclusion that I wasn't really eating anything at all, and gave up.