Double Slow Roasted, but for What?

I’ve been wanting to review the Taco Bell Cantina Chicken items for a little while now. They debuted a few months ago, and I even grabbed one to review, but the Taco Bell I went to screwed up one important thing: they forgot to give me my Avocado Verde Salsa sauce packet. Taco Bell makes a big deal about this verde sauce, saying it’s what completes the dish. Without that packet I could eat the burrito I got, and I did, but I wasn’t impressed by the offering. Despite its listed ingredients and supposed combination of flavors, I wasn’t wowed by what I was given.

Unlike other Taco Bell specialty offerings (see their chicken nuggets), the Cantina Chicken items have actually stuck around for a while, seemingly becoming a regular fixture of Taco Bell’s menu. That meant that after a couple of months of grabbing other food items, and even other Taco Bell specialties to sample, I could finally come back and grab another Cantina Chicken item as a kind of do-over. This time I made sure to request an extra verde packet, and I paired that with the burrito I got so that I could get the proper and full experience.

The end result: I’m still not wowed. I will admit that the verde sauce is great, but the overall burrito doesn’t taste any more interesting or exciting than a standard Taco Bell burrito. This wasn’t a revelatory experience like their nuggets, and it doesn’t have the same “what are they thinking” wow factor as their Steak and Garlic nacho fries (which I’ll try and get to soon so I can review them before they disappear. This is just a pretty standard Taco Bell offering that isn’t awful, but also isn’t great. It just… is.

The Taco Bell Cantina Chicken Burrito comes with a double order of slow-roasted chicken (in comparison to the chicken soft taco), avocado ranch sauce, creamy chipotle sauce, lettuce, shredded purple cabbage, freshly prepared pico de gallo, and cheddar cheese inside a grilled flour tortilla. That’s a lot of ingredients, some of which, like the avocado sauce and purple cabbage, are new for this burrito. I do find that interesting since, very often, Taco Bell tends to make new things out of old things, using the same eight or so ingredients that are just pre-installed in every Taco Bell to make something “new”.

“Hey, Gary? What if we took the ground beef and beans and instead of putting it into a curled up crunchy taco we instead laid it out flat on a crunchy tortilla disk? But wait, here’s the interesting part: we then top that with the usual sour cream, cheese, and tomatoes, wrap the whole thing in a burrito, and then grill it. I call it a ‘crunch wrap’. Is that insane? It feels a little insane. But I’m sure the kids will love it.” That’s the basic process for everything at the store, and it works. The Cantina Menu, with its few new additions, marks a departure from that, and I think that’s neat. Sadly, nothing else about this burrito is neat.

The issue with the burrito is that, outside of the verde sauce, it tastes a lot like everything else Taco Bell has to offer. I got two crunchy chicken tacos to go along with my burrito, just standard chicken taco supremes, because I like chicken tacos and I wanted a “baseline” to compare against the burrito. And while, yes, the texture was different, I didn’t feel like my burrito tasted all that dissimilar to my tacos. Sure, it had more sauce inside, and yes I could tell there was cheese and stuff in there, but the overall vibe was just the same. If I’d lined it up against a crunch wrap, I dunno if I would have noticed a real difference at all.

Taco Bell doesn’t go out of their way to make things that taste new or exciting. The Cantina Chicken meat tastes like basic chicken, and the sauces they put in counteract each other until they reach this middle vibe of “wet”. I didn’t get a specific flavor or idea out of this burrito, it just tasted like a Taco Bell burrito. It wasn’t bad, and I certainly like Taco Bell burritos just fine, but considering this was a different, “new” thing I would have liked to get something more special out of it than what I experienced.

The best part of the burrito was the Avocado Verde Salsa packet. This came on the side, and let me apply however much of the flavor I wanted. It was slightly creamy and very tangy, with a strong, lime flavor forward. It was delicious and, when applied to the burrito it gave it a tasty, sharp bite that I really liked. Without the salsa this was just another burrito, but with the salsa this was a whole new flavor and I really liked it. This was what I wanted and it’s what the burrito was missing all along.

But here’s the thing: you can get the salsa packets for 20 cents each all on their own. It sucks a little to have to pay for them when all other Taco Bell sauce packets are free up front for anyone to grab (and I always do), but if you want to have verde sauce on your crunchy tacos, or you Doritos Locos, or anything else you want, you can, and all you gotta do is spend 20 cents. I’d much rather do that on other items, and find the right taco or burrito or nacho that truly complimented the verde sauce flavor and made it sing. It was good on this burrito, but I have to imagine it would be even better elsewhere.

Taco Bell has a really good thing with the verde sauce as it’s the true star of the show. If they let you grab handfuls of it and put it on everything by default, I absolutely would. But the Cantina Chicken menu isn’t the best showcase for this new, premium item. The food itself is fine, it’s just kicked up by the verde sauce. Being able to buy it and apply it as I like means I’m just gonna skip the Cantina menu and get this slightly more expensive salsa on its own for other things I buy.

In reality Taco Bell should automatically apply this sauce to their Cantina items and forego letting you buy and apply it yourself. Then it would make the Cantina menu seem special and interesting with a drastically new flavor. They didn’t, and it ruins the experience just a little. You nearly had a good thing here, Taco Bell, but you just didn’t quite get the menu over the finish line. Still, the salsa is great, so that alone is worth picking up.