Taco Bueno

Skip this one. Food is okay, but a little salty for me. Other Taco Buenos are much better. Maybe I hit a bad day.

Place is dirty and food is bad! Even when they have specials, it’s not worth it! Police have sub-​station across parking lot, and they don’t eat there. That says it all!

1 star only because that is the bottom of the scale. Actual rating 0. The illiterate staff was rude and told me there was no such thing as a breakfast burrito even though I pointed to it on the menu. I asked to speak to a manager, to which she stated she was the manager and asked me to leave even though they had already sold me the wrong item. I called several other stores asking for a general manager. Once the third store gave me a cutomer service hotline, they patched me through to a dead extension. They win. I am never going back.

I was a big time bueno head, until this past year or 2. Service at this particular location blows. I found a corner of a plastic bag in my bean burrito. Food is worthless. Give me taco casa over bueno any day. I can’t wait until a taco casa comes to Plano.

I love their Muchacos!!! so darn tasty

It was the summer of 1993. I was an awkward 16 year old working at my very first job at this precise Taco Bueno on the east side of Plano. Years later, I would become a titan of business: a wizard with spreadsheets, a virtuoso of conference calls with an opulent 8’x6’ cubicle of my own. It’s hard to imagine my humble beginning making $ 4.40 per hour slinging tacos.
To celebrate the nearly 20 years since I worked here, this is my attempt at a Bourdain Kitchen Confidential: Taco Bueno edition.
The first thing that surprised about Taco Bueno is that nearly everything was made in the store: grilled chicken, refried beans, the salsas, taco shells, tortilla chips, and guacamole. We diced tomatoes in house. The ground beef did come pre-​seasoned (and raw) in big 10 lb plastic tubes. The chili sauce (used mainly for party burritos) was pre-​fab and pretty terrible.
In my year at this restaurant, I never once saw an employee do anything gross to someone’s food.
I’ll never understand why some people do gross things in restaurant bathrooms. A piece of my soul died every time I had to clean up some inexplicable atrocity.
I made $ 4.40 per hour. I would come home from an 8 hour shift exhausted, soaked with dishwater, with steam table burns on my hands, stinking of refried beans and queso. All that for about 35 bucks.
Some of the employees were quite… interesting. There was the manager who moonlighted as a strip club dj. There was the scruffy guy who, for some reason, brought a pistol to work in a paper bag and showed it to me (looking back now, I’m terrified). I can only imagine how fun it is to keep a fast food restaurant staffed and running.
On balance, I think the food at Bueno is pretty decent quality. This ain’t farm to table local goodness, but the recipes are simple and flavorful. I would frequently make a burrito for myself at the end of a shift or a big olé nacho salad, and, to this day, I still crave party tacos with the house salsa.
At this store, there was a silent alarm button near the front of the store. It was inexplicable placed right next to the button that would buzz the back of the kitchen. One day, I hit the wrong button. The police showed up, and our store got hit with a false alarm charge. After getting a lesson from the manager about the alarm button, I proceeded to hit the same stupid silent alarm button later that week. Yep, and I was a national merit scholar.
Anyway, this Taco Bueno helped shape me into the man I am today. It was a good store then, and I am sure it is good now. Check it out, and be nice to the folks behind the counter.