Taco Bell

³⁄₅ stars.
The food at this restaurant usually is fine, and is very fast, but let me give four reasons why I can’t give more than a ³⁄₅.
First, this location don’t allow online ordering. Not a big deal, except for the second thing I’ll talk about. Lack of online service might actually be a plus, since online ordering might slow service to the physical customers, assuming they rate employees on speed of online service. (I don’t know for sure, but this is my guess this is correct. The nearby mall’s taco bell has online service and takes forever. Speed is certainly noticed by yum! brands — I know of one time when an employee at this location actually asked us to pay without delivery of food on the drive-​through just so they could get rated as being faster!)
Second, this is a co-​branded taco bell; they also serve KCF chicken products. I love most taco bells, but I hate co-​branded stores. Specialization is good — make less of fewer things. IMO the owners of co-​branded stores have strategically decided to have two 3 stars restaurants instead of one 4 or 5 star one. Their choice.
Let me give you a very specific little example of a problem that co-​branding caused in this restaurant for me and why it is bad. My favorite taco bell food happens to be their Crunchwrap. Taco Bell’s website lists 4 different ones, or 6 if you include the two combo options. You’ve probably seen the Crunchwrap, since it was featured in a tv commercial that went viral, with millions of additional online views. (
is the url, but if you are wondering why that url doesn’t work, it is because, as I had expected, this Yum! Brands’ commercial was soon deleted. The commercial is the greatest commercial ever made to date. It was far better than Apple’s 1984 commercial,
. So why was it deleted? Copyrights? LOL. Ostensibly, the ad was designed to promote Crunchwraps as an alternative to McDonald’s Egg McMuffin breakfast product. The problem was that it went way over the line of what is tolerated in this society. It had heavy anti-​government revolutionary themes in it. I’m sure it freaked some people out. Even without the Ramones Blitzkrieg Bop «shoot ‘em in the back now» song [the only full version currently on youtube has no sound], the commercial would still have had to have made some people wonder about stuff like the too big to fail bailouts, since it can be argued that technically these made the usa socialist. It is very important that we love our govt./leaders. See
. So the entire ad campaign had to be disappeared, including the websites like
. Although tweets like
are still up, most of the references to the campaign on wikipedia have been sanitized.) At any rate, there is no space for this particular taco bell to put any pictures of any Crunchwraps on the menus because about half of the space is slated for their KFC foods. Crunchwraps are taco bell’s own invention, and this particular franchise venue doesn’t usually stock paper menus, nor, as I said, do they have the online ordering that is available at other taco bells. The commercial for the Crunchwrap was subtle, so it didn’t actually reveal taco bell’s own name of this product they were advertising. So good luck in ordering what I think is taco bell’s best product if you go to this franchise location; you’ll need it because there isn’t a simple way for a viewer of the commercial to have known what to have requested. Co-branding=dumb.
Third, another negative is that the temperature of their bean burritos here is too high. You’d have thought that the Liebeck v. McDonald (hot coffee
) lawsuit changed things. Not really. As I say regarding
, high temperature foods can increase risk of esophageal cancer. To avoid burning myself, I’ve developed a way of lowering the temperature that utilizes evaporation of the vinegar in their hot sauces, but I shouldn’t have to do all that.
Fourth, there was a good fraction of a week when this store had a bad smell in it. This issue was fixed, so I am not sure this matters anymore.
Overall, IMO this restaurant is a ³⁄₅.

This location tends to be slow.

I almost wanted to give this Taco Bell/​KFC 4-​stars. It is fairly clean (minus the bathrooms) and shares space with the KFC. The service was relatively quick.
I hate to admit this… but I drive from downtown Silver Spring to this location for Taco Bell rather than the one in Blair Park. To be fair, even with all the traffic lights on Georgia it is still faster than the one in Blair Park.

You do know this is Taco Bell, right? There are no 4 star Taco Bells in the world. Located in the mall food court, this location is clean and the service is quick. Food is like all the others, but they do tend to get the orders right.
To make this review interesting, I taste tested all of the salsas. For the most part, they were all gringo friendly. In this predominantly Latino area, they likely aren’t that popular. The verde has a nice flavor of green chili. I would skip the mild sauce, it is the weaker version of the hot sauce. Hot sauce was more mild, with a clear jalapeño flavor. The fire sauce was a bit like Tapitito sauce but slightly less heat.