AUSTIN, Tex. — On Thursday, August 20, Taco Bell brought back four discontinued menu items from its 2016 lineup, and three of them are fine — the Meximelt, the Beefy Crunch Burrito, the Caramel Apple Empanada — and one of them is a fried chicken patty with no shell on it, which the chain is calling the Naked Chicken Chalupa, and which has been on sale for a week now at $5.99, and which is the food story of the summer, and which nobody can explain.
The item launched as part of the chain’s third “Decades” menu, a limited-time nostalgia run built around its 2016 lineup, and it was the one fans had been petitioning for for years. The Chalupa, in its original 2016 form, was a fried chicken patty wrapped in a crispy chicken shell — a patty in a suit. The item coming back this week, per the menu, is the patty. Just the patty. The suit is gone. The patty is out. The patty is, as the name says, naked.
I called Taco Bell corporate. I was on hold for nine minutes. When a human being finally picked up, I asked the single question that has been occupying the nation’s collective mind since Thursday: “Is it just a chicken patty?” A pause. “It is the Naked Chicken Chalupa,” the representative said. Another pause. “It has a sauce.”
“It has a sauce,” I repeated.
“It has a sauce,” the representative confirmed, with the tone of a person who has answered this question approximately four thousand times and has made peace with the fact that it will be the question of his career.
The local response has been, as local responses to this kind of thing are, immediate and unfiltered. At the location on the west side, a line formed Thursday afternoon that was, by the account of a woman in it, “about half people who want the chalupa and half people who want to see what the chalupa is.” The woman, who declined to give her name because she works in accounting and has a family, explained the split. “I’m in the second group,” she said. “I want to know why it’s naked. I want an answer. I’ve been waiting since Thursday.”
She did not get an answer. She got a patty. She has not said whether she is satisfied.
THE 2016 DECADERS MENU: AT A GLANCE
- The Naked Chicken Chalupa — $5.99. A fried chicken patty. No shell. A sauce. The item fans petitioned for. The item the nation cannot explain.
- The Meximelt — $2.99. Cheese, meat, and a warm tortilla, melted in a pan. It is, by every account, a normal food. It is the control group.
- The Beefy Crunch Burrito — $2.79. A burrito. With crunch. The crunch is the feature, the crunch is the name, the crunch is the whole thing.
- The Caramel Apple Empanada — $2.99. An apple in pastry with caramel. It is, by every account, the best thing on the menu, which is the item nobody is talking about.
A food analyst, speaking on the condition that his name not be used because his firm does consulting for several chains and this is a very delicate moment, offered the framework. “Nostalgia menus work because the customer is buying the memory, not the food,” the analyst said. “The 2016 Chalupa memory is the shell. The customer is buying the shell. The product is the patty. There is a gap between the memory and the product, and the gap is $5.99 wide.”
He paused. “Also, it’s just a chicken patty.”
The chain’s position, as stated in the newsroom announcement, is that the Decades menu is about “bringing back fan-favorite items from the 2016 lineup,” and the announcement does not use the word naked, and the announcement does not address the shell, and the announcement is, in the words of one person who read it twice, “doing its best.”
At press time, the item remained on the menu at participating locations, the line on the west side had shortened but not disappeared, the woman in accounting had, by her own account, “made her decision,” and Taco Bell corporate had, per a source close to the situation, received 4,001 calls, and a representative was telling caller number 4,001, calmly, for the four-thousand-first time, that it has a sauce.