Feb 19, 2018 3 min read

I was intrigued last week to learn that Chipotle, the struggling Mexican-style food chain, has hired former Taco Bell executive Brian Niccol as its CEO in an effort to spice up its menu. Critics, if you think “spice up” is a poor pun, let me point out that in commenting on the hiring, financial analyst Peter Salehon called Niccol “a seasoned executive.”

Niccol is widely credited as the man who introduced the wildly successful Nacho Fries to Taco Bell’s menu earlier this year. So successful was this addition that Taco Bell briefly considered attaching the tag phrase “over 9 billion arteries clogged” to its store signage.

I don’t know what all the fuss is about: pouring melted cheese on french fries seems hardly an innovative idea – anyone who has been to Kennywood Park knows it well. Culinary historians report that cheese fries became popular in the United States around 1952, after the introduction of Cheez Whiz, which manufacturer Kraft briefly tried to market as “molten golden goodness from a cheesy volcano.” Or at least they should have. As of 2016, Kraft began calling its viscous bottled concoction “cheez dip.” It contains no actual cheese, although “cheese culture” – a phrase that brings to mind bespectacled hunks of cheddar attending an art show – is listed among its ingredients.

But I’m not here to trash Nacho Fries. I admit that melted, tangy cheese makes tortilla chips a pretty tasty item – if you eat them before the whole mess coagulates into something that might just be the solution to PennDOT’s pothole-filling problem. Instead, I’ll taco trash. (This is a bad pun.)

Exactly what is “taco meat”? I ask because I have seen it listed in the description of tacos at several restaurants, both large and small. “Taco meat” implies that hunters clad in pith helmets and safari outfits tramp through the Mexican rainforest, lie in wait for the horned Taco beast, then shoot it, slaughter it and ship its processed ground flesh back to the United States in refrigerated boxcars. I suppose calling it “taco meat” makes the filling sound more exotic than saying “hamburger.” Ah … but cannot tacos also be filled with chicken, fish, turkey, shrimp and – egad! – even vegetables? ¡Ay, yi, yi, yi!

And while we’re on the subject, why is it called hamburger? White Castle, originator of the small, square burgers now frequently known as “sliders,” traces the name to Hamburg, Germany, which makes sense, but there is no conclusive evidence for this theory. Cooked ground beef patties on a bun and called a “hamburger” were first mentioned in an article in a Boston newspaper in 1896. I suspect that calling it a “hamburger” made the item seem more exotic than dubbing it the “cow sammich.”

A little further down the menu at some restaurants you may also find a Greek favorite, the gyro. In a restaurant known for its gyros on Pittsburgh’s South Side, I was fascinated to read a large poster explaining the origin of the gyro sandwich, along with instructions on how to pronounce the name correctly: “yee-row.” Wishing to appear fresh off a Greek fishing trawler anchored in the nearby Monongahela River, when the waitress asked for my order I intoned, “I’ll have the yee-row!” To which she replied, “Yinz mean the JI-ROW! We ain’t got that other thing.”

The list of ingredients for the sandwich included “gyro meat.”

I didn’t ask if it was frozen or freshly caught in the Grecian rainforest.