Chipotle's Carne Asada Is Bad Food x 1000
A meditation on the struggling chain. Plus: How to get into Art Bath on Thursday!
Here’s a Monday surprise: We’ll have two columns this week!
Today, I’m going deep on Chipotle’s popular new steak offering. And on Thursday or Friday, I’ll write about a new taqueria that I’m excited about — and that hasn’t been reviewed at length yet!
Let’s get to it.
But first…how about a free show at Lincoln Center!?
Lincoln Center’s Festival of Firsts is underway! The Upper West Side series, now in its fourth year, has returned to the David Rubenstein Atrium, that cute little alleyway right around the corner from P.J. Clarke’s.
Here’s why I’m excited about this:
All the performances are free
On Thursday, Lincoln Center is turning over the keys to Art Bath!
Art Bath, run by my friends Mara Driscoll and Liz Yilmaz, highlights experimental performance art that flies just below the radar — or sometimes well above it. I’m thinking of the freeform drawings of Shantell Martin, the intimate bedroom paintings of Ivan Alifan, or the sly films of Kent Monkman.
Tickets usually run $70 or so, but again, admission is free on Thursday! This week’s event will include songs by Grammy-winning mezzo soprano J’Nai Bridges, a performance by New York City Ballet soloist Megan LeCrone, and other cool stuff.
I’ll see you all there!
Art Bath starts at 7:30 p.m. on 16 October. First come first served, or sign up for Fast Track reservations on Tuesday at noon. 1887 Broadway, Upper West Side
The case against Chipotle
New York’s Modern Mexican scene shows no signs of slowing down.
We have steak trompo tacos with down-the-block lines. We have hazlenut moles. We have polychromatic aguachiles, carnitas from every part of the pig, and a fine dining institution that packs in patrons with $112 duck carnitas.
We also have Chipotle.
I can’t believe how many Chipotles there are.
The struggling chain runs 58 stores across our five boroughs. I usually do my best to ignore them as vestiges of a bygone era, but the $55 billion company has been on my mind lately.
I blame the steak commercials.
If you watch too much TV like I sometimes do — you don’t finish “Alien: Earth” by cracking open the new Pynchon novel, lol — you’ve surely seen ads for Chipotle’s carne asada. The dish has returned to the menu for the first time in two years.
The commercials last 15 seconds each, and they feature a diligent chap giving his steak a handsome sear on the plancha. Looks pretty tasty! And the kitchen in question has the air of a farm-to-table spot crossed with an Apple Store, with giant windows, halved avocados so eerily free of oxidation they look like bar soap, and an army of staffers chopping up meat and green stuff with the studiousness of an Eleven Madison Park brigade.
What a destination!
Chipotle has always emphasized “making food fresh.” The chain builds its pangolin-esque burritos (so dense!) without artificial flavors, hormone-laced meat, or, for some reason, without any ingredients retrieved from a freezer. Heck, they’re not even allowed to use can openers, suggesting that the company isn’t concerned about reliable alimentation after the zombie apocalypse.
Anyway!
I’ve reviewed quite a few steaks in this newsletter, but this one is different.
A nationwide chain with over 3,600 locations has quite a bit more reach than any single chophouse or taqueria. When I mentioned to Expedite’s Kristen Hawley that I was mulling over Chipotle’s spiced steaks, she pointed out that the dish was the second most searched-for limited time offering — across the entire industry — after the McRib.
So I figured it was time to give the carne asada a test drive.
The steak is seasoned with cumin, garlic, and oregano, and finished with fresh lime. It has, per the press release “29 grams of protein per serving and is Whole30®, Keto and Paleo friendly.” I’m not sure what that all means, lol, but it all sounds about right for our carnibro era.
I sampled the steak over three separate visits, at three separate locations.
It was all bad.
The first time I tried Chipotle’s carne asada, it was via DoorDash on Long Island.
Delivery isn’t the necessarily the ideal method for food critics to check out a particular dish, but this is how people get their barbacoa bowls. Nearly 36 percent of Chipotle’s sales last quarter came from digital orders.
My single carne asada quesadilla cost $27 after tax, tip, discounted delivery fees, and supplemental red chimichurri.
How was it?
It looked as if the driver pulled my steak from the crevices of his car’s own tires.
On the Chipotle website, the carne asada flaunts a pink hue, but my meat was gray and rubbery — with a gnarly chew. It recalled beef jerky discarded for quality control purposes. The flavor ranged from bland to skanky. The chimichurri was oily and garlicky in an uninteresting way. And a separate salsa roja had an industrial flavor to it, as if a food scientist used algorithms to recreate the condiment from old cumin and dust.
This all sat inside a brittle tortilla with scant cheese, and the whole thing bore about as much resemblance to an actual quesadilla as a certain Madeira airport statue evoked Ronaldo.
Also….there wasn’t much meat!
The second time I tried Chipotle’s carne asada was at the outpost on Seventh Avenue in Midtown West.
The location boasted an equal number of staffers to patrons (three). That’s about the ratio you’d expect at an intimate chef’s counter spot. Except here, the large room was cold and empty approximately four hours before the stated closing time.
I ordered a few tacos and took a seat at a shiny steel table.
The slices of carne asada, about as fat and long as small thumbs, were gray and bland. The meat was more tender than in my quesadilla, and it tasted aggressively of cumin. When I encountered a little nugget of fat, it didn’t have that meaty sweetness or wobbly softness you get from expertly cooked beef. It was simply gristly.
Was this less bad than my quesadilla? Sure. But it was still bad.
I also tried Chipotle’s cheaper “steak” option, cut into smaller cubes. It had a little more beefy flavor.
Cost: $5 per carne asada taco — or $4.45 for the regular steak.
That price is worth a moment of consideration. One of the longtime lures of fast food is that you’re saving quite a bit of time and money, but Chipotle is already one of the spendier brands out there, and it continues to raise prices (like many of its peers). An order of carne asada will cost about as much as a tastier taco at a local food truck. Or it’ll cost about a dollar less than really good tacos from El Rey or Los Tacos in Midtown.
Trading up from Chipotle probably isn’t going to max out your Chase.
The third time I tried Chipotle’s carne asada, there was reason for hope.
I swung by the location a few blocks away from The Port Authority on Ninth Avenue last week. A lively crowd enjoyed their bowls and burritos while chatting with friends — as good music played throughout the room.
And that’s the thing: Chain restaurants in Midtown can be fun!
Folks go “nuts” for Jollibee, as Eater reported in 2017. True to form, the Midtown location of the Filipino chain was bustling on Friday, filled with people who were surely eager to try the banana ketchup spaghetti. And back in the spring, I wrote about how the Red Lobster in Times Square — rather than feeling like a tourist trap — had a chill vibe at the bar, with locals knocking back cocktails.
Indeed, the Port Authority-area Chipotle had decent energy when I visited, with 13 patrons eating or queuing up around 9:00 p.m., and with the sound system piping out “Sunny” by Los Iracundos. Cool.
But for a chain to be good, the food should actually be good. And that brings up one of my favorite maxims: Fast food is best when it actually tastes like fast food. It shouldn’t taste too much like the real food it’s trying to imitate.
I use “too much” as a caveat because there are exceptions to my little theory. Some folks seem to like Dunkin Donuts as much as good artisanal crullers (I’m not one of those folks), and Helen Rosner once wrote about a certain Southern California restaurant that proudly sold Popeye’s fried chicken. Bless.
But for the most part, I want fast food that doesn’t remind me of how much happier I’d be at a street vendor, a bodega, or a tiny independent restaurant.
To wit: A cheeseburger from McDonald’s makes me wish I was at Hamburger America, but few good restaurants actually serve a Big Mac. And good luck walking into Enrique Olvera’s Cosme if you really want a Cool Ranch Doritos Locos taco. I mean, if you ever find yourself eating ground beef in a hard shell tortilla that’s covered in nacho dust, you probably know precisely where you are and how many White Claws you’ve had with your old college buddies.
Sometimes, Taco Bell or McDonald’s is the treat you need. But I don’t ever feel like Chipotle is a treat. The chain evokes boring office bowl lunches of yesteryear, back when we all had to be present at the corporate headquarters five days a week. And I’m not sure how the pricey chain stands out in a city — or a country — with so much amazing Mexican or Tex Mex food. Chipotle feels generic.
So let’s get back to my third carne asada experience: At the Port Authority, the first bite of my hard shell taco was inedible. That’s not a phrase I use too often as a critic, but the level of beefy sinew was so intense that I couldn’t physically chew it apart. The rest of the meat was tender (good!), or spongy (woof!), and the flesh was slightly pink (yay!). And then, I detected an unwelcome, livery tang (barf!).
I also tried a $13 barbacoa burrito. It was average and acceptable. And that about sums up Chipotle. It doesn’t boast the sly junk food appeal of Taco Bell, nor can it compete with the deliciousness and bright flavors of our city’s brilliant Mexican scene.
Chipotle wants to be a more responsible type of fast food company, and that’s not a terrible goal. If only eating here didn’t feel a like faux-healthy punishment, along the lines of a parent who argues their kids can’t have Lucky Charms because they should be eating unsweetened Cheerios instead.
The well-paid Chipotle execs clearly want their fans to enjoy the affordable-ish steak they’ve been clamoring for — especially in this era of skyrocketing meat prices — and I respect that ethos. Indeed, it says something about our moment in time that Chipotle offers three distinct beef options — barbacoa, carne asada, and steak — on its otherwise lean menu. Such is the red meat world we’re living in.
That aside, I don’t really recommend any of those beef options. And Chipotle’s carne asada ranks among the worst steaks I’ve tried in my two decades as a professional critic.
Okay, I’m done here.
It’s worth noting that Chipotle has a stated goal of expanding to 7,000 domestic stores across North America.
If you really need some fast food protein, you can now swing by Starbucks and ask for a scoop of cold banana cream foam on your matcha latte. It has 24 grams of protein.
What a world, lol.
Ryan!!
Friendly reminder that The Lo Times is an independent publication. We pay for our meals and we don’t visit restaurants at the request of publicists. For a more loving ode to fast food, see my old chicken nuggets missive over at Eater.
This makes me so sad. I attended the University of Denver from 1993-1994. As a broke grad student I think I ate one of their $3 burritos 5 days a week. And they were so darn good.
I've never been to a Chipotle because the one that opened in my old nabe years ago (Hell's Kitchen) smelled so wrong every time I walked by. I just noticed a week or so ago that they're following me and are opening in my new nabe across town. I was sad when I saw the sign. I now know that I'm correct to be sad that another one of these places is being foisted upon us...