A crunchwrap at Hen Home is made with toum, soujouk, and garlic potatoes.
Picture: Hugo Yu
It’s a wet Wednesday afternoon and Eugene Cleghorn, the chef and proprietor of Tremendous Burrito, is sitting at a Taco Bell close to the Seaport, contemplating his Crunchwrap Supreme. The San Francisco native admits he has an advanced relationship with the combination of beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato, bitter cream, and a crisp corn-tostada spherical, all enveloped in a smooth flour tortilla that’s wrapped up like a hexagon and griddled. After he opened his Mission-style burrito chain’s first brick-and-mortar retailer within the Rockaways in 2020 and started providing specials to outlive winter lulls, dozens of consumers peppered his Instagram account with requests to make a Crunchwrap dupe. “I actually didn’t wish to do a Taco Bell factor,” he says. “I’m attempting to make this meals that’s very valuable to me and who I’m.” Cleghorn, a self-described folks pleaser, managed to disregard and delete the pleading messages for eight months earlier than lastly caving. “I used to be like, what, fuck it — give the folks what they need.”
The day Tremendous Burrito debuted the Dankwrap, the kitchen was slammed. It was the day’s greatest vendor, and tickets rang in till closing. “All of us form of had a deer-in-the-headlights look, as a result of we have been on this shit all day,” Cleghorn recalled. “There’s like a magic high quality to this dish that draws lots of eyeballs and garners a ton of pleasure.”
The unique Crunchwrap Supreme is 20 years outdated, having made its debut at Taco Bell in 2005. Lois Carson, a product developer for Taco Bell, had spent greater than a decade attempting to invent one thing that drivers might eat comfortably with one hand. “To start with, there have been individuals who didn’t like the concept,” she advised The New Yorker in 2023. “However someplace in my thoughts I knew.” Throughout its first six weeks, Taco Bell reportedly bought 51 million Crunchwraps. It was hardly a flash within the pan; final 12 months the chain bought 100 million Crunchwraps. As cooks have recently embraced and reengineered any and each childhood staple they will discover — char-siu McRibs, caviar nuggets, high-end Cosmic Brownies — the Crunchwrap, a fixture of Little League video games and highway journeys, is a pure match for the ever-expanding “haute nostalgia” canon. Because the Occasions famous just lately, cooks like Cleghorn have taken the essential thought and run with it. And now, the concept of a crunch-filled hexagonal package deal has now been reconfigured, reimagined, and rebranded so many various ways in which the dish has shed its picture as merely fast-food customary. “Like communism, the concept of the Crunchwrap is gorgeous and great,” the chef Fernando Strohmeyer says. “All of it is determined by how you employ it.”
“It’s a masterpiece. It’s good,” provides Strohmeyer, who put a “Crisp Wrap Final” on the menu at I Like Meals, his meals counter inside a Ridgewood bar, regardless of by no means having eaten the unique Taco Bell Crunchwrap. He watched a handful of YouTube tutorials whereas stoned on the sofa one night throughout lockdown and made a vegan model the subsequent day for the workers meal. The kitchen workers advised him they wanted to make it a menu merchandise instantly. “I used to be like, ‘We’ll throw it on there as a goof,’ and it simply took off,” he says. (He now provides a model made with pernil, which one common described to me mid-bite as “fairly night time and day” from the Taco Bell model, plus a Buffalo-chicken variant on his “secret menu.”)
“Crucial be aware of all is nostalgia and luxury, and also you’re getting each of these,” says Farideh Sadeghin, a author and recipe developer who made a DIY Crunchwrap for Vice’s Munchies in early 2020. The free parameters of what even constitutes a “Crunchwrap” additionally implies that so long as cooks get the feel proper, they’ve a large berth to combine in no matter components they need whereas staying true to the spirit of the unique. “I did a pizza Crunchwrap earlier than. I’m seeing Caesar Crunchwrap, with a Parmesan crisp because the crunch in it,” Sadeghin says. “You’ll be able to have enjoyable with the flavors, and other people see it on a menu and so they’re like, ‘Wow, that is, like, so significantly better than Taco Bell.’”
Antony Nassif confirmed off this inventive licensing at his Lebanese East Village restaurant, Hen Home, the place his Crunchwrap is like Taco Bell’s filtered via the Fertile Crescent then tripled the dimensions. He begins with the flatbread wrap referred to as markouk, which is piled on with smashed garlic potatoes, toum, soujouk, cheese curds, pita crisps, and lamb-shoulder shawarma, plus a za’atar slaw and a bathe of sauces that features tahini and pomegranate molasses. “It feeds two to 4 folks,” Nassif says. “This one man as soon as ate one at lunchtime and he fell asleep within the restaurant and was late for work.”
The one draw back to the Crunchwrap is that each one the wrapping and grilling required to make a suped-up model can actually gradual a kitchen down. Nassif says that getting hit with back-to-back Crunchwrap orders will take up the entire station, and he even took it off the menu for a time for logistical causes. That, nevertheless, “was a really large mistake,” he says, “as a result of now we’re pissing everyone off that noticed it on-line and may’t have one.” Jackie Carnesi bumped into related technical issues when she launched a Crunchwrap on the Tex-Mex-ified Kellogg’s Diner for a “whimsical” Cinco de Mayo specials menu that additionally included discoteca fries and hard-shell tacos. (“If perhaps everyone knew what the Battle of Puebla was, we’d be doing extra severe Mexican meals, however they don’t, so we’re doing Crunchwraps,” she says.) Her boss, the diner’s proprietor, had by no means had one and, after consuming Carnesi’s — filled with scrambled eggs, refried beans, queso, bacon, and pico de gallo — was a direct convert. He, too, requested how they may do a model for the everlasting menu. “I used to be like, ‘I don’t wish to, as a result of they’re a ache within the ass,’” she says. “We made like 30 for Cinco de Mayo and chilled them, after which we have been reheating them. Perhaps we’d do a barely much less crunchy wrap. Perhaps that’s what we’d name it.”
No matter it’s referred to as — Crisp Wrap Final, Cwunch Wap Supweme (because the halal model bought at Blue Hour in Brooklyn is thought) — the Crunchwrap is about to transcend borders again to Mexico. When Cariñito finishes its six-month Greenwich Village pop-up serving tacos mashing up Mexican and Southeast Asian components, Joaquín de la Torre says he and his companions plan to take the “Crunchywrap” they concocted right here again to their unique restaurant in Mexico Metropolis. Their interpretation — Szechuan-spiced floor beef and pork, Oaxacan cheese and fermented beans, all tucked inside Mexican-made flour tortillas and topped with an avocado slaw — is “a dialogue with New York, about us doing one thing that’s relatable to you, however new, with part of Mexico Metropolis,” de la Torre says. Taco Bell itself has failed a number of occasions in its makes an attempt to open in Mexico (“It’s like bringing ice to the Arctic,” one cultural critic advised the Related Press in 2007), however that isn’t deterring the staff at Cariñito. “We don’t do conventional tacos,” de la Torre says. “We wish to do one thing extra.”
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For those who desire to learn in print, you may as well discover this text within the June 30, 2025, concern of
New York Journal.
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For those who desire to learn in print, you may as well discover this text within the June 30, 2025, concern of
New York Journal.