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How the Crunchwrap Became Bigger Than Taco Bell
Photo: Hugo Yu/
It’s a rainy Wednesday afternoon and Eugene Cleghorn, the chef and owner of Super Burrito, is sitting at a Taco Bell near the Seaport, considering his Crunchwrap Supreme. The San Francisco native admits he has a complicated relationship with the mix of beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato, sour cream, and a crisp corn-tostada round, all enveloped in a soft flour tortilla that’s wrapped up like a hexagon and griddled. After he opened his Mission-style burrito chain’s first brick-and-mortar store in the Rockaways in 2020 and began offering specials to survive winter lulls, dozens of customers peppered his Instagram account with requests to make a Crunchwrap dupe. “I really didn’t want to do a Taco Bell thing,” he says. “I’m trying to make this food that’s very precious to me and who I am.” Cleghorn, a self-described people pleaser, managed to ignore and delete the pleading messages for eight months before finally caving. “I was like, You know what, fuck it — give the people what they want.”
The day Super Burrito debuted the Dankwrap, the kitchen was slammed. It was the day’s best seller, and tickets rang in until closing. “We all kind of had a deer-in-the-headlights look, because we were in this shit all day,” Cleghorn recalled. “There’s like a magic quality to this dish that attracts a lot of eyeballs and garners a ton of excitement.”
The original Crunchwrap Supreme is 20 years old, having made its debut at Taco Bell in 2005. Lois Carson, a product developer for Taco Bell, had spent more than a decade trying to invent something that drivers could eat comfortably with one hand. “In the beginning, there were people who didn’t like the idea,” she told The New Yorker in 2023. “But somewhere in my mind I knew.” During its first six weeks, Taco Bell reportedly sold 51 million Crunchwraps. It was hardly a flash in the pan; last year the chain sold 100 million Crunchwraps. As chefs have lately embraced and reengineered any and every childhood staple they can find — char-siu McRibs, caviar nuggets, high-end Cosmic Brownies — the Crunchwrap, a fixture of Little League games and road trips, is a natural fit for the ever-expanding “haute nostalgia” canon. As the Times noted recently, chefs like Cleghorn have taken the basic idea and run with it. And now, the idea of a crunch-filled hexagonal package has now been reconfigured, reimagined, and rebranded so many different ways that the dish has shed its image as merely fast-food standard. “Like communism, the idea of the Crunchwrap is beautiful and wonderful,” the chef Fernando Strohmeyer says. “It all depends on how you use it.”
“It’s a masterpiece. It’s perfect,” adds Strohmeyer, who put a “Crisp Wrap Ultimate” on the menu at I Like Food, his food counter inside a Ridgewood bar, despite never having eaten the original Taco Bell Crunchwrap. He watched a handful of YouTube tutorials while stoned on the couch one evening during lockdown and made a vegan version the next day for the staff meal. The kitchen staff told him they needed to make it a menu item immediately. “I was like, ‘We’ll throw it on there as a goof,’ and it just took off,” he says. (He now offers a version made with pernil, which one regular described to me mid-bite as “pretty night and day” from the Taco Bell version, plus a Buffalo-chicken variant on his “secret menu.”)
“The most important note of all is nostalgia and comfort, and you’re getting both of those,” says Farideh Sadeghin, a writer and recipe developer who made a DIY Crunchwrap for Vice’s Munchies in early 2020. The loose parameters of what even constitutes a “Crunchwrap” also means that as long as chefs get the texture right, they have a wide berth to mix in whatever ingredients they want while staying true to the spirit of the original. “I did a pizza Crunchwrap before. I’m seeing Caesar Crunchwrap, with a Parmesan crisp as the crunch in it,” Sadeghin says. “You can have fun with the flavors, and people see it on a menu and they’re like, ‘Wow, this is, like, so much better than Taco Bell.’”
Antony Nassif showed off this creative licensing at his Lebanese East Village restaurant, Hen House, where his Crunchwrap is like Taco Bell’s filtered through the Fertile Crescent then tripled the size. He starts with the flatbread wrap called 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 shower of sauces that includes tahini and pomegranate molasses. “It feeds two to four people,” Nassif says. “This one guy once ate one at lunchtime and he fell asleep in the restaurant and was late for work.”
The only downside to the Crunchwrap is that all the wrapping and grilling required to make a suped-up version can really slow a kitchen down. Nassif says that getting hit with back-to-back Crunchwrap orders will take up the whole station, and he even took it off the menu for a time for logistical reasons. That, however, “was a very big mistake,” he says, “because now we’re pissing everybody off that saw it online and can’t have one.” Jackie Carnesi ran into similar technical problems when she introduced a Crunchwrap at the Tex-Mex-ified Kellogg’s Diner for a “whimsical” Cinco de Mayo specials menu that also included discoteca fries and hard-shell tacos. (“If maybe everybody knew what the Battle of Puebla was, we’d be doing more serious Mexican food, but they don’t, so we’re doing Crunchwraps,” she says.) Her boss, the diner’s owner, had never had one and, after eating Carnesi’s — stuffed with scrambled eggs, refried beans, queso, bacon, and pico de gallo — was an immediate convert. He, too, asked how they could do a version for the permanent menu. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to, because they are a pain in the ass,’” she says. “We made like 30 for Cinco de Mayo and chilled them, and then we were reheating them. Maybe we’d do a slightly less crunchy wrap. Maybe that’s what we’d call it.”
Whatever it is called — Crisp Wrap Ultimate, Cwunch Wap Supweme (as the halal version sold at Blue Hour in Brooklyn is known) — the Crunchwrap is about to transcend borders back to Mexico. When Cariñito finishes its six-month Greenwich Village pop-up serving tacos mashing up Mexican and Southeast Asian ingredients, Joaquín de la Torre says he and his partners plan to take the “Crunchywrap” they concocted here back to their original restaurant in Mexico City. Their interpretation — Szechuan-spiced ground beef and pork, Oaxacan cheese and fermented beans, all tucked inside Mexican-made flour tortillas and crowned with an avocado slaw — is “a dialogue with New York, about us doing something that is relatable to you, but new, with a part of Mexico City,” de la Torre says. Taco Bell itself has failed multiple times in its attempts to open in Mexico (“It’s like bringing ice to the Arctic,” one cultural critic told the Associated Press in 2007), but that isn’t deterring the team at Cariñito. “We don’t do traditional tacos,” de la Torre says. “We want to do something more.”
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