The Big Carl must be doing pretty well (it’s certainly, consistently one of the top search terms that brings people to this site), because this officially makes it a trend — the Big Mac rip-off is the new mini-burger. Not literally; we’re talking trendwise. Tiny burgers were the hot new item on menus everywhere earlier in the year, but now, the double cheeseburger with a bun in the middle seems to be heating up, as Jack in the Box presents the awkwardly named “Bonus Jack.”

(See, to me that name makes me think of when you have a porno that’s so good you can go, uh, two straight rounds with it, the jack and the bonus jack. And now you, dear reader, have lost your appetite. I can tell. That might be a good thing, because I looked at the nutritional information on JITB’s website, and damn, it’s as bad as you think for most items.)

(Also, the abbreviation for Bonus Jack is BJ. But you were ahead of me on that one, right?)

The Bonus Jack combo is reasonably priced at $4, though you always gotta upsize at Jack’s, either to curly fries or stuffed jalapenos, a.k.a. LYT’s favorite fast food item ever that will probably induce a coronary one day. And the buns are cut-rate, in that they do not come bearing sesame seeds. But if you happen to hate sesame seeds and love this kind of burger, then oh snap, Jack has just won you away from Mickey D’s.

The Bonus Jack has one up on the Big Carl in the lettuce department. Shredded lettuce is far less unwieldy in a burger than the big chunk of iceberg Carl’s puts on theirs. There is, in the end, less lettuce on the Bonus Jack overall, but if you really love lettuce, you shouldn’t be eating fast food in the first place. Now, I know that picture above shows a big leaf, but I’m telling you, I got mine shredded. That picture above also shows pickles, which tells me that compared to what I had, the picture LIES! But even if the lettuce does come in a big green leaf, like on some other JITB sandwiches, it’s still better than the Big Carl’s Big Crunchy Chunk O’Leaves. I have no comment on the pickles.

The true bonus on this sandwich is more cheese. Though it all melts together, I’m fairly sure this has four slices rather than two. It feels like four, anyway.

The meat? It can stand shoulder to shoulder with Jack’s bigger burgers. Ever since they inadvertently poisoned customers with e. coli back in the early ’90s, Jack has enforced more stringent meat quality standards than most other burger joints, and it has paid off. This may be a bargain-item burger, but the meat tastes good.

The only area in which the burger disappoints is the sauce. Look at that picture above. The sauce is orange. Based on previous Jack offerings, you’d expect that orange = chipotle, because that’s usually how the chain rolls, as seen on their pita snacks and chicken ciabatta. Southwest chains represent, y’all. But no. This orange sauce tastes like a blend of ketchup and mustard, which makes me think they maybe should have just put ketchup and mustard on it in the first place, both of which they already have at hand, rather than inventing a new merged sauce that has to ship separately. Or just gone with chipotle.

However, most Jack in the Boxes are very generous with side sauces, vis-a-vis not charging you extra for any kind you want. So you can drown out the flavor of sauce you don’t care about for sauce you do with relative ease. You saucy lad, you.

Too bad the Bonus Jack is only available for a limited time. It’s probably less hard on my arteries than the Ultimate Cheeseburger.

The long-held truism about El Pollo Loco is that you should never order anything there other than the charbroiled pieces of chicken that are their specialty. Seriously, for a nominally Mexican place — nominally in that “pollo” and “loco” are Spanish words, and Spanish is the language many Mexicans speak — their burritos are an abominable misuse of the concept. The BRC (bean, rice, cheese) exists, I am convinced, solely so that chintzy employers can get cheap craft services en masse. Indeed the only occasions in the past decade that I have eaten a BRC were (a) at OC Weekly staff meetings, and (b) on the set of VIOLENT BLUE. In both cases the only alternative was eating nothing at all, an option that ultimately might have been more preferable.

As for the classic chicken burrito, even back when I was on minimum wage at the Sunset 5, I knew it was worth shelling out the additional coin to embellish it with extra cheese and guacamole, thus rendering it edible.

So now they’ve decided to try their hand at hot wings. It’s something they should be good at – their chicken wings are generally good, and they also know spicy — the spicy quesadilla at El Pollo is probably the hottest basic fast-food item I’ve ever eaten, save those chicken jalapeno burritos Taco Bell had for a very limited time two years ago. Not that Taco Bell tried hard, or anything — filling something with jalapeno slices is cheap and easy.

Anyway, it seems that the truism still holds. The Buffaloco wings, which are offered primarily as part of a $5 five-piece deal that includes fries, are a failure.

I’ll give them credit for one thing — unlike the hot wings at KFC, which are huge and undoubtedly comes from chicken on ‘roids and hormones, these wings are anemic things, about half the size of the ones you see in the official advertising picture above. And of the five I got, four were lower-wings rather than drumettes, a karmic payback for all those places that only do drumettes. I happen to be a lower-wing dude, myself.

And the “Buffaloco” sauce — really? This was the best you could do, o crazy chickenmeisters? The jalapeno sauce that comes in ketchup-like packets would have been better than this, which tastes like barbecue sauce mixed with Tabasco. Buffalo sauce should not be sweet; almost by definition, it has to be sour. And yes, I’m sure I didn’t get the barbecue option, which I’m fairly certain is the usual EPL barbecue sauce (good for what it is).

I will add that it’s been nigh on ten years since I’ve had fries at El Pollo, but I remember them being very distinctive, big and browned with an almost baked flavor. These fries were tiny and tasty, an improvement while being somewhat more generic, with less personality.

Mitigating this visit was a chicken soft taco I ordered that was so overloaded with filling and salsa that it nearly collapsed in my hands. Good taco. So maybe the exception that proves the rule.

Don’t order the Buffaloco. Get regular wings, and put the jalapeno sauce on them. Better plan

Some of you may remember — actually, I hope most of you will, or else you might have a brain disorder — about two years ago when Taco Bell revamped its value menu with a bunch of new items. One of them was the double beef and cheese burrito, made with ground beef and nacho cheese, sold for 89 cents with the idea being that it was competing with basic cheeseburgers sold elsewhere for a similar price. And it had double the beef of a regular beef burrito!

What you may not have noticed is that it recently, quietly disappeared from the bargain menu. And shortly thereafter, these showed up:

The same burrito, with one or two added things from the existing menu, justifying a price hike. I’d love to tell you how much of a price hike, but Taco Bell’s infuriating website only gives prices for the value menu, and not regular items…as far as I can tell. Search for yourself to try and prove me wrong if you wish. My recollection is that these are about 50 cents more. And yet they’re not better.

Half a pound of food sounds like a lot. A half-pound burger is big, right? Yeah, but that half-pound is just the meat in the burger. These burritos weigh half a pound TOTAL. They aren’t actually that big for burritos, even fast-food ones. Think about Del Taco’s half-pound bean and cheese burrito. It only feels big because there’s only so much bean paste a guy can eat at once.

I’ve now tried two of these three new ones — the combo burrito seemed superfluous, since it’s just a slightly bigger version of a beef and bean burrito, and anyone who has eaten at Taco Bell in the history of the chain can easily imagine what it will taste like.

So I’ve had the nacho crunch burrito and the cheesy potato burrito, and both have the same major deficiency – not enough nacho cheese. This may be in part because I don’t like sour cream, and order the burritos without it. But in doing so, the final product becomes too dry.

Especially the potato one, good lord. It’s been years since I’ve had a Taco bell breakfast burrito, but I recall it having tater tots inside. I was hoping they still used them, but like everything else at Taco Bell over the years, the chain is cheaping out. These are just square cuts of frozen potato covered in seasoned salt. because the beef and the nacho sauce are not salty enough, apparently. And like your average pre-frozen steak fries, they have a texture like ashes and sand. And they appear to be the primary ingredient, at least in the one I had.

Mileage may vary, a lot…because looking at the picture, I see that the nacho crunch burrito looks to have tomatoes in it. Mine didn’t. So maybe reviewing it isn’t totally fair, but service is a part of the deal. Tomatoes would have added some needed texture and moistness. The red tortilla strips are the opposite of something for nothing — nothing for something. A tasteless, pointless addition to any menu item except as a means to pointing out that something has a lot of ingredients.

I ordered a volcano burrito not long ago and they didn’t put any volcano sauce in it. It occurs to me that overall, the Bell has not been exceedingly competent lately in the training of employees. But at least they don’t use those oval, easy-to-drop trays any more.

I can’t recommend these burritos, mainly because I think Taco Bell’s ground beef is so cheap and nasty that it needs to be consumed with ingredients that sufficiently disguise the flavor…like volcano sauce. But if they want to put together a chicken burrito with nacho cheese — and given that in time, Taco Bell inevitably comes up with every possible combination of its core ingredients, this is an inevitability — I’ll be all for that.