It’s 2 a.m. and you’re craving a chalupa, but you want to keep the night going. You’ve snuck a flask into Taco Bell before, but you’ve learned that’s generally not advisable. Soon, you can ditch the flask entirely because Taco Bell is opening 300 to 350 new locations that serve alcohol.
The majority of these new boozy Taco Bells will be located in large urban cities including Detroit, Pittsburg, Boston, and New York. Food & Wine also reports that these “cantina-style stores” will be “designed to express the local vibes with artwork, open kitchens, and digital menu boards.” The new locations are doing away with the traditional drive-thru in an attempt to meet a growing demand for alcohol service. “People would come through the drive-thru and say ‘could you please leave a little off the top.’ And we’d know exactly what they meant,” Taco Bell’s COO Mike Gram explained to Business Insider.
As VinePair reported, Taco Bell’s alcohol service experiment began in cities including Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, and on the Las Vegas strip.
Taco Bell’s alcohol menu is refreshingly diverse, and plays to the appetites of slightly intoxicated, hungry patrons. A freeze wall offers eight flavors, which include Margarita, Cola, Piña Colada, Lemonade, Orange, Baja Blast, Cherry, and Blue Raspberry. Customers can add tequila, rum, vodka, whiskey, and spiced rum to any of the slushy flavors. There are the obvious combinations such as rum in your Piña Colada or whiskey and Cola. However, this is a fast food joint, you may have a strong buzz going, and you may be feeling creative. Maybe try your version of a tequila sunrise by adding tequila to orange or an improvised Tom Collins by substituting vodka for gin with a lemonade slushy.
Whatever your preference, just remember to heed Taco Bell’s advice and live mas.