Secret fast food: 10 items you won't see on the menu

Ten of the strangest, most innovative entrees you won't see on fast food menus – but can get anyway, if you ask. 

7. Cheesy Gordita Crunch (Taco Bell)

Paul Sakuma/AP/File
A Taco Bell restaurant in Mountain View, Calif. Many discontinued Taco Bell menu items, including the Cheesy Gordita Crunch, can still be ordered off-menu in certain locations.

Here’s the not-so-secret secret about Taco Bell: Every entrée shares many of the same ingredients. This means two things: First, like at Starbucks, it is possible to get any listed menu item in any variety you can think of (everything can be easily made vegetarian, for instance). Second, depending on the specific location, most “discontinued” items are usually available off-menu. Case in point: the Cheesy Gordita Crunch.

The Cheesy Gordita Crunch is nothing more than a hard-shell taco wrapped in cheese and a soft Gordita shell (which is a lot like a pita). It’s offered on some Taco Bell menus. But even where it isn’t on display, every Taco Bell restaurant carries all of the necessary ingredients. So if you crave one, most are happy to oblige.  

7 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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