It may be optimistic to put a category ("hybrids") on this post because who knows if there will ever be another post in this category? I kind of feel like I'm naming it "The first annual post on hybrids." :)
I'm not completely a marketer's dream, but I do tend to get drawn in by new things. And I kind of love hybrid foods or flavor combinations that don't seem immediately obvious. McGriddle? Check. Or maybe my love is really for the combination of sweet and savory/salty. Trail mix or just peanut M&Ms with pretzels is one of my favorite snacks. If it's not a ready-made sweet/salty combo, I like to alternate what I eat because I think it brings out the flavor of each item more. But I'm getting off track. The feature of this post isn't even a sweet/salty combo...
So when I heard about the Quesarito from Chipotle, I knew I would probably want to try it someday. In my mind, a quesadilla is a crispy flour shell (made crispy from frying in some oil) with cheese inside. Given my love for crispy flour shells (an alternate title for this post could have been: a list of all of the unhealthy foods I love, sheesh), this sounded amazing as the outside of a burrito. Last Monday, I got one. Chipotle charged me the price of a burrito plus the price of a quesadilla (which seems fair because that is exactly what I was given), which is more than I really like to spend on this type of food, but also much less than the $13 the person who took my order warned it would be. She based her amount on the fact that I would be charged for both a burrito and a quesadilla. I had never ordered a quesadilla from Chipotle before, but I knew my burrito was less than $7, and found it difficult to believe that a quesadilla could possibly cost the same as or more than a burrito, but whatever.
Preparation: They made a full burrito. They made a full quesadilla. They wrapped the burrito in the quesadilla.
As I mentioned, I've never ordered a quesadilla from Chipotle before, but there was nothing crispy about it. There was minimal cheese between the two shells making up the quesadilla. And while this was no doubt healthier for me (if you can call it that at all), I didn't feel I really got to experience what the quesarito has been built up as. Mostly, I had a burrito with three shells. Yikes. Especially yikes for someone who usually gets her burrito in a bowl with the shell on the side and eats about half of the shell.
So maybe a quesarito as described in the link above really is amazing, but the one I had was not. The best thing about it was that it was big enough for three meals. But, really, those meals were just a lot of tortilla shell.
