So on Thursday, drained from a week of chronic back pain and a long day at work, I found myself at Taco Bell for dinner. And I vaguely remembered seeing commercials for new items at Taco Bell, something involving cilantro and lime. I will of course always try any new item at Taco Bell that isn't based around either bacon or lettuce, so I looked.

And I blinked.

And I looked again.

And I blinked again.

The new item is the Cantina Taco. It's your choice of chicken, steak, or... carnitas?! Served on two warm corn tortillas? Topped with cilantro and raw onion and lime? Truly, the apocalypse is nigh, ladies and gentlemen, because Taco Bell, for the first time in almost half a century, Taco Bell is trying... authenticity.

Of course I ordered one of each. They even had a handy combo meal where you could get three of them and a drink. The authenticity thing was confirmed even more when the tray came out - all three tacos were individually wrapped in plain foil, with the steak and chicken ones bearing only a single sticker to identify them.

Unwrapping the foil, I found an actual slice of an actual lime wrapped up with the taco, between two layers of the foil. No, seriously. Actual fucking lime slice. Everything was lining up to be one of the most astonishing, coginitively dissonant meals I've ever had at Taco Bell, and then I took a bite and everything made sense.

See, here's the thing. A classic, basic taco like this works because each of the elements are good. The corn tortillas are good, the meat is good, and the onions, cilantro, and lime are good. Taco bell managed one of these, and that's only because fresh cilantro, fresh lime, and raw onion are three utterly unfuckuppable things.

The corn tortillas were just warmed, not toasted. This made them mushy and doughy, without any of the toasted corn flavor a good tortilla gives you.

The meat. Oh, the meat. If you must try this, go with the chicken. Taco Bell's chicken is mostly innocuous because industrial chicken is mostly innocuous. The meat is a vague template, and the cilantro and lime really shine through. And there are few things in this world that fresh cilantro and lime juice can't brighten up.

The steak is problematic, because Taco Bell steak has a slightly gamy, "off" flavor that only really works if it's stuffed in a burrito full of other strong flavors, or covered in whatever concoction that sauce on the Grilled Steak Taco is. In the Cantina Taco, you can really taste the steak, and you really don't want to be doing that.

And then there were the carnitas. Dear god. They tasted like bad hot dogs. Too salty, fake-smokey, a bit nitritey, and swimming in a much-too-loose sauce reminiscent of canned pork-n-beans without the beans. Here's how strong and how bad these carnitas are - they don't just absorb the cilantro and lime, they assimilate it. They consume it's uniqueness and absorb it into the whole as if they were never there. That's not easy to do.

I don't know why Taco Bell is doing this. Are they feeling the competition from Chipotle? Are they insane? There's no way a place like Taco Bell can actually jump on the fresh food / quality food bandwagon - these tacos prove it. They should embrace their true nature and keep serving an almost ironic parody of American Tex-Mex. It's what they're best at.