I spend a lot of time at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater on 26th St. in New York. I’m a writer on a sketch team there and I also work in the box office some nights. It’s located in the basement of a Gristedes grocery store. On the street level there’s a small strip that contains a medical equipment supply store, a McDonalds, and a taco joint called Taco Bandito. This should be heaven right? Tacos right above the place where I spend most of my time. Also, it’s called Taco Bandito which is pretty badass. But in the two years or so since I’ve been hanging around the theater, I’ve never once gone in because I just had a feeling it wasn’t meant to be. The place is a hole in the wall and looks like every other terrible fast food mexican joint. Well I finally decided to cave while working the other night. A coworker had ordered chili nachos for $4 dollars. The chili looked gross but they seemed otherwise edible and for $3 dollars you could get them plain.



I knew I was in for trouble when the first two tacos listed on the menu were bean.



I get that they’re listing them from lowest to highest price but that’s another reason to worry. If price is your major concern, what’s the product going to be like?

I ordered the nachos that had looked pretty good earlier and then I decided on bean and steak for the tacos. I was offered a choice of crispy or soft which I wasn’t expecting so I made a quick decision that turned out to be a mistake. I asked for the bean to be crispy and the steak to be soft. I shouldn’t have ordered crispy at all but if I was only going to make one soft it should have been the bean so it was more like a bean burrito. That was my bad.







The nachos are the thing to get here. They’re nothing special. They taste exactly like something you can make at home with kraft cheese and tortilla chips but for $3 dollars you get a pretty big portion. The steak was surprisingly tender and flavorful. But with a flour tortilla and cheddar cheese and lettuce as toppings it killed it. The crispy bean taco was terrible but that was my own poor decision. In what world would that be a good combination?

Overall, not particularly compelled to return but with it’s proximity to the theater and bars I’m sure I’ll be getting nachos there again eventually.

Taco Bandito
325 8th Ave
New York, NY