Whither the Choco Taco?

Suerte's Chocotaco (Image via Suerte)

When Klondike announced earlier in the week that it had discontinued its iconic Choco Taco, social media was ablaze with outrage. But let's be honest: When was the last time you actually had a Klondike Choco Taco?

(It’s entirely possible that one of my many late-night undergrad trips through the Taco Bell drive-through included a Choco Taco. We’ll never know. But one has certainly not passed these lips in the intervening years.)

Here’s a secret: The concept of Klondike’s Choco Taco is god-tier. The execution of Klondike’s Choco Taco is mid. The waffle cone shell is soggy. The fudge-swirled vanilla ice cream is thin and wants more chocolate. It’s fine, but not great.

And now it’s gone. (For now, at least.) In the meantime, there’s a gap in the market for taco-shaped ice cream treats. Lucky for us all, there's been a Chocotaco on the dessert menu at Suerte since 2020. For 12 bucks you can treat yourself to pastry chef Derrick Flynn’s elevated interpretation of the ice cream truck treat.

"I genuinely enjoy putting a lot of effort into a dessert only to have it trigger a very low-brow, nostalgic memory in our guests," says Flynn. "I originally planned on working on the Chocotaco when I first started at Suerte, but some other chefs had been doing it so it lost a bit of its excitement for Fermín and I. But during quarantine, the entirety of our management team had been cooking meals for our staff and making suadero kits. So there was a lot of time to think and muse about things we had been wanting to work on. Nothing worse than having a backlog of ideas that you just need to work on to clear some space in your brain. One evening I had been watching a video of Alex Stupak making a masa tuile for a dessert at Empellon, no measurements, just spouted off ingredients. That was when the lightbulb went off again. I went into work the next day and jokingly told Fermín it was finally gonna happen. I spent a week working on it and the rest is history."

The shell is composed of chocolate masa, basically a chocolate corn tortilla, thin and crisp. It’s filled with a peanut caramel and cinnamon semifreddo, and the whole shebang is topped with chocolate and roasted peanuts. The chocolate masa shell adds a savory note that complements the sweet caramel and semifreddo. The roasted peanuts topping the dessert are generous and want to be free (eat over your plate, babes; you don’t want to make a mess).

And y’all, this baby is rich – share-it-with-your-date/bestie rich. Way more satisfying and memorable than some mass-produced confection that comes in a plastic wrapper.

We’re keeping an eye out for how other local innovators take advantage of the opportunity to fill the Choco Taco-shaped hole in our dessert-loving hearts. Stay tuned!