Each 25-pound batch takes roughly three hours to cook. Black beans and dried pintos, grown in Washington, go on the stove first in enormous soup pots. The store in suburban Kirkland opens at 10am the morning crew flips on the lights at 7. “Sometimes you kind of race yourself,” she says, to see if she can fill an entire hotel pan with tidy cylinders in 10 minutes or less. When Kristine Hepburn works the morning shift at Taco Time’s Rose Hill location, her favorite prep task involves hand-rolling crisp burritos. Taco Time’s menu constitutes “this weird Mexican, Tex-Mex, Pacific Northwest thing.”

“It’s obviously a complete bastardization of Mexican food,” he says. He has a barista’s precise palate and prefers Taco Time over southern California’s iconic In-N-Out-the hottest of takes when talking regional fast food. Lim is a longtime coffee professional who owns Watson’s Counter in Ballard. Months after Dear Elite’s first season, Lim recalls his own foundational Taco Time experiences-how his dad would take him to the Canyon Park location after soccer games for a crisp burrito or two. According to family legend, customers didn’t know how to pronounce their signature menu item, ordering them as “tay-cos.” debuted the first Taco Time Northwest here in White Center. A white guy named Glen Bell founded that chain in a Los Angeles suburb in 1962-the same year a white guy named Frank Tonkin Sr. Not to mention Del Tacos, Blue Water Taco Grills, and the ultimate in soulless Mexican food, Taco Bell. For newcomers, these restaurants fade into a landscape crowded with other drive-thrus. But Taco Time does little to stand out to folks who aren’t already familiar. Even ate at the Interbay one with a friend who’s a diehard fan. Sure, I drove past the gaudy mirrored location in Wallingford. I arrived in Seattle 13 years ago, and even as a food writer, the chain never hit my radar as anything noteworthy. Hardly any customer exits the drive-thru without a paper bag of well-seasoned tater tots most people still call by their old, culturally dubious name, Mexi-Fries. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of Mexican food will point out it’s really a pumped-up flauta. Or the “crisp burrito” that resembles a deep-fried cigar. This meal could include a soft taco so gargantuan it might as well be a burrito. Devotees look at the enormous menu not with overwhelm, but with conviction that they have, over the years, honed their ideal custom order. If you grew up here, chances are you’d defend its curious menu of tacos with ranch dressing and slender fried burritos to the death. The stylized cactus logo of Taco Time Northwest stands, green arms upstretched, at 77 locations up and down Western Washington. Taco Time employees each spend about three hours in the morning doing the sort of actual cooking you don’t expect in restaurants like this.

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