News that Taco Bell is to open its first restaurant in Ireland under the Applegreen umbrella this summer is almost certain to excite the taste buds – and the queuing instincts – of at least some Irish people who appear eternally enthralled by not entirely healthy fast food born in the USA.
“We are really excited to announce this partnership to launch the iconic Taco Bell brand in Ireland,” said Applegreen’s MD Seamus Stapleton adding that he was “sure Irish consumers will be very excited at the arrival”.
In some respects the Mexican (ish) Taco Bell has been a long time coming to these shores. Globally there are already close to 9,000 outlets with the company making its mark in the UK last year opening restaurants at several of Applegreen’s Welcome Break motorway service areas.
The exact location of Ireland’s first Taco Bell, with its brand of cheap-as chips tacos, quesadillas and nachos and more, has yet to be confirmed, but it seems likely that Mr Stapleton was on the money when he said Irish consumers would be “excited” by the news.
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Excited is the default setting of some fast food diners.
Going right back to 1977, Irish people have been happy to wear their love of American fast food on their sleeves and sometimes – it must be said – on their waistlines.
Almost 50 years ago McDonald’s came to town with the first outlet opening on Dublin’s Grafton St in May 1977 followed shortly after that by a second outlet across the river on O’Connell St.
While the Dublin fervour did not quite match the unbridled delight across Moscow when McDonald’s arrived in 1980 prompting queues stretching for more than a kilometre, it was still pretty popular here.
Almost as soon as the first Big Mac went on to the grill people were loving it with the McDonald’s heady mix of fat and sugar quickly making it a destination for people visiting the city centre rather than a place they might just happen to visit if they were in town shopping.
Some seven years later, buoyed by the success of its first forays into the Irish market, the franchisees who brought the chain to Ireland opened Europe’s first McDonald’s Drive Thru in the Nutgrove Shopping Centre.
It was a huge hit with the car driving denizens of south Dublin and has remained wildly popular for decades.
Just how popular was proved beyond all reasonable doubt in May 2020, when the Nutgrove drive thru through reopened after being closed for almost two months thanks to the first Covid lockdown.
Within seconds of the reopening, there was a traffic jam around the block – literally – with the fast food tailback stretching for almost two kilometres and gardaí called to police the traffic jams.
But while that fast food frenzy can be – sort of – explained by a long pandemic fuelled shutdown, another frenzy remains eternally inexplicable.
In the autumn of 2018 the nation was swept up in the madness of the crowd with tens of thousands of people collectively going nuts over doughnuts.
Not even in their wildest dreams could the Krispy Kreme‘s executives who decided to open the chain’s first Irish outlet in Blanchardstown have imagined that there would be a queue out the door – and all the way through the car park from dawn to dusk.
In fact there wasn’t one queue – there were two queues
There was a regular one for people who wanted to select their own doughnuts and an express queue for people who were happy enough to walk away with a box preselected sweet treats.
The Irish Times joined those queues shortly after opening – in the name of research – and while many people were reluctant to talk, for fear perhaps of being sugar shamed, others were happy to have their say even if what they had to say made absolutely no sense.
One woman in the queue seemed to actively dislike the thing she was queuing for. “I had them in Florida once and they were effin disgusting,” she told this newspaper as she waited patiently in line.
When asked what she was doing in the queue she responded: “Sure what else would I be doing?”
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Literally anything is what we said at the time – and we stand by that today.
But what do we know?
Over the course of its first year trading, around 600,000 people bought close to seven million Krispy Kreme doughnuts making it the brand’s most successful store opening internationally.
The queues are long gone now but the company also has a much deeper footprint here with more than a dozen stores and cabinets selling its sweet treats found in more than 100 other locations
And then there is pizza, one of the most beloved fast foods across the world.
While Dominos Pizza is not without its critics – and certainly the pizza lovers who queue up outside home-grown joints such as Bambinos, Dough Bros, Doom, Sano and Pi would be quick to turn their noses up at it – there is no doubting its popularity here.
One of its outlets – in Tallaght, – was once described as the busiest Domino’s restaurant in the world and the first to hit an annual turnover of $3 million (€2.76 million), making more than 200 pizzas an hour.
That equates to one pizza coming out of its ovens every 20 seconds at peak pizza times.
That is a lot of dough – literally and metaphorically.
Shorecal – once the largest of the Dominos franchises in Ireland and the one-time owners of the Tallaght store – saw its pizza sales jump 4 per cent to €64.4 million, according to its final set of returns filed before it was bought by the parent company last year in a deal worth close to €100 million.
It remains to be seen if Taco Bell will scale such dizzying heights or if Wendy’s which is bringing its own take on takeaways to Ireland next year will have people queuing out the door.
But the smart money suggests we’re not done with our love of all things Americana just yet.
