Millennials and Chipotle go together like peanut butter and jelly.
The fast-casual chain’s emphasis on high-quality ingredients has had a noticeable impact on the quick-service restaurant industry. And despite a slowdown in 2016 due to an e-coli outbreak, people were eagerly waiting for the company to bring the same high-quality, natural outlook to another restaurant concept.
Chipotle unveiled its first fast casual burger restaurant, Tasty Made, located less than an hour from Athens in Lancaster.
Because we love Chipotle as much as any other college students, I, along with Senior Multimedia Producer Patrick Connolly, news writer Bailey Gallion and multimedia staffers Kevin Pan and Alex Penrose road tripped to Lancaster to give it a try.
To our surprise (and displeasure), the experience was just okay. Slightly disappointing. It wasn’t bad by any means, it just wasn’t super good. It lacked the sleek, youthful punch that we love so much about Chipotle.
The best way to describe out Tasty Made is through comparison to other quick-service burger restaurants. At the bottom, you have your cheap fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and Burger King. At the top, you have the more expensive fast casual joints like Five Guys that offer higher-quality burgers at a higher price point. Smack dab in the middle is Tasty Made, in terms of both pricing and food quality.
The menu is about as classic as it gets: Burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Three things, that’s it. You can get a single or a double, and the signature Tasty Made burger comes with cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickles and “tasty bacon sauce.” A single will run you $4.25, while the double is $6.25.
Patrick and I both purchased doubles, while the other staffers opted for single-patty burgers.
The burgers, while generally tasty, had some structural flaws. In a risky deviation from normal burger prep techniques, Tasty Made put all of their toppings below the burger patty, creating a rather unpleasant, drippy mess. Also, the cheese on the burger was not melted in the slightest, and while this is common in some fast food and fast-casual burgers, melting it would’ve made all the difference. I’ll take a gooey cheeseburger with hot, melty American cheese over a burger with a square piece of cheese slapped on top any day.
The fries received mixed reviews. Kevin, Alex, and I thought they were alright. They were seasoned correctly, but they were a bit limp. Bailey was particularly critical of the fries, which, in her own words, were “more like potato noodles than french fries.” Instead of ketchup, we opted to dip the fries in the aptly-named Tasty Bacon sauce, which we enjoyed very much. It was tangy, smoky, and well worth the 50 cents extra we paid for a side of it.
Besides the sauce, the general consensus was that the stars of the meals were the milkshakes. While the classic flavors — chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla — are available, some of us opted for the Buckeye-flavored shake, which we found to be a delicious blend of chocolate-and-peanut-buttery goodness that tasted similar to a peanut butter cup, but with a thick and smooth texture. A Buckeye milkshake in the Buckeye state? How could you go wrong?
The atmosphere, while clean, was pretty drab. It seemed like they were going for a modern take on a '50s diner, but hasn’t that been already been done before with Five Guys and Steak ‘n’ Shake? It didn’t really set itself apart from the competition. It’s also worth noting that the back of the receipt paper is the same as Chipotle’s, which is a nice little nod to its parent company, but kind of made us wish we were eating there instead.
On the other hand, the staff was extremely friendly, and service was prompt. We enjoyed chatting with one of the workers about the restaurant’s first few months, and we even heard people have driven from as far as Illinois to give Tasty Made a try.
If you’re driving through Lancaster, it’s definitely worth checking out, simply because it’s Chipotle’s burger place, and Ohioans, for the most part, are the only ones who’ve had the opportunity to try it. Was it worth the 40 minute drive from Athens? Honestly, probably not. For what we paid, it was fine. But it’s not spectacular.
As long as they keep their prices low to compete with fast-food restaurants, then Tasty Made definitely has a chance to be successful. On the other hand, it’s missing that fresh, organic feeling that people love about Chipotle. To be fair, it is a burger restaurant, so “fresh” and “organic” probably isn’t what people are looking for, but Five Guys seemed to capture that quality in their food. For the time being, we’ll wait and see what happens with Tasty Made.
