I Know Jack

On a nice day in April 1976, my friend Eddie and I cut out early from P.E., hopped on our bicycles and rode a couple of miles to the local Jack in the Box, where we had a late breakfast of Super Tacos and onion rings and probably a Dr Pepper or two. We would’ve gotten back to school almost in time for chem if security hadn’t caught us sneaking back onto campus.

I know this because I still have the detention slip someplace, on which the vice principal carefully inscribed, “Skipped P.E.; went to Jack in the Box for tacos,” an offense that earned at least one of us the nickname “Taco Boy” for the rest of the year in gym.

What I’m trying to say by this, I guess, is that Jack in the Box has always been the kind of place that might reasonably tempt a high school sophomore to ditch class. Wendy’s and Carl’s Jr. were places to go with your mom; Jack’s was cool enough--we hoped but never really believed--to stretch out its hamburger meat with kangaroo.

Where McDonald’s applied the principles of mass production to the genteel hamburger lunch counter, Jack in the Box codified the seedier end of the hamburger spectrum, the greasy beach stands where you could get tacos and fried fish--Moby Jacks!--as well as the standard dripping hamburgers. Its mascot was a slightly sinister clown that could have doubled as a surveillance device. McDonald’s clown is the nonthreatening sort whose prototype can most often be found entertaining rich kids at birthday parties.

Even as a 6-year-old (especially as a 6-year-old), I thought Jack in the Box was something close to paradise. Jack in the Box always had lousy fries but compensated with its racy onion rings, sweet and a little burnt beneath their pebbly brown coat, with a slightly high aftertaste that sometimes persisted for the better part of an hour. The (discontinued) Bonus Jack, oozing Secret Sauce, was a bit of a gut bomb but otherwise superior to its over-sweet competitor, Big Mac. Jack’s Ultimate Cheeseburger, though over-sauced and inappropriately baconed, isn’t so bad.

But although part of the fascination of Jack in the Box lies in the chain’s constant attempts to reinvent itself with the kind of mildly trendy stuff that would never make it past the test-marketing guys at McDonald’s, the sport of sorting the stinkers from the mere duds can get to be tiring.

Jack seems to be over its brief flirtation with grown-up meal replacement, the outmoded chef’s salads and taco meat salads that were always too awkward to eat in your car. Today, the heirs to Jack’s adult-contemporary hits include the awful egg rolls and breaded chicken strips, also the chicken Caesar sandwich, a disc of soggy pita wrapped around a few strips of defrosted chicken, browning wisps of iceberg lettuce and a slippery, reeking substance that I believe is supposed to be Caesar dressing.

The dominant flavor on other dishes--Chicken Supreme, Sourdough Burger, the constant and fruitless attempts at Philly cheese steak--seems based on sticky glops of sourish white cheese. The potato wedges, not completely reprehensible if also not car-friendly, are batter-fried crisp and sopped with a sort of bacon-saturated nacho sauce; they don’t seem a good bet to make it through the year. You’ve had 15 years of warning. Jack in the Box is not good at reproducing Real Food.

Still, I’ve become almost fond of Jack’s “stuffed” jalapeno, a thick coat of onion ring batter encasing a jolt of something like molten Cheez Whiz and the musky vegetable heat of a chile scrap, scraped carefully free of its capsaicin-rich veins. But if you are actually foolish enough during the lunch rush to order the teriyaki chicken bowl, a sugary, nearly inedible dish of flaccid chicken and overcooked broccoli over rice, the headset dudes will hate you. Because yours may be the only order of the day, you will clog up the drive-thru lane, the people behind you will honk until your ears start to hurt and even the manager will give you dirty looks. Jack may be back, but it doesn’t mean he has to be nice.