Steve Mendoza didn’t quite know what to make of the Waffle Taco when he walked into Taco Bell on Thursday morning. 

He’d seen the ads. And he was no stranger to the world of fast food breakfast. As a Bay Area laborer he’s had to eat on the go more than even he wants to admit and considers himself somewhat of an expert. 

But a waffle as a taco shell? And Taco Bell serving breakfast? It was all a little bit too much for him to wrap his head around as shuffled through the parking lot and towards the front door, rained out from his jobsite and essentially getting the rare chance to sleep in on a weekday and enjoy breakfast on his own terms. 

Twenty minutes later he emerged with an ear-to-ear smile. 

“It was good,” he said. “I can see what all the hype was about. I could definitely eat that every morning for a week.”

An expanded morning menu has given the longtime marketing geniuses at one of America’s preeminent fast-food chains plenty to work with as they try to muscle in on a market that has long been dominated by the likes of McDonald’s. McDonald’s shook up their own offerings recently by adding a host of $1 items. 

The company that awarded everybody in the country a free Doritos Locos taco after San Francisco Giant Angel Pagan stole a base in the eighth inning of Game 2 of the 2012 World Series has been on a full-on media blitz surrounding their newest offering. 

Company President Brian Niccol took to the Internet Thursday morning to answer questions on popular chatboard Reddit – noting that he’d love to add “cerveza” to the menu as a dream item and adding that the item would appear on menus in Canada as soon as the country “took Justin Bieber back.”

He also talked a little bit about the company’s food. 

While an online bulletin chat wasn’t enough to get Sara Whitney out to sample the new breakfast concoction, her own curiosities were. And like most who sampled it on Thursday morning, she said that it wasn’t disappointing. 

“It was definitely strange – the idea of turning a waffle into a taco is something that’s so basic but yet nobody had ever thought of it,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll try one again. My friends told me there was no way they’d eat one, so I’ll have to report back that it’s not all that bad.”