How fast-food chains are using design to go local On a recent Saturday night, I invited a couple of friends out for dinner and drinks. We got in a car in Los Angeles, where we all live, and drove 40 miles south to Newport Beach, a pricey oceanfront Orange County city known for its nightlife. We had journeyed this obscene distance across multiple Southern California freeways to try a new restaurant. Its name is Taco Bell Cantina.

Yes, the restaurant is a part of the Taco Bell fast-food chain, which has more than 6,000 outposts in the U.S. serving a variety of Mexican and Mexican-ish foods. Taco Bell Cantina, unlike most of those 6,000, is a ?concept? restaurant, one of about a dozen being rolled out across the country to test out a new permutation of the Taco Bell format. Taco Bell Cantina?s main distinguishing feature" It serves beer. The restaurant is located on a tight footprint on a corner about a block from the beach. There?s no drive-thru or parking lot, and on the Saturday night of my recent visit, the dining area was nearly full with mostly teenagers and 20-somethings. There was a line for the bathroom.
My friends and I ordered several thousand calories worth of the usual Taco Bell food: chalupas, cheesy gorditas, nachos, a quesadilla wrapped around a burrito. On draft, the restaurant had an amber lager from a local brewery rebranded as ?Beach Bell.? It was a novelty on top of the novelty.
Taco Bell Cantina verges on the sleek, with dark wood-topped tab...