Like everyone else normal I had been eagerly anticipating the 11/6 launch date of the Mountain Dew…read moreBaja Blast Pie in the south, maybe elsewhere, but this was mostly for me and the girls in Florida and Texas. I spent a lot of time fantasizing about this flavour, as a normal person does. I unfortunately had bidness to attend to on the other side of town for most of the day so I did not get back into the area until the sun had already gone down. That is prime vampire time, but I still wanted my pie so I risked it even without my necklace of garlick cloves and fashionable hammer and sickle-shaped-stake.
If you didn't know the deets of the Baja blast pie, it was a thing all over TikTok and a fun meme, but an actual real thing you could obtain once it launched. There were a ton of Reddit posts about it, many with mishaps in attempting to obtain it. The guidelines were each store was only going to have about 12 pies so it was very limited, very exclusive, very demure. You had to buy the entire pie, no looseys of a single slice so the $21.64 might have scared off some customers who were not real thugs comin' through on a meme pie.
You could not get it through uber eats or any delivery service. And when I went into this store you could not even get it on the order kiosk, you had to order it only from a real live human behind the register. This makes me feel like I am back in the Roger Rabbit (Roger is my favourite Disney princess) film with the password of "Walt sent me" to get into the speakeasy, this is one of the most exclusive things I have had access to in a while.
I had high hopes for a Baja blast pie. It was very blue-green, sea-like almost on all of the photos and videos I had seen. The frozen Baja blast in the Times Square Taco Bell is one of my favourite NYC treats after a 12+ mile walk since that guy that lights people on fire riding the Subway is still around, so I don't go near the Subway, the thing in the ground or the sammich place. I am a truuuu Winchester so I live for pie, key lime pie especially and this is a near-cousin of key lime pie. I thought there was no way this could be bad. I was wrong.
As I was in the store last night, I used my credit card on the credit card stand furthest from the front door since the government could know about this transaction, it is not one that needed to be in cash munny. I had not used that card in a while. Less than 12 hours later this morning that credit card got hit with a fraud alert, someone had unsuccessfully tried to use that card to buy thousands of dollars of AT&T merch. My credit card company knows me well enough to know that is a purchase I would absolutely not be making. So this store is either intentionally using a skimmer, or they have negligently failed to detect a skimmer in use on their credit card machines. Either way, pretty pathetic store ops to have an active criminal in your employ you shrug off, or you not being able to detect a fraudster in your mix.
The inside of the store was also dirty, sticky, and in need of a good wash. It smelled badly in the store, the ambiance was that of a place you need to rather than want to exit. The pies were individually wrapped but nothing else I saw in the store made me think I would ever come back to this location. The Times Square Taco Bell smells pleasant, so it is nothing inherently bad about Taco Bell in general, just this location which needs to be hosed down and soaped up like a Girls Gone Wild video.
Beyond that, the pie was an absolute disaster. I carried it out of the store gingerly and unboxed like it was a delicate porcelain doll and it was as mangled as you see in the photos.
Gross, disgusting, whilst originally used against KFC almost 20 years ago, the way Taco Bell presents this $21.64 pie that disabled one of my credit cards with fraud, this is the 2025 Christmas-season update edition of "failure pile in a sadness bowl".
Y'all should be ashamed of yourselves. Go wear a dunce cap, sit in the corner, and think about what you have done.
Winchester impulse to acquire pie is still there, but next time I will keep driving past the Taco Bell to have a more authentic pie experience.
I paid $21.64 for this exclusive item only for Mountain Dew fans and all I got was this lousy one star Yelp review.