We tried Burger King's new tacos, and they looked shockingly different from their promo photos

Irene Jiang / Business Insider

Left: promotional photos showing Burger King's Crispy Taco. Right: a real-life Burger King Crispy Taco.

• Burger King brought back tacos for the first time in a decade on Tuesday.
• We tried the new $1 Crispy Tacos and were thoroughly unimpressed.
• We were also surprised and disappointed by how different the tacos were in real life from how they looked in Burger King's promotional photos.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Burger King brought back its Crispy Tacos on Tuesday, but don't get too excited.

We ate the chain's tacos, and not only were we unimpressed with the taste, we were blown away by how different they looked from their glossy counterparts.

We understand that fast food in real life is usually noticeably different from the advertised version. But usually the actual content and method of preparation is fairly similar between real life and advertisements, even if the presentation is disappointing in real life.

Read more: I ate the bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits from 4 major fast-food chains, and the winner surprised me.

However, if you go into Burger King with the expectation that what you saw in promotional photos for the Crispy Taco will resemble what you'll get in real life, it's likely you'll be disappointed and confused.

In promotional pictures from Burger King, the Crispy Taco has a uniform hard shell stuffed with chunky ground beef, red hot sauce, shredded lettuce, and shredded cheddar cheese.

Burger King

A Burger King promo for the Crispy Taco.

However, what we actually got looked more like this:

Irene Jiang / Business Insider

A Burger King Crispy Taco in real life.

It's not only extremely disappointing, it's also confusing. It's maybe one-fourth as thick as its advertised counterpart. It's colorless, and there's no visible beef. The shell is also warped, and the cheese is melted.

For comparison, after trying Taco Bell's Crunchy Taco this week, we thought it actually looked pretty similar to the way it looks in Taco Bell's official photos.

There's a uniform hard shell, ground beef, shredded lettuce, and shredded cheese. Sure, maybe the lettuce in the photos is way greener than in real life, and maybe the item is slightly smaller in real life. But overall, the promotional photos are a fairly reasonable representation of the real product.

Irene Jiang / Business Insider

Read more: I ate everything at Costco's food court, and there was one item I'd absolutely never order again

Burger King's take isn't necessarily the worst snack food concept. In fact, Jack in the Box sells 554 million similarly made tacos a year - although former Business Insider senior reporter Melia Robinson was less than impressed with those. The chain's advertisements for the item are also notably less idealized than BK's.

We walked into Burger King expecting something classic-hardshell-American-taco-like, and we got something more like a deep-fried pocket of melted cheese and vaguely beefy substance.