Deep Eats Volume 4

Burrito Edition

Back to our regularly scheduled programming! This month we return to Mexican food. Kind of. 

Ah, burritos. How do I love thee? Always the food I miss the most when I leave California. The paragon of a meal on the go, neatly foil-wrapped for consumption anywhere, always available at a moment’s notice. Equally appropriate for lunch or dinner (or breakfast but that’s a different writeup), takeout or a table, sober at 7pm or drunk at 3am. More than half your daily calories in a convenient, forearm-shaped package, skirting the definition of junk food just widely enough that you don’t feel too guilty about eating one a week. At least I don’t. 

The burrito as we know it is actually more of a Bay Area invention than a Mexican one. Though burritos originated in Ciudad Juárez, those svelte meat-and-tortilla wraps bear little resemblance to the burrito we know and love today. The Mission-style burrito, true to its name, is as Bay as blue jeans, hyphy, and cioppino. The exact birthplace is hotly debated — both El Faro and Taqueria La Cumbre claim the rights — but general consensus is that they came out of San Francisco some time in the 60s. Six decades later, burritos can be found in nearly every major international city, but nobody makes them like California does. And these days, the best Bay Area burritos aren’t in San Francisco. They’re in the East Bay.