One Two Three Four Five

I went to La Bamba Tacqueria, 12345 San Pablo Ave., Richmond (seriously, that's the address) and earned myself half a red neck along the way. I suppose I'll have to roll up my left t-shirt sleeve to hold a pack of Marlboros until it subsides.

I wanted to stop at the first place north of Target, but the first two were closed. I think La Bamba's excellence may have played a role in that. Anyway, I hadn't eaten that day, so I showed up with one hell of an appetite. As you first walk in, you might suspect that you've stumbled upon a really pitiful joint; there's a barely-decorated room with no seating and a little window to the kitchen. But there's no cash register near that window and there's a door at the back of that room and *b00m!* you're in a really awesome place. Check out the kitchen






















and the mirrors on the back wall.





















I didn't have the means to capture it, but they also have Spanish-language radio at pretty thumping levels, at least by restaurant standards, to contribute to the atmosphere.

This place is cheap, too. I was parched from my walk, so my agua fresca brought the bill from $4.60 for the burrito to $6.60. The chips looked like they came from a bag, if just because of the curvature (how do factories get chips to curl so much, anyway?), but a good bag. The salsa fresca was indeed very fresh and a little more picante than usual. I think, and I'm just going by color here, that the peppers they used weren't jalapeños, but rather green chiles. Yum.







































The burrito bled the moment I stuck my knife into it. The tortilla was nicely freckled with grill marks, the rice and beans tasty, but boy did they do a number on the meat. The recipies I've seen for carnitas require baking a large quantity of meat in the sauce. I imagine (and I really have to find out for myself) that this results in a crispy layer on top and a juicy layer beneath. The best example of this phenomenon I've tasted is still La Casa Latina's. Here at La Bamba, I suspect the use of a shallower pan, as all the meat was crispy. It's really good at first, but your jaw may get fatigued. Don't give up too early, though, as there's still enough juice to make the bottom of the burrito incredible and moist. And bravo to the burrito-folder, as not a drop escaped from the thing when I took it out of the foil.

World Cup Burrito Challenge

Letterman just had a bit where Rupert G, in the spirit of the World Cup, challenges a guy to eat a burrito without using his hands. There was a significant gap in the footage, pretty much everything between the first bite and the last, so I'm not sure if it happened or not. Watch this space for a thoroughly documented attempt at this feat.

On Covers and Books

Nice sign, no? It's a decent-looking place inside, too. The walls are a festive-but-tasteful orange, there's a fountain, a flat screen television, and a bunch of piñatas and jolly skeleton sculptures.
But the fact that their spokesentity has neither a tongue nor a digestive tract tells you all you need to know about La Calaca Loca, located at 5199 Telegraph Avenue.



























These are La Calaca Loca's condiments. There weren't any squeeze bottles of salsa on my table, so I had to borrow them. That there weren't enough squeeze bottles of salsa doesn't bother me as much as the fact that the salsa was in squeeze bottles. How hard is it to put a tub of salsa in a bigger tub of ice? And then there's the fact that you have to pretty much liquify everything in the blender to get a salsa that will exit the squeeze bottles without incident. On top of that, the salsa didn't leave the squeeze bottles without incident. I couldn't detect anything distinctive about the rojo and went for another squeeze when some chunk of who-knows-what clogged up the bottle. I decided against removing it because this probably happens to a lot of people and they probably react by touching the nozzle with their hands or with the tines of forks that had been in their mouths. Gross. The verde was a little picante, in a good way. You'll notice that I'm only reviewing the salsa and not the chips. Thing is, chips don't come with the burrito at La Calaca Loca. I'd call them cheap bastards for this, but then I'm a cheap bastard and $4.75 is reasonable for a standalone burrito, so it doubled as my salsa vector. I squirted huge puddles of salsa on it so as to make the flavors contained therein overwhelm that of the burrito.






















When I had a salsaless bite, I realized I wasn't missing out on much. The carnitas were dry, chewy and bland. The tortilla, well, it tasted and looked low-fat. Then there were the little bits of aluminum foil on the ends, you can see one on the right. Do these people eat burritos? Don't they understand that a well-constructed burrito is supposed to be able to stand on the end, at least after you're halfway done? They destroyed functionality just so the wrapper might look nicer. Not even the food, just the wrapper.



























At least he's not a Giants fan.

Pico Paco con Ana Poe

Ana and I went to Pico Paco Taqueria, 4911 Telegraph Ave, Oaktown. The plan was to go with Ana and Paco, seen below, but he was out of commission.


























Ana has a Paco connection anyway, as she runs Paco Collars. I hadn't eaten in the whole day, so we got there starved at around 3. Ana wanted an al pastor burrito, but there wasn't one on the menu, so she settled for a super carnitas burrito. I got a regular carnitas burrito. Pico Paco gets the chips and salsa right. We had a number of digital cameras at our disposal and settled on this one, which showcases the most important thing about the chips :


















the individual grains of salt on the surface. This is the hallmark of a proper chip. If it has visible external salt and is reasonably fresh, it's a good chip.


















Note the chunks of green onion in the salsa. These are also key. It shows that some human spend some time manually cutting shit up instead of dumping a bunch of ingredients into a blender and pressing "pulverize." Good salsa. Sweet and tangy. I know I've used those adjectives before, but how many words are there to describe the ideal thin salsa rojo?

With the exception of the two pictures below, Ana took all the photos because mine look, according to her, "like bad porn." I told her I needed to take a picture of her and asked if she would flash the "b"s. She said no, but I could get a picture of her taking a big bite out of a burrito. I was perplexed by her refusal until I realized another possible interpretation of my request and counted myself lucky to have not been kicked in the shins. I meant for her to throw the burrito blog gang sign consisting of two "b"s, which she was happy to do.




















































Boy is my fez red.

If you're a good detective, the picture below tells the whole story. Think about it for a minute.




















This is a carnitas burrito sans foil. That means the burritologists behind the counter are reasonably certain that the tortilla alone can maintain its structural integrity. The tear indicates that we're not dealing with some sort of supertortilla, so the contents of the burrito have to be pretty damn dry, which means the carnitas won't really be carnitas so much as a pile of boring old pork. Then, to make up for the lost flavor, they'll have to cheat by adding one of the traditional super burrito ingredients (cheese, sour cream, guacamole) to a regular burrito. Given the string of missteps so far, we can safely assume they'll go with the cheapest and blandest, sour cream. We would be right in all of these assumptions. Here's a picture of the bland burrito guts.

















To top it all off, Ana said her guacamole tasted canned. Sorry, Ana. One good thing came out of the excursion, though; we discovered this picture on the wall.


























Nothing more appetizing than a bug-eyed mustachioed muchacho in a big-ass sombrero holding an AK.

The Burrito Shop

A straightforward name for a straightforward place. The Burrito Shop is cheap. Unless otherwise noted, the burritos I blog will be in the $6-7 range. This one was $4.89 after tax. Even though it's on a route I traverse often (this was the 5359 College Ave location, they have two others), I don't go to The Burrito Shop often due to bad associations. At one point, I was low on cash. I had overdrawn and didn't notice the minus signs in front of the numbers that kept showing up on my ATM receipts, even though the absolute values of those numbers kept increasing until the bank spazzed out and cut me off. Long story short, I was living off of coins. At the time, they had a $1.69 bean & cheese burrito and I had more than a few. Now it's $2.50, but no worries -- I can afford the carnitas burrito now!





















They assembled my burrito in the time it took me to procure a seat outside and two cups of salsa. The salsas were actually pretty good. The salsa rojo was sweet and zesty and forced me to triple-dip the first chip I used. I never like salsa verde, but I can at least tell that this one was decent. The chips themselves were weak. I know The Burrito Shop is inexpensive, but how much can they really save by skimping on something made of corn, oil and salt? Chips and salsa aside, there's a burrito to blog!
























I'm getting better at slicing the burrito for these shots, even though I still got some little bits of aluminum foil into it. Let's start with the meat. The meat was uniformly soft and moist. It almost melts in your mouth. I tried to crush a piece against the roof of my mouth with my tongue. It didn't work, but the fact that it was worth a try gives you an idea of how soft it is. The pork was also a little picante! The rest of the inside of the burrito was pretty standard. The tortilla was a weak spot, as you can see below.
























Horrible photography (my fault; I have a new camera and no plans to read the manual) aside, you can see a tear, a forseeable result of combining a weak tortilla with juicy juicy carnitas. A tear like that is often an omen of burrito in one's lap's future. It didn't lead to a huge disaster this time, but be warned.

Short Post

The Cinco de Mayo Letterman featured a burrito on the "Will It Float?" segment. I just caught it 30 seconds ago. It floated.

UPDATE : It sunk during the commercial break. Figures.