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.