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.