Pain On A Plate

The day after Tortilla Flats, we lunched at ,
69 First Ave, NYC. The sign is easily the most uninspired this blog has seen. As for the "II," "I" is now known as Puebla and sits right down the street. We chose this one for the reviews, even though Puebla's reviews are pretty positive, too. Downtown Bakery II looked pretty no-frills; the description of the burrito indicated that it came with refried beans but no salsa. There was a surcharge for hot sauce, which I gladly had my brother pay since that's not cheating. Take a look.






Looks like salsa verde, right? You could probably pick a little piece of pork out of the burrito, coat it with salsa and hope that it's at least decent salsa verde. Go on.

You're entering a world of pain. I really needed an iced tea to make it through this burrito. The texture of the deweaponized portions of the burrito were decent, but I can only vouch for the taste of the salsa. I think I detected hints of curry. Curry and napalm. It kept my mouth burning for an hour afterwards. Bravo!

One word of advice-- I would suggest against trying to customize an order here. My brother order a burrito sin cilantro and they prepared his burrito without adding any cilantro to the meat. Thing is, there was a ton of the soapy stuff in the rice. Dorx.

Where the Food Comes Last

I could have saved myself a visit to , 767 Washington Street, NYC, had I glanced at their web site first. Here's how they introduce themselves:

We're New York City’s innovative place to party - putting the FUN in FUNky. Check-out our Event Nights: Bingo, Hula-Hoop, & Funday-Sundays. There is always great music, amazing margaritas & the best in Tex Mex dining. [font change mine]

Nothing against margaritas, but I have reservations about any place that gives them higher billing than the food. Speaking of billing, this was the first time I paid $8.50 for a burrito, or would be if my bro hadn't paid. Was it worth it?






No. Nothing was any more appetizing than it looked. Whose idea was it to showcase that mushy mass of beans outside the tortilla? As for the unfolded burrito, that's a rookie mistake I haven't seen outside of Tres Rios [spits]. Anyway, since the thing was unfolded, I opened it up instead of slicing it in two :






Cheaters! Just the cheese this time, and it didn't really help. The carnitas had grill marks, but no smoky flavor. Or any other flavor, for that matter. In Tortilla Flats' defense, this was a custom order; the only carnitas burritos option on the menu is, for some reason, two carnitas burritos with some form of salsa.

If you're looking for a place to wear pajamas, hula and play bingo, by all means, get your dork on at Tortilla Flats. If you're looking for a carnitas burrito, keep walking.

Potle

On my first day in New York, my brother and I set out for burritos. We were under a time constraint and the numerous mexican places that don't serve any pork weren't helping. Fortunately, carnitas was on the menu at what he considers the best burreatery in the city :













This is the 19 St. Mark's Place location, though there's probably one closer to you. The closest to me is on Gilman St, the Berk, but that will change soon. I've had a couple carne asada burritos from there and knew it was a cut above most chains. So I got my carnitas burrito with rice, pinto beans, salsa fresca and the red tomatillo. In case you've never been to Chipotle, they ask about each ingredient before it goes on your burrito. It's like Subway but with edible food.























This was a pretty darn good burrito. The meat was nicely textured, the salsas were tasty and the rice and beans really reflected the fact that they hadn't been sitting there for several hours. If it's possible to glean a message from a burrito, this one does its best to inform you that it's made up of a lot of different things. The cilantro lime rice has a presence of its own; it's not just a backup foodstuff that serves to fill out the burrito and absorb some of the juice.

I noticed that my burrito was salty. I eat a lot of salt, so for a burrito to make me notice its saltiness, it would have to be . . . well, let's find out. At Chipotle's extensive site, we poke around until we find the nutritional information in the "Useful" FAQ, hidden behind the "Magical" FAQ. I ate 3620 milligrams of sodium. Hoyvinmayvin! Also, my 988 Calorie burrito makes it look like perhaps Rubio's was the outlier. The unhealthiness, however, won't stand between Chipotle and its rightful position as the #1 chain reviewed so far.

Chipotle makes a good effort to not feel like a chain. One wall features a black and white photo of the restaurant when it was first opened in, er, a few years ago. My photo of the photo didn't turn out, but I did get a shot of this quasi-pre-columbian guy :




























It's labelled puff.jpg because I was sure he was smoking a stogie or a fattie. But that wouldn't make much sense, especially when the alternative interpretation is that the burrito-shaped tube he's holding is a burrito. It's not much bigger than his nose, though. Maybe he's trying to make you appreciate the giant burritos we have now by showing you the tiny ones they had to make do with back in the time of very elaborate and heavy hats.

This Was Easy

I went to Jalisco, 1721 International Boulevard, Oaktown. Here's the sign :




























Here are the bone fragments I found in my burrito :

¡Ya Regrese!

Sup.

I'm back from a trip back east, but before I can address New York burritos, I have to review some I ate before my trip. Today we'll discuss








,












specifically, the one at 5010 El Cerrito Plaza, El Cerrito. That's right, local fans; I got a mall burrito.























The salsas did little to redeem mall food. Counterclockwise from the top, we have ketchup, green high-fructose corn syrup, red high-fructose corn syrup and sweet barbecue sauce. Rubio's doesn't come right out and say it, but that's pretty much what you're getting. The barbecue sauce, which you can get from the "chipotle" bucket, was actually pretty good. There were a lot more fixin's, but I don't mess around with lemons and limes, etc. If you need some citrus to deal with the heat of these salsas, I suggest you get back in your buggy-- you're a long way from Amish country. And what are you doing using a computer, anyway?





















There was nothing immediately offensive about the burrito. It was a reasonable size and folded properly in a decent-looking tortilla. So we slice the thing open looking for the catch.




























Cheaters! Sour cream and the guac. Unlike a few places I could name, Rubio's actually cheats to win. Since they're out of the burrito competition, I'd like to award them a "Best in Food Court" Medal.

A fan took issue with my slight of Baja Fresh, claiming that burritos are bad for you in general and I shouldn't single them out just because they put the statistics out there. Thing is, despite spoonfuls of fatty goodness, the Rubio's burrito clocks in at 890 Calories. It's not health food (although Rubio's serves that, too,) but it shows that a burrito doesn't have to push four digits to taste good.

Finally, can the people who brought us bags of broken pretzels do the same for mutant tortilla chips?




























These happen everywhere, but since I got two beautiful examples with this burrito, I figured now would be a reasonable time to make that request.

Fuckin' Picante

A familiar refrain from Raj, who used to live above Picante. Their "vegetarian" food was bad and often not vegetarian (ask about the chicken stock!) and their customers often took every parking spot within a reasonable distance of the place. I first went once a number of years ago to see if perhaps the meat was the draw. I concluded that it wasn't.






























Just for your benefit, I went back to 1328 Sixth Street, the Berk, a few days ago. I didn't tell Raj because I knew it would make his blood boil.




























The salsas are kept cold in a fridge right by the door to the back patio. Yes, they're in squeeze bottles, but note the mitigating factor : these are sawed-off squeeze bottles designed to let the occasional chunk through. From left to right, we have chipotle, verde and habanero. All were billed as some variety of "hot" (smokey hot, tangy hot, and [something along the lines of "very"] hot, respectively). I didn't get to test these claims immediately because a basket of chips is apparently not standard with a burrito order.















So I had to use the burrito as a salsa vector again. I didn't think about saving the sticker until after I folded the sticky side to itself.
























The meat was stringy and tough, but as you can see, the burrito is pretty juicy. The salsa verde was reasonably hot. The chipotle salsa as well, with the advertised smokey flavor. The habanero salsa, the red stuff in the middle of the left half of the burrito, didn't live up to my expectations. It's not that it wasn't hot. I wouldn't spread it on toast like jam and feed it to a toddler. It's that it's a habanero salsa from a place called Picante, so it should taste something like this :





















I didn't even need my strawberry agua fresca to deal with the heat. It was nice that they made it look kinda like a pint of amber ale.




























One word of warning : if you must see the place for yourself, you'll probably want to sit near the bar, as the patio is unusually popular with parents of annoying little babies.

Fuckin'

Burritos à la Dave Thomas

"Wendy's International, Inc., the owner and operator of Wendy's® and Tim Hortons® restaurant chains acquired

®









Mexican Grill (operated by Fresh Enterprises, Inc., a privately held company) on June 21, 2002. The terms of the sale called for a price of $275 million in cash for 100% of the stock of Fresh Enterprises. Baja Fresh® Mexican Grill is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wendy's International, Inc. and will maintain its home office in Thousand Oaks, CA."

This is the first major chain I'll be reviewing and hence my first chance to poke around an extensive corporate website for gems like the above.

I didn't bother doing so until an hour ago, so you can trust that I gave the food a fair shake when I, fully unaware that I was eating in a wholly owned subsidiary, sampled their carnitas yesterday. To recreate this order, you want a Carnitas Burrito Mexicano with pinto beans and spicy salsa. Here's what you eventually get, after a long wait caused by a huge lunchtime crowd at an unbeatable location (2237 Shattuck, the Berk):






















In the meantime, you've helped yourself to a cup from each of the four salsa buckets, which is allowed here, as well as a bottle of a salsa you may not have had before :




























You dip a chip in the salsa verde, just to get it out of the way. One of these days, you tell yourself, there will be a surprise. It will be made with green m&ms or plutonium 231 or rattlesnake venom. But not today. You push the green stuff aside.

You scoop up some Pico de Gallo, which turns out to be salsa fresca. Wikipedia says they're sometimes synonymous, but in certain regions of Mexico, Pico de Gallo is something else entirely. Also included in their entry is the etymology you may have suspected : the Pico de Gallo ought to be able to deliver a sharp stinging sensation, just like a rooster's beak. That doesn't happen at Baja Fresh, where you pretty much just get a little cup of fresh diced tomatoes.

You try the black stuff. This is Salsa Baja. It's sweet. There's not really a whole lot going on otherwise. Between the flavor and the color, you infer that Baja's flagship salsa is nothing but boiled-down Coca-Cola, inviting lawsuits from not one but two major corporations. Just to make sure the color's not playing tricks on you, you dip a chip, close your eyes, take a bite, and wipe the salsa off your chin. Coke is it!

Discouraged, you go for the rojo. It's good! It's thick, too, so if you don't waste your chips on bad salsas, you might be able to make a significant dent in the red stuff and pour the rest on your burrito later.

As an afterthought, you pour some of the radioactive orange bottled stuff on a chip, where you discover that it contains too much vinegar for too little heat.

Finally, you open your burrito, which has got to be feeling a little neglected by this point.




























It has that weird shape because they don't cram enough stuff in there to make it maintain a cylindrical shape. But do we want more stuff in the burrito? To find out, we pay another visit to the Baja Fresh site.

Go there.

Click on "Nutrition."

Click on "Just the Facts."

Click on "NUTRITION INFO."

In Firefox 1.07, the resulting window's dimensions allow you to see some nutritional information for four and a half items. You see that the burrito bowls have between 580 and 700 Calories. You also see three curves forming the top ends of numbers. Scrolling down, you see that those numbers were "9," "3," and "0," respectively, as in "The Charbroiled Chicken Baja Burrito has 930 Calories." Scrolling down a bit further, we see that our burrito contains 980 Calories in addition to 2450 milligrams of sodium, more than you're supposed to have in a day, according to the FDA. The real nightmare, of course, is near the bottom of the list : Charbroiled Steak Nachos pack a whopping 2120 Calories. Long story short, you and your heart both thank Baja Fresh for not packing more stuff into their burrito. The burrito innards, however, don't share your enthusiasm for their arrangement and attempt to flee.
























You devour them with a fork and knife, discovering that the spicy salsa you ordered is actually spicy. When all that's left of that side of the burrito is tortilla, you make a little tube of rolled up tortilla con salsa rojo. This should be on the menu. It's cheap, it's 15 seconds of prep time, and for most customers, it guarantees the purchase of a drink. You, being hardcore, can hold your hot salsa and move on to the other half of the burrito. This one stays intact and you walk out of Baja Fresh satisfied, but not wowed. Then you see the following passage on their website

"Our unique brand of teamwork instills personal accountability, promotes a systems approach to operations, and includes generous quantities of respect and praise for a job well done."

and you vomit the whole meal up onto the sidewalk.