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'