I was shaking, sweating, trying not to cry, in fear that someone might hear me.
On the other side of the hollow door was the busy back room of South Orange County’s most popular pet store, a cramped corridor where staff clocked in and out, and where all manner of live food for tropical fish and reptiles was kept. My coworkers passed through the area continuously; I had to stay quiet.
What had started as a slightly sick feeling in my lower abdomen had quickly become something much more pressing. I rarely used the employee restroom, but on this occasion I had no choice.
The first wave, a fetid eruption — one of many to come. “Horrible horrible horrible.” Layers of my insides were stripped away by every caustic blast, each successive evacuation an evolution in violence and agony.
The laws of matter began to break down as I passed barbed wire in liquid form.
Soon it was no longer a bowel movement — it was an exorcism. My colon was attempting to invert itself, to rid my body of every remnant of the pure evil I had invited inside of me.
The duration felt interminable, the quantity impossible. More was coming out than I could possibly have put in, somehow simultaneously surging while taking its sweet time.
When the contractions finally slowed, feeling a mix of relief and anticlimax, I lingered, to make certain the ordeal had indeed ended, that no stragglers would follow.
Two flushes and a ceiling vent fan had little effect on the heat and the heaviness of the air around me. And there was that smell. This wasn’t something that would dissipate on its own.
It was on me.
People would notice it. They’d think I didn’t know how to wipe myself properly. They wouldn’t understand that this was no ordinary odor — that it couldn’t merely be wiped away.
This would have social repercussions. It might even affect my employment. And I could think of nothing that would save me. Even soap and water seemed too conventional a solution for a stink so … supernatural.
As I scanned the tiny, dirty restroom, my eyes fell upon a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and my subsequent deduction was as follows:
Foul odor is caused by bacteria. Alcohol kills bacteria. Therefore, alcohol will eliminate this odor.
And so I took the bottle from the shelf, removed the cap, and poured as much rubbing alcohol into my cupped hand as I could hold, then splashed the liquid up onto the smoldering crater that was heretofore my anus.
Whatever pain I had felt while shitting became a faint memory in light of this new sensation, a burning so intense I had to stifle a shriek.
I leapt to my feet. Pants around my ankles, I shuffled quickly to the sink, awkwardly trying to position my ass over the rim of the basin, so I could splash my screaming hole with cool, running water.
The anguish did not subside. I applied a generous helping of liquid hand soap to the area, to no noticeable effect. Defeated, I rinsed away the suds and blotted the region dry with a paper towel, as the pain persisted.
There was no remedy. I would have to ride the burn.
Purified by chemical fire, I pulled up my pants, gathering myself. I wiped out the sink basin, then washed my hands and face. I coated the toilet seat with Lysol before spraying the rest of the can into the air and exiting the room.
I returned to the floor, still somewhat in shock, the fire in the back of my pants overshadowed only slightly by the confidence that comes from knowing you have the single cleanest and most odor-free asshole on Planet Earth.
It was a good half-hour before I was pain-free. The experience was unpleasant, but the alcohol had done its job, leaving me free to reflect on the decision that had led me there; it took place the night before, a few hundred yards away, in a restaurant called P&J’s Casa Fiesta.
Casa Fiesta no longer exists, nor does the pet store where I worked, or El Toro, California, where they were both located, but for a time in the early-to-mid-nineties, I ate there with friends two or three times a week. Justin and I always ordered the Big Red Burrito.
The Big Red had a perfect balance of intense heat and flavor — a massive flour tortilla enwrapping more than a pound of spicy pork. It was a wet burrito, smothered in a hot, red sauce, to be eaten with a knife and fork. The meat was tender, cut into large chunks akin to carnitas, many of them too big to be taken in a single bite.
We’d gorge, wiping the sweat from our foreheads and taking short breaks to cool our mouths, until we reached those final few, soggy bites, and scraped the last of the red sauce from our plates.
The rubbing alcohol incident could not put an end to my love of the Big Red. A day or two later, I was back at Casa Fiesta, eating yet another one, and the morning after that, I was suffering again in the employee restroom.
I’m only a little ashamed to say that I used the alcohol a second time.
I soon learned that the key to surviving a spicy meal and its unpleasant aftermath is to eat pungent food as often as possible. The solution to the problem of the post-burrito hot shits was not moderation, it was to eat more Big Red Burritos. The body adjusts.
It has been around thirty years since the Big Red ceased to exist, but my mouth still waters and my asshole still puckers a little when I remember it.
Justin and Eric used to ride their bikes to my work. Justin had glued two cow horns to his pink-striped bike helmet. Eric insisted on wearing spandex shorts when he rode, and he always had a rotten case of swamp ass when they arrived; thankfully he never ordered a Big Red, which would only have worsened his condition.
My managers rarely minded when I took an extra half-hour for lunch; I often stayed late to make up for it. It was my first job — the one I’d wanted since I became interested in tropical fish as a little kid. I started at $4.25 an hour and had worked my way up to around six bucks by the time I made my final exit, but the real payoff was the fifty percent employee discount.
I can best describe the work environment as a version of Caddyshack. Problematic by today’s standards, it was sex and drug-crazed chaos under the auspices of a respectable local business. Lines weren’t so much crossed as they were non-existent. It seemed the only thing that could get a person fired was to steal from the store, and that happened with surprising regularity.
It was also a place to learn. I received my first snake bite there; I did my first, rudimentary behavioral work with a biting dog. I learned about environmental enrichment, though I had no idea what it was at the time. I got an insider’s perspective on an industry that I eventually came to repudiate.
I also learned about people. I had my favorite regulars, but I particularly enjoyed the difficult customers, the narcissists, the ones who were unaccustomed to being told no. A few of my managers sent them to me instead of dealing with them themselves; they liked how I handled them — calmly, respectfully, but in a way that tended to enrage them and ensured they never returned.
I quit the job a few times to explore other opportunities, but when things didn’t work out they always took me back.
By the time I left for good, Casa Fiesta was out of business. The Big Red Burrito was gone, along with the newness of my first job, and my enthusiasm for it. I might have been welcomed back, but there was increasingly little to return to.
Sometimes a burrito isn’t just a burrito.
____
In September of 2014, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight published an article titled America’s Best Burrito. I was filled with rage, and twelve years later, I’m still mad as hell.
It was the culmination of a months-long project that spanned the nation, starting with nearly 70,000 restaurants, and narrowing the field to just 64 burritos, which then went head-to-head in a bracketed contest to determine a single winner.
The methodology was equal parts baffling and appalling. The country was divided into four regions: Northeast, South, West, and California. Besides the weirdness of the geography, the divisions ignored entirely that the modern burrito is a true ecotone cuisine, inextricable from the borderlands of the US and Mexico that shaped it.
The Northeast and the South are not burrito regions. They do not have their own takes on the burrito, unless you count ‘shitty’ as a valid cultural variant. Likewise, most of the West is not Burrito Country; there is no burrito tradition in Idaho or Kansas or North Dakota. Instead, there are multiple, distinct traditions along the southern edge of the West, each deserving of its own regional status.
And then there’s California. FiveThirtyEight was on the right track when they separated it from the rest of the pack, but lumping Southern California in with Northern California is burrito blasphemy.
I’m not saying that there can’t be a truly great burrito in Minnesota or Kentucky. I’m saying the tradition that birthed it, and probably the hands that made it, came from somewhere else.
For comparison, take another regional food that Americans love: pizza. We all know that pizza originated in Italy, where it already had different regional variations before it took on new characteristics in the United States.
A debate rages between aficionados of New York and Chicago-style pizzas over which is superior; meanwhile, many believe the world’s best pizza is found at Pizzeria Bianco in, of all places, Phoenix, Arizona.
New York and Chicago are our major pizza regions (some would say Connecticut deserves its own place in the conversation), but each is producing something very different from the other. It is truly an apples to oranges comparison, or Big Apples to Big Shoulders.
Neither is representative of pizza as a whole. Neither is more valid than the other.
Meanwhile, Chris Bianco is making incredible pizza in Arizona, for some the best there is, but that doesn’t make Arizona a native pizza region. It also doesn’t invalidate the differences in people’s preferences, or divorce the pizza from its cultural heritage and the personal histories of the people making and eating it.
The best pizza I’ve ever had was made by a Mormon in Washington State, who had worked at both Giordano’s and Gino’s East, stole all their recipes, and combined and tweaked them into something truly unforgettable. While it was my favorite pizza to eat, it certainly wasn’t the only way to make pizza, nor does Washington have its own pizza tradition. If you’d like to try it for yourself, I’m sorry to say he went out of business years ago.
As it is with pizza, it is much the same with burritos, if not more so. There are regional variations within Mexico, and in the US there are distinct styles in Southern California, the Bay Area, Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas.
For those who would extol the burrito traditions of Denver or Oregon, I need to clarify something. Fuck you.
The creator of FiveThirtyEight’s Burrito Bracket was Anna Maria Barry-Jester, a talented journalist who writes mainly in the field of public health. She holds a degree in Latin American studies and is fluent in Spanish, but it’s also important to note that she is from fucking Michigan.
With the country divided into ill-conceived regions, FiveThirtyEight analyzed Yelp reviews to choose the top burritos in the nation. The results were immediately skewed. In regions with no burrito traditions of their own, and fewer burritos to choose from, mediocre contenders rose to the top. Simultaneously, the analysis favored places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, due to their higher population densities, tourism, and tech cultures that more heavily utilized sites like Yelp.
Moreover, relying on Yelp to narrow the field has an even more glaring flaw, in that it assumes that the average asshole Yelp reviewer knows fuck all about a burrito, not to mention how many reviewers didn’t even order burritos, or awarded stars based on things like service, cleanliness, or what might have crawled up their asses and died earlier that day.
Next, a group of food experts weighed in, including chef David Chang, and food historian and notable Canadian, Jeffrey Pilcher. I encourage you to search for Pilcher’s photo online and then try to imagine asking him where to get a good burrito. Here are a few questions you are probably more likely to ask him:
Where can I buy sunscreen in bulk?
Will you teach me to tie a bow tie?
Does getting your ass kicked every day of your childhood build character?
The expert panel helped pare the Yelp results down to the top sixteen burritos in each region. The data team then organized them into seeds, and the model broke down almost immediately, forcing some Southern California burritos to be moved into the West region.
From there, things went from misguided to truly deranged. The winners in each bracket were picked by Barry-Jester, who traveled the country and sampled each burrito, giving it a numeric score from one to 100. It sounds reasonable so far, but she didn’t just eat them, she also dissected them.
This person took a scalpel and sliced each burrito from ass to forehead in a barbaric procedure she called a “burritopsy.” By diddling the guts of the burritos, she hoped to gain a deeper understanding of them, much like da Vinci with his stolen corpses or RFK Jr. and his road-kill collection.
And then, after mutilating them, she ate them. I had assumed that she ordered two burritos — one to eat and one to dissect, but I am assured that I was incorrect, that after transforming each burrito from a pressurized cylinder into an open-faced meat canoe, she ate it, using a modified fork with a fucking GoPro mounted on it.
I need a minute.
Barry-Jester chose her final four, representing San Francisco, Los Angeles, El Paso, and the Bronx. She declared the final winner to be the Carnitas Super Burrito, ordered Dorado-Style, from La Taqueria in San Francisco’s Mission District. Her boss, Nate Silver, joined her for a taste test, and claimed he “achieved nirvana” upon his first bite, thereby proving that he, like Barry-Jester, didn’t know a goddamned thing about burritos.
Any connoisseur knows that the first bite of a burrito is largely irrelevant — it is the last bite that matters. A well-conceived burrito is a feat of engineering as much as a culinary achievement, and eating one is a cooperative exercise. It takes the combined skills of the builder and the eater for the center to hold.
As one consumes the burrito, its contents must be kept in place by a mere tortilla, while juices and flavors become more concentrated in the ass end of the vessel with each successive bite, warping and softening, threatening to rupture the envelope, until finally, at the point of complete structural failure, the diner is left with the most intense and transcendent mouthful of the entire meal.
Correctly eating a burrito is a skill gained from years of experience, with training beginning in early childhood. It is not simply folding the pizza slice in half or tilting one’s head before biting into a taco. It is a mastery achieved across decades of stained shirts and deceptive droplets on the crotches of pants, of golden rivulets running from the webs of fingers down to the elbows.
For an authentic experience, you must eat a burrito in its entirety, beginning at one end and making your way to the other. This is true of smothered burritos as well, in a process that requires the conservation and continuous monitoring and redistribution of sauce.
You do not cut a burrito in half unless it is served to you that way. You do not eat it from the middle, Justin Bieber-style. (I know he didn’t really do that.) And you sure as fucking fuck do not slice it fucking lengthwise and eat out its insides.
As for Nate Silver’s experience, the premature ejaculation of achieving nirvana on the first bite is better kept to oneself.
Moreover, the entire exercise of ranking, scoring, and dissecting burritos reduces the culmination of centuries of cultural heritage and personal experience to a grotesque pornography. Barry-Jester wasn’t just cutting up food, she was gaping my life.
She gaped us by the millions.
In an interview about the project, Silver called it a mix of seriousness and whimsy, stating, “We also know that burritos are not a matter of great national importance.” Barry-Jester later echoed the sentiment.
Appealing to the tech-bro luxury of “whimsy” to justify the algorithmic trampling of someone else’s heritage feels too Midwest Nice for my borderland sensibilities.
Along the southern border, the burrito developed in immigrant communities as a food of the laboring class — compact, portable, nutritionally dense. Each iteration addressed a different local reality, but what they all share is their connection to the common people, be they farm workers in southern Arizona, builders in El Paso, or even surfers and skaters on the coast.
The hands that expertly cradle a burrito, in its perfect tension, are the same hands that adeptly cut and stack lettuce into wooden crates, that smooth the concrete beneath our feet, that ache and bleed to preserve our way of life.
The food that gives power to those hands is not mere fuel. It is love. It is strife. It is living history.
It is more than the sum of its parts.
That a Mission-style burrito won the contest is less of an outrage than the contest itself, but it does further betray the naïveté of the people at FiveThirtyEight, to think that they could conduct a valid competition without sparking a national uproar. They prioritized a cold matrix over warm memory, and people were pissed.
I can set aside the presumptuousness of naming a restaurant La Taqueria, when it was predated by thousands of other taquerias named for their owners, saints, and geographic or cultural landmarks. What I can’t excuse is the notion that a Dorado-style Mission burrito was treated like something representative of American burrito culture instead of the outlier it clearly is.
That it became the template for fast casual chains like Chipotle should do little to secure its status as the archetype, just as the success of Taco Bell should not be sufficient to convince you that it is the genuine article, or that the thousands of taquerias along the southern border are the knock-offs.
The Mission-style burrito is a relative newcomer to the scene, having originated in the early 1960s. It features a large tortilla stuffed with an array of fresh ingredients and wrapped in foil to seal in its steam and help with adhesion. The Dorado-style version is seared on all sides on a heavily greased plancha.
Mission-style is the Chicago deep dish of burritos, which is not to say it can’t be an excellent meal, but that it bears only a minimal resemblance to its borderland cousins. It is a city burrito. A tourist attraction.
In El Paso, burritos are smaller, with fewer ingredients. Typical fillings are guisados — stewed meats like chile verde or chile colorado. They are highly portable, and leave little room for error.
Heading west, New Mexico’s burritos reflect its Native American heritage, and serve primarily as delivery vehicles for the state’s famous Hatch chiles. While handheld options are available, a breakfast burrito smothered in red or green chile sauce and melted cheese is New Mexico’s quintessential burrito experience. For the undecided, a ‘Christmas’ burrito is split in the middle between red and green.
Arizona’s burritos bear a heavy Sonora influence. Frequently called burros, they feature a paper-thin, slightly translucent tortilla stuffed with carne asada or machaca. The chimichanga, invented in Tucson, is the deep-fried version, and the Percherón, named for the French draft horse, is an oversized variant filled with carne asada, melted cheese, and avocado.
In Southern California, the San Diego-style relies mainly on carne asada for its protein. A standard carne asada burrito comes with a scoop of guacamole and some pico de gallo, and nothing else, while a California burrito contains carne asada, French fries, and cheddar cheese; some versions also have guacamole and sour cream.
Being on the coast, San Diego burritos may also feature shrimp or fish, likewise common in the beach cities south of the border. San Diego burritos are wrapped in butcher paper, never foil, so that moisture can escape and their Sonoran tortillas won’t become soggy.
Los Angeles is famously a taco town, so its burritos are indicative of that heritage. Most are smaller, and feature guisados and refried beans cooked in lard. They do not contain guacamole. LA is also known for the other end of the spectrum, with its gigantic, smothered party burritos, meant to be shared, and eaten with utensils.
And sitting between LA and San Diego is Orange County — the melting pot.
____
When Arturo Galindo and his wife Maria arrived in El Toro, they were surprised at the lack of the fresh, stone-ground corn products they were accustomed to in their native San Antonio. After Art’s discharge from the Marine Corps in the early 1960s, the couple moved briefly to Santa Ana before he took a job as a restaurant manager at the Colony Kitchen in San Juan Capistrano.
In 1984, after amassing years of restaurant experience, Art and Maria created Las Golondrinas, in English, ‘The Swallows,’ a nod to the local folklore surrounding the annual return of the migratory birds to the town’s historic mission, and perhaps a bit of a pun.
The little tortilleria focused on selling fresh ground corn products and simple fillings to go. There was no seating for diners, so that nearly the entirety of the restaurant’s space could be used for food production.
The shopping center where Las Golondrinas began was next to a small private school where my mother was a teacher, and I was a third grade student. After school, while my mom graded papers and did other work in her classroom, she would hand me a check with the amount left blank, and send me to Las Golondrinas to buy tacos.
The shop was a runaway success, opening a second location in Capistrano Beach in 1988. Others followed. With increased business, they expanded their menu. And as I also grew, I began to order burritos instead of tacos.
In 1992, the Big Dave was introduced as an extra-large version of any other burrito on the menu, but soon it became its own menu item. I always ordered a Big Dave de asada, later upgrading it with extra salsa.
I loved watching the kitchen staff at work. A woman with a hair net would pull two, enormous flour tortillas from the stack, which she’d throw in a press to soften them up. A single tortilla would not be sufficient for what was coming.
While that was happening, she would chop the carne asada, loudly, with a cleaver. Then she’d take the tortillas from the warmer and lay them, overlapping one another, over two sheets of butcher paper and one sheet of foil. A smear of refried beans would be applied.
Next came the carne asada, and a heap of rice; then a giant handful of thick-grated cheese, some cilantro, and two ladlefuls of salsa.
What followed was the miracle. In quick succession, the ends were folded in and the fillings drawn into a tight mound before the entire mass was rolled into a tidy parcel. Somehow a pound and a half of fillings were compressed into a perfect bundle.
Over decades, I have periodically tried in vain to recreate this process at home, with disastrous results.
To eat a Big Dave correctly, you must first open the foil and butcher paper wrappers carefully, remove the burrito, and inspect it to decide from which end you will eat it. This is an important decision, and once made, there is no going back. I try to identify the less stable end as my starting point, which designates the opposite end as the burrito’s delicious ass.
The ass is then planted firmly in the center of the wrapper, flattening it enough that the burrito can now be set down on a table without falling over. The wrapper is folded up around the burrito, leaving approximately one third of it exposed. The paper and foil will be rolled down as you make your way through the meal.
The first bite will be mostly tortilla, with a little bit of meat juice and salsa. This is as it should be; the purpose of the first bite is to awaken the senses, and to release some of the pressure inside the package.
With each ensuing bite, the flavor and moisture increase, and the ingredients are encountered in different proportions from one mouthful to the next. In one, only meat and tortilla; in another, meat and a large helping of cilantro. In one bite, the cheese has melted; in a later one it has been kept cold by the salsa, providing a delightful contrast in temperature, texture, and taste.
Much has been said about the inclusion of rice in burritos, with its detractors suggesting that it adds unwelcome blandness to the flavor landscape, but this is only true if the rice is not itself flavorful. In the case of the Big Dave, the rice is necessary to absorb the liquid from the extra salsa.
As you make your way through, you must be mindful of the structural integrity of the vessel, rotating it regularly to address moisture damage and weight distribution issues as they arise. In the rare event of a breach in the vessel wall, you must apply steady pressure with the wrapper, and consume the material above it as evenly as possible as you make your way to the affected area. Go straight to the rupture and you risk Biebering the burrito, only worsening the situation.
As you move into the home stretch, you might be tempted to take a break, but you must resist that urge. You are in a race against the laws of thermodynamics; slow down now and the ass end of the burrito will become too cold to sustain your eating pleasure. Lukewarm is acceptable, even inevitable, but cold is intolerable.
“Why not just save it and reheat it later?” You shut the fuck up. You shut the fuck up and you eat.
Next stop, Ass City.
Buttburgh.
Kiesterville.
Rumpopolis.
The closer you get, the more the structure of the burrito will deteriorate, and juices will begin to pool. You must use the wrapper and the remaining tortilla to form a cup to contain them. Slurp them up if you have to, but do not let them spill from the wrapper, lest you look like a novice and a slob.
As you approach your final few bites, you must ration them in such a way that the last one is the largest — not so large that it causes discomfort, but enough that it is bigger and better than the ones that preceded it. This could mean taking a few small bites until what remains is the appropriate size.
And now, you have arrived. Put it in your mouth and savor it, but do not allow any residual fluids to spill from the wrapper, as these will be a refreshing sip to top off your meal.
If you are experienced, you will have saved the entirety of any drink you ordered to be consumed after the completion of the burrito. But if you are a master of your craft, you will have purchased a second drink.
I have never encountered another burrito like the Big Dave de asada, even here, in the Galindos’ former home state. But I will continue searching.
On my increasingly infrequent trips back to Orange County, I often stop at Las Golondrinas before visiting any family or friends, a practice not one of them has ever questioned.
____
I didn’t expect to be living in a Mexican car wash at age 38, hanging out with smugglers, money launderers, and a cartel enforcer.
That was not in the five year plan.
Sometimes you just need to get away. Sometimes you want to go where nobody knows your name. Sometimes that place is a defunct car wash in Ensenada.
There are stories I can never tell. Some simply don’t belong to me; some are too dangerous to write down. I can only share a few of the lessons I learned:
When you’re pulled over by the police, and you have certain people in your car, the officers will apologize for stopping you and quickly leave the scene.
When you cross the border with a convicted smuggler, you will remain a subject of particular interest to CBP for at least a few years.
If a guy used to be a mob lawyer, he’s probably still a mob lawyer, unless he was disbarred, in which case he’s a mob accountant.
Sometimes the quiet kid in the basketball jersey who hangs out in your friend’s office turns out to be the guy in all those stories you’ve heard.
Never say no to free tacos.
More than the lessons I learned, I was moved by the warmth and generosity of the people who taught them to me. It’s easy to think in terms of good and evil, right and wrong, until you have to live by your own definitions.
There is no black or white, or even gray.
Reality is in color.
I didn’t know when I arrived in Playas de Chapultepec that I’d stumbled into the culinary epicenter of South Ensenada. It felt like every meal was the best one of my life. I was broke, but I ate like a high-roller.
Some of the restaurants were brick and mortar shops, but many were little more than a vinyl canopy and a few burners. Some had specialties; others offered the standard menu of tacos, sopes, and the like.
I learned the differences between the taquerias as I sampled their offerings. This one has the best salsa. That one puts beans in the tacos. This guy buys his bread from the lady across the street.
To find the best restaurants, I didn’t use Yelp, I used my eyes and my feet. I walked around and paid attention to which places were crowded. An empty dining area on a Sunday morning probably meant you’d find a hair in your food.
But of all the meals I had in Ensenada, I had exactly one that was bad, and in most of the United States it would have still been the best Mexican food in town.
Everything was within easy walking distance. Tacos El Poblano was a solid choice for a standard, Baja-style taco, served with your choice of toppings, like salsas, cilantro, limes, and the region’s famous, impossibly pink pickled onions. I now make them at home.
Up by the main road there was a menudo joint with the best breakfast potatoes I’d ever had. Around the corner from El Poblano there was a tiny hotel that made huevos rancheros like you might find on the breakfast table at any house in the neighborhood.
For something more upscale, there was Estero Beach Resort, but I had no problem slumming it. Even the gas station tamales were good.
Down a dirt alley about a hundred feet from my driveway, an old man would roll out his birria cart a few days a week. I’d sit on a stool, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, as he handed me one taco at a time, until I’d eaten my fill. A squeeze of lime. A squirt from the salsa bottle. Perfection.
At the end of the street, in a makeshift shack, was Big Burro. The place was popular with the locals, but even more so with the Baja 500 and 1000 drivers and their crews, who enjoyed slapping their decals all over its walls.
A true family business, owners Juan Carlos and Irene were frequently joined in their tiny kitchen by their children and grandchildren. There was a warmth at their little lunch counter that meant more to me than the food they served.
When my mom and stepfather visited, they ordered shrimp tacos. I preferred the carne asada burro, which came sliced in half for easier consumption, but what I liked even more was the torta with carne asada or adobada.
No one would blame you for being jealous. I was immersed, not in good food, but in truly great food, made from fresh, local ingredients, and sold dirt cheap.
And about once a week, I’d drive or walk into town and get a Western Bacon Cheeseburger at Carl’s Jr. Don’t judge me. It’s been my favorite burger since they first started field testing it in 1982.
I settled into a rhythm, walking my dogs on the beach, sometimes ten miles a day, filling my pockets with shells and sand dollars along the way.
I stole cuttings from neighborhood cactuses and dug palm seedlings from sidewalk cracks and foundations.
I found a tiny, flea-infested puppy in the street, dehydrated and anemic. I took him to a local vet, nursed him back to health, and added him to the family.
My Spanish was slowly improving, as I began to build relationships with neighbors and local businesses.
I was piecing together a life, but the pieces that were still missing felt too cumbersome to drag into place.
I had no income. I’d been offered a job helping expats move their furniture and other belongings from the States, but I knew that wouldn’t be all I was moving. Some risks aren’t worth the reward, and some choices can’t be unmade.
I yearned to explore more of the area, but I couldn’t afford to drive very far; I felt trapped inside a walkable radius.
And I had unfinished business up north, loose ends that might have been better left untied, but nonetheless, those strings were pulling me back to the cold and damp.
I’d pieced together a life there, too, and I hadn’t finished living it yet.
For years after I left Ensenada, when I returned to visit, I’d stop at Big Burro, and Irene would ask about my mom. The intersection has been built up, and today the shop is across the street; it’s called Baja Burro now, but the food and the people have not changed.
The car wash is gone, and the neighborhood is a bit more crowded, but it’s mostly the same. I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed. My life would certainly look different. I might be some leather-skinned burnout in a little beach house, or running guns and cash for the cartel. I might be planting a vineyard in the hills, or tending my sheep in the desert down south.
I probably left too soon. I was pretty raw when I arrived in Mexico, and my wounds were still open when I went back to the Northwest.
Ensenada was a better place to heal.
A better place to think.
And a better place to eat.
____
I’ve been fortunate to dine at Michelin-starred restaurants. I’ve also cooked a turkey in a trash can full of burning scrap, and bought tamales off the back of a truck. I’ve eaten weeds from my yard, and things I could not identify in markets abroad.
And thousands of burritos.
I’ve learned that the best meal is the one that warms you up when you’re cold, wet, and exhausted.
No amount of sorting, scoring, or dissection can assign a value to that experience.
In 2014, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight tried to find America’s best burrito, and they failed. They failed because they never learned what a burrito was.
Long days after school.
A first job.
That drunken fight at La Posta.
A reward for fixing the leak in the employee restroom.
A piece of my childhood I found a thousand miles from home.
The time spent healing, if not quite enough.
What I fled.
What I ran to.
The stories I can never tell.
The places and the people we have lost.
In May of 2026, ABC deleted the entire FiveThirtyEight archive from its servers. In an instant, eighteen years of journalism and statistical analysis, the work of hundreds of contributors, disappeared.
It seemed unnecessarily cruel to erase a man’s legacy, but ABC clearly felt it was not a matter of great national importance.
There’s a little donut shop in Capo Beach where the day laborers gather in search of work. Southern California’s donuts are special, the legacy of Cambodian refugees — a history I took for granted until I walked into a Dunkin’ in New York City and learned just how bad a donut can be.
This particular California donut shop used to also sell breakfast burritos. It changed ownership sometime in the last several years, and I don’t know if the burritos survived the transition, but for a time, they fed countless workers on job sites all over South Orange County.
After a long night of driving, hunger had set in. I’d dropped my trailer up the hill, so I could maneuver my pickup carefully through the tiny parking lot. I tried to get into a spot quickly — the laborers were already circling. A pickup truck usually meant work, but I wasn’t hiring.
I slid out of the truck and plodded across the lot, tired, a little sore. Inside, I ordered a chocolate bar, a black coffee, and a chorizo, egg, and potato burrito. It was warm enough to sit outside, so I took a seat at the little table farthest from the door.
It had been years since my last Southern California donut. They were better than I remembered.
A green pickup pulled up along the curb, and the driver held up two fingers. The crowd of workers reacted, but only the two quickest made it into the back of the truck. They’d have money in their pockets tonight.
On the corner, a man stood lookout, ready to warn the others at the first sign of la migra.
I took my first bite of the burrito, exposing fluffy scrambled eggs and melted cheese. I squeezed it a little, to open a small fissure, and filled it with hot sauce. I added a little more sauce after every few bites.
By the time I reached the bottom, the potatoes were saturated with sauce and drippings from the chorizo, intermingled with tiny bits of egg and cheese. I savored the final bite, holding it in my mouth for as long as I could.
My heart was heavy, and my mind was weary, but in that moment, my spirit was calm.
Sometimes a burrito isn’t just a burrito.
Sometimes it’s the only thing that matters.