Intrastate Debate

So, when I was interviewed in the paper about burritos, my comments regarding San Francisco’s burritos garnered the most vocal response, both from San Diegans and San Franciscans. I don’t want the focus of this site to be the debate over whose burritos are better, because although it’s fun to yell at people and have tantrums, ultimately, we are dealing with subjective tastes. Each should be appreciated in terms of its kind and all opinions are valid. Quiet, sensitive discussions of taste are in order—more Charlie Rose than Hardball. It’s just that when someone tells me that SF burritos are waayyy better than SD burritos, it’s like someone telling me that Stevie Wonder is overrated. Fine. You are entitled to your stupid opinion.   

Once, at a friend’s house in New York, a couple of people, New Yorkers, were talking about this place they found in Brooklyn that made “the best burritos, OMG!” “We totally have to go there tomorrow!” I was interested by this for obvious reasons: I wanted to know who made these burritos? Where did their tortillas come from? And so on. Then this bruiser of a woman comes in and says above everything: “You have no fucking idea what a good burrito is. Listen. I’m from San Francisco. You haven’t had a burrito until you’ve had one in the Mission. The best.”  

So there. The end of discussion. The beast from San Francisco had laid down its paw to crush the ignorant minions who were foolish enough to think that they had found something worthy and speak of it. (As a side note: Nobody is really from San Francisco. Okay, maybe like a few hundred people and they are all in therapy pretty much fulltime, so you’ll never meet them. Most everyone who claims San Francisco is from the much less glamorous Bay Area, and more often than not, it’s not Oakland or Berkeley, even though they might say, “Oh, you know, the East Bay.” Translation: Livermore. “You know, South SF.” Translation: Foster City. Not that there’s anything wrong with these places, but come on!) 

A huge contingent of San Franciscans are reformed Southern Californians. These people are the most likely to complain about the Botox and traffic and strip malls of So Cal. They love the burritos up there and I’ll get to why. But in truth, SD and SF have much in common. Foremost, both are expensive cities to live in, cities that are each lifestyles and which demand sacrifice to get by. The burrito is the food of the busy, under-paid, hard-working class. This class of people composes construction workers, homeless people, band members, artists, working families, and so on. People on the run who don’t want to spend much money on food because they live in a desirable and thus expensive locale. (Sure, rich folks eat burritos too from time to time, but rich folks also say ridiculous things like “Hallah!” and have “This is Why I’m Hot” as their ring tones. Rich people are bored so they’ll do anything for fun. SF and SD have a lot of rich folks keeping the prices high and being annoying.)  

You might say, well, all cities have this under class of hungry, busy people who are trying to save money for other things like rent. Some cities are like this, cites that draw people in with their aura, and each has its foods. Philadelphia has the cheese steak and Yuengling; New York has knishes and hot dogs and falafel and pizza; Hawaii has plate lunches and Bud tall-boys; Chicago has sausages and peppers and pizza; and LA—I have no idea what they eat in LA. Sorry. Do poor people eat sushi there? Wraps? I don’t know. Maybe they eat stray dogs. But anyway, cheap, plentiful, and fast food is necessary in any city that attracts people by virtue of its aura. (We should note that increasingly, we see Mexican-American food popping up nationwide as the Mexican population and word has spread. And people love it everywhere. But we in SF and SD are lucky enough to have a long tradition of Mexican-American food, traditions that have evolved apart from one another and taken on their own prototypical forms. We should further note that SF and SD are not the only American places that enjoy such a tradition. It runs through out the Southwest, especially refined in parts of Texas. See, for example, the breakfast taco and miga.)  

Why, you ask, would SF and SD have Mexican food that outshines the many? There are a couple of reasons for this. Monterey was Alta California’s first capital and though it was short-lived, the de facto capital of Northern California is San Francisco (then Yerba Buena) and, more generally, the Bay Area. The first regularly published newspaper was here, the Alta Californian. It was in this that Mark Twain published what would later be collected as the Innocents Abroad, his first real book. As a Mexican territory, this was a land of American Indians, haciendas run by those who pledged their allegiance to Mexico and Catholic priests. The food and culture—vis-à-vis the food—of this area is wonderfully described by Encarnacion Pinedo in her seminal The Spanish Cook. Although the Anglo trappers and Gold Miners that swarmed the Bay Area in the middle-19th century would become the dominant culture, the culture of the Alta Californians was something, as Pinedo shows us, that clung on in spite of the shift. Proof of this is the Mexican-American recipes that began to pop up in cooking books in the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in SF. It survives to this day. 

SD was the second capital of Alta California and enjoys its own long and lurid history with Mexico. But I think this more distant history is less critical to the development of our food than our proximity to Mexico. Particularly after the Mexican Revolution in 1910, many Mexicans began the migration north to what had become the United States of America. These immigrants went primarily to Los Angeles and SD, such that SD had the second largest Mexican-American community in the United States in the middle of the 20th century. Thus, a lot of tortillerias and good Mexican food, which would evolve in its character to what we today might call SD-style Mexican food (see my review of El Porvenir). For some reason this Mexican-American community must have been more integrated into the larger population in SD than they were in LA because, although LA does have great Mexican-American food, it does not saturate the landscape in the same way it does SD. There are taco shops everywhere in SD and the food served is unlike any to be found elsewhere, including LA. It does me proud.  

So to recapitulate, we have two cities with grand Mexican-American food traditions, in which populations live busily and beyond their means and for whom this Mexican-American food has become a central form of sustenance. The foods are different because of their separate evolutions. And also because San Franciscans are different from San Diegans. We are, as you know, subtly different.   SF has a vibrant diversity of foods available to the weary wonderer and Mexican-American is one among many. This is somewhat different from SD. Here, other ethnic foods have been ghettoized. Chinese food thrives in Kearny Mesa. Vietnamese thrives in City Heights. Ethiopian in La Mesa. These are all considerable distances from one another. In fact, Mexican-American is the only salient food type in San Diego: it is everywhere.

In SF, the outer Sunset is a quick walk from Haight-Ashbury, which is a quick walk to the Filmore and so on. And SF—or the area generally—has Alice Waters and Kermit Lynch and Napa Valley and so on. It supports a more vibrant and exciting food culture by far. Speaking of food generally, it’s a more interesting, if superior, place to eat.   

Also, San Franciscans, even poor ones, care about being so-called healthful. They eat a lot of flaxseed oil and organic stuff that isn’t—heaven forbid—cooked. Even starving artists maintain these strange fetishes religiously. San Diegans have similar fetishes, like tanning booths and abs workouts. While SF has the opera, SD has Over the Line; SF has the Lawrence Livermore Labs, SD has the Navy; SF has bike messengers, SD has beach cruisers; SF has Apple, SD has Jack in the Box—see? But I digress. 

San Diegans want to fill up and they want it simple and delicious. It’s a heartier food here and less complicated, without space, time, or patience for all of the fillings that make a San Franciscan smile. Our burritos are big but that is not what makes them. Bigger, although good, can’t make up for deficiencies. Our burritos are piquant, toasted, and filled with three or so of the most complimentary staples of the Mexican-American kitchen made in the most time-tested manner. That’s it. It’s peasant’s food. Our beans are wet and lardy and salty—not at all good for you. Our salsas are often not “fresh” but are made with a variety of dried chiles and spices and even bullion cubes. The result can be mesmerizing. It’s not healthy per se, except that it makes your stomach smile.   

So while our symphony is imperiled, our libraries are under-funded, our galleries are barren or embarrassing, our newspaper is deficient, our wineries are insulting, and so on—despite all of this, there is a nice little culture here that lies just beneath surface that tourists and critics seldom see, and I take the SD-style burrito for it’s emblem. Two burritos crossing over a Gharibaldi for our crest.