Confessions of Dr. Burrito

It’s been a while since I last posted. It was a while before that. The truth is, this web stuff is a lot harder than most people–including me–thought it would be. Especially if resizing and uploading photos is about as fun for you as cleaning dog shit out of your shoes.

So what am I saying? Well, most of the feedback I get from this site is from a guy hawking something called Tramadol in South Florida. There have been great moments, but overall, I feel like I’ve let you down–which is perplexing because I also feel like “you” often don’t exist (and my google analytics verify that)–which is also my fault. Ahg! So you see my predicament?

I love burritos. I’m still eating a few a week, and I don’t see that changing. I thought through this site I’d make some discoveries, and perhaps I shall. But progress is slow due to my lack of intertia and time and the nature of insights. The insights I have gained have been small. (Did you know that at El Porvenir, the oldest continuously run restaurant in San Diego, they began making salsa out of dried chilis because the proprietor, who confessed this to me, was lazy and didn’t like fresh ingredients that would go bad, so she banished them from the kitchen? That’s amazing, to me.) I thought I’d do a trip to Sonora and discover the origins of the gigantic wheat tortilla. I thought I’d go to TJ and taste around down there. LA too. I thought I’d figure out where this form came from and share that insight. I haven’t really done that, and I’m not convinced that anyone besides me really cares or that I have the time or will to convince anyone why they should care.

(Quickly: you should care beacuse this form of burrito is unique to this region and that alone says something, profound I think. Because our oldest restaurants are Mexican-American, our culture is Mexican-American, and this food product is a way of examining both sides of the border and how they’ve come to be for the average, burrito-eating person–not through the lens of politics or monied interest or any of the other vantages that typically hog our history. This is ultimately about us in San Diego now. And goddamn they taste good.)

So, if you do check in here from time to time, the theme is going to change–if there’s to be a theme at all. I have the site, might as well use it. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to the night. That’s all right. Better than spitting into the wind!

Paz, C