There is a burrito sold in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights that’s beyond cosmic, that’s as close to touching God while eating Mexican food as finding Jesus on a tortilla. It’s the Manuel’s Special at Manuel’s El Tepeyac Café, a ramshackle restaurant named after the hill where the Virgin of Guadalupe first appeared to the world. A small shrine to la morenita sits at the back of Manuel’s parking lot; Assumption Catholic Church stands just across the street, its stained-glass abstract mosaic of the Savior looking right at the eatery, like those invariably waiting in line on the sidewalk.
Manuel’s Special: five pounds, beans and rice and guacamole and sour cream and your choice of meat—juicy nubs of grilled chicken, carne asada burned into succulent charcoal, or best with machaca, shredded beef that sticks between molars for hours afterward, heavily spiced and just grand, wrapped in a flour tortilla that, if laid flat, can serve as swaddling cloth for a puppy. Many brave souls order Manuel’s Special with the intent of eating the mass on its own, but this cylindrical god1 is best enjoyed communally, sliced up and portioned out like the Holy Host.
Manuel Rojas runs the place, opened by his parents in this spot in 1952, serving burritos almost as long, and drawing thousands of visitors over the years. Although a Mexican eatery by genre, English dominates at El Tepeyac—third-generation Angelenos trekking for a post-Mass lunch as they have since childhood, or the children of Mexican immigrants, far removed from the native cuisines of their parents, settling for the Hollenbeck and the Okie, Manuel’s other famous burritos, merely as large as a policeman’s forearms.
But for all its fame, Manny’s giants aren’t nationally known. No, the true burrito of renown is in the north, in Los Angeles’s eternal civic rival, San Francisco. In a city as self-important as this one, one that residents and outsiders alike consider a beacon for innovation, hedonism, arrogance, and gluttony, it’s telling that one of the few restaurants in San Francisco with the audacity to call itself a lighthouse—that most indispensable of structures in seaside towns, the guiding light to safety and shelter for the lost—is Mexican.
El Faro—what else? “The Lighthouse” in Spanish—stands on the northeastern corner of 20th and Folsom Streets, on the edge of the city’s iconic Mission District barrio, San Francisco’s slice of America’s demographic jalapeño, in the area where gentrification has yet to sneak up. Every day at about noon, breakfast, or dinner, people come to sit on its uncomfortable, yellow-and-orange benches. The menu speaks of tacos, combo plates, even pupusas in a nod to the Mission’s Central American community, but customers come for the burrito—not just any, but the ur-burrito, from the agreed-upon birthplace of the Mission-style burrito, the gift wrapped in foil, hefty and fat, that now dominates the United States.
The original sign still stands outside—orange backdrop, black-and-white lighthouse, with “El Faro” in the searchlight pointing downward, toward the entrance. But the most distinctive part of the restaurant is a tiled mural decorating the wall above everyone. It’s a city-wide party. A city celebrates. And on both sides of the wall, a lighthouse beckons the world in. Photos of celebrities ring the wall—Willie Shoemaker, Hollywood stars, and a complete charro outfit worn by ranchera icon Vicente Fernandez, intricately embroidered sombrero, belt, and gold-woven suit hanging in a display case like the Shroud of Turin.
You enter through the doorway, go to the end of the tiny, narrow restaurant, and pick up your drink from upright coolers. The kitchen is in plain view, separated from the eating area only by a counter and chest-high glass panels. Place the food order—burrito, of course, and your choice of meat. Everything? A woman places a giant flour tortilla on a press, just enough so it heats and the glutens inside the flour tortilla loosen, allowing the disc to stretch without ripping apart—a necessary attribute, as will soon become apparent. She grabs the tortilla, moves to her right, and lays it flat on the counter, ready to adorn it with toppings—a bed of beans, a tundra of rice, a spoonful of meat, all grabbed from heated trays in front of her. Soon comes a rain of cheese, dollops of sour cream and guacamole, a jungle of shredded lettuce, items in containers laid out in front of her that she scoops up with spoons, as fast as in a game of Whac-a-Mole.
The worker moves east to west through this Station of the Burrito, speaking with other workers but never stopping her benediction, waiting for the worker in front of her to move on to the next step. It’s the Miracle of the Loaves, the burrito becomes fatter, bigger, a mount. Edible origami is the finale: ingredients in the center, the worker folds one side of the tortilla three quarters of the way over the other, then tucks it all up like a Windsor knot. The excess folds at the ends of the new creation get poked inside and disappear. She puts the quivering mass in the middle of an expanse of foil and wraps the burrito in it. And again. Your double-wrapped superburrito is ready, placed on a plate, with chips on the side and salsa in a ramekin.
Eating the burrito is like eating a living, breathing organism—you can feel the burrito’s ingredients sigh inside with each bite, each squeeze. The foil acts as an exoskeleton that must cover what isn’t yet ready to eat—rip it all off at once, and you’re liable to eat a burrito plate as the contents explode and the tortilla flops open. Instead, eaters rip off the foil piece by piece, leaving the shimmering petals on the plate.
El Faro is one of more than a hundred such taquerias in and around the Mission. Pancho Villa, La Taqueria, El Castellito, El Cumbre (which claims they created the Mission burrito assembly line)—the rivalries are fierce, the natives argue online, in person, at the taquerias. The Mission-style burrito is a way of life. It’s also in danger of disappearing from its birthplace, even as its cult has turned into a full-fledged religion nationwide.
Mayans never ate burritos. Mayans never set up shop in Springfield, Missouri, as far as archaeologists have determined. But a metallic sculpture of one of the ancients, resplendent in flowing headdress, hand stuffing a burrito into his big-lipped mouth, now adorns more than a thousand restaurants across the world.
Some brothers of Tau Kappa Epsilon need to grub. It’s closing time at Chipotle Mexican Grill in Springfield, a tiny college town with a baseball stadium for the Double-A affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals, Missouri State, and little else. This is the type of town where the local business journal runs stories about Indian immigrants who run hotels and must deal with prospective customers who won’t stay at their hotels because of their ethnicity.2
But Mexicans are okay. The Tekes each order a burrito—one pork, one vegetarian, two shredded beef. “Black beans or pinto?” the worker asks. “Sour cream, guac, or both?” More questions; more answers. The Stations of the Burrito starts again, in Heartland USA. The tortilla press. The ingredients. The bundling of the babe in foil. Except this juggernaut is larger than anything you can find in the Mission. Other changes have happened, too: the salsa is milder. The music is Phil Collins and other 1980s classics instead of ranchera. Carne asada is now called “steak”; the meats, all organic and free-range.
Others rush in for last-minute takeout orders. They receive their burrito in brown bags with second-grade doodles. A floating, smiling pig face shouts via cartoon bubble, “¡Viva la Revolución!” Long live the revolution, the classic rallying cry of Latin America. But this coup call is different, the porcine Che calling for the humane treatment of his brothers.
Chipotle is now the second-largest Mexican food chain in the United States; in the past decade, its take on Mission-style burritos has come to define burritos in the United States, leaving other styles relatively unknown. It’s an unlikely ascendancy, though, because the burrito has been nationally available since the 1960s (the taco empires all served them) and has existed on the borderlands since the 1920s, when small meals known as burros crossed into Tucson from Sonora, the name the dish still goes by in that region. Yet we are in the midst of a burrito renaissance, one as unlikely as, well, a burrito in Springfield, Missouri.
Unlike the taco, the burrito wasn’t historically widespread in Mexico—indeed, it’s known only in the borderlands, and even then more specifically around Sonora and Baja California, where flour tortillas are preferred instead of corn. There is no known etymological origin for the term, or even where it was created—the story bandied around is that the name came from miners in Sonora who nicknamed their portable lunch after the donkeys taking them down into the depths. But Mexican dictionaries from the late 1800s place it as a food term used in the Mexican state of Guerrero.3
What is accepted is that the burrito, from its earliest days until just recently, has been a meal of the working class, the simplest of lunches: a tortilla, the morning’s leftovers, and nothing else. They were easier to transport than tacos made from corn tortillas, which harden shortly after heating; the flour tortilla, on the other hand, maintains a fresh flavor long after and easily yields to the ravenous incisors of the lumpenproletariat.
The burrito’s first widespread audience in the United States was braceros—the migrant workers who legally entered the United States from the 1940s through the 1960s under an agreement with the Mexican and American governments. Braceros depended on farmers and government for everything—their wages, housing, clothing, and food. Their handlers found it easy to make burritos en masse and hand out to workers every day to take to the field, relieving them of the responsibility of preparing fresh lunches; just leave it in foil and let the sun bake it naturally, and you have an instant lunch. “They had good housing; they had good food; they had the kind of food that they liked to have,” one farmer told an oral historian decades later. “The migrants knew they were going into a part-time job and they did not mind it. … It was a pretty fair thing they were getting and I don’t think they felt that they were being put upon.”4
That’s not how the braceros felt; for them, the burrito became an object of scorn. Most of them weren’t familiar with the item, as they came from central Mexico, where the flour tortilla, let alone the burrito, was exotic. “A bracero is given two burritos for his lunch,” noted a chronicler, incredulously noting cheese was added only “as a bonus. Can you imagine eating two bean burritos every noon hour for lunch?”5
“They were disgusting!” a bracero remembered decades later, saying the food was nothing like that in Mexico.6 In other cases, the portions were so meager and disgusting that famished braceros filled them with dog food.7
Burritos were personal meals, meals of pain and embarrassment. Stories of Mexican students from the 1950s and 1960s suffering burrito humiliation fill the annals of Chicano literature.8 Gerard Meraz remembers his mother’s embarrassment when her white classmates at Catholic school ridiculed the burritos she brought to class one day. “Because of the shame of eating [burritos], her mom switched to sending them to school with bean sandwiches,” says Meraz, a professor at California State University, Northridge.
While Mexicans struggled with their burritos of shame, Americans warmed up to them. It became a staple of Los Angeles’s catering truck scene by the late 1950s. Glen Bell included bean burritos in his original 1962 Taco Bell menu, and copycats followed. By 1964, the Los Angeles Times published its first burrito recipe, noting they were “beginning to be popular in our taco stands”; demands for that recipe moved the Times to republish it a year later.9 Southern California became the country’s burrito nexus, and the region’s many drive-ins and delis incorporated them onto their menus, whether in Mexican-American neighborhoods or not.
These burritos were straightforward—just beans, rice, some sort of meat, and maybe guacamole or sour cream. But mongrels arose, most famously with the Kosher Burrito, an ungodly concoction of a flour tortilla, heaps of pastrami, and cheddar cheese. Its birthplace is unknown, but logic points to Boyle Heights, a historic Jewish-Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles. It spread in popularity during the 1960s until reaching an apotheosis at Oki Dog, a run-down hot dog stand in West Hollywood that became legendary in punk circles during the late 1970s. Here, Okinawan immigrant Sakai “Jimmy” Sueyoshi created the dive’s namesake: two hot dogs, chili, cheddar cheese, pastrami, and grilled onions wrapped in a flour tortilla, grilled and served to hungry punkers and the brave who still stand in lines wrapped around the building for a grease-drenched end to their night.
Other competitors took Oki’s cue and served their own variations. Up north during this time, the Mission-style burrito was coalescing. The first one was born on September 26, 1961, a day after Febronio Ontiveros opened his grocery store, El Faro. During lunch, Ontiveros and his clan claim, a group of firefighters from the station a block away asked Ontiveros for sandwiches. He had just arrived from Durango, a state in central Mexico, trying to better his life. With no sandwiches but not wanting to lose business in his first week, Ontiveros asked the firefighters to return the following day, when he’d have something better for them.
He did. Ontiveros had eaten burritos in his youth, and knew that it was a staple of Mexican workers in the fields of California’s abundant Central Valley to the south. But he also figured firefighters needed more than a single order. When they returned as promised the following day, Ontiveros had positioned two flour tortillas side by side, spread the ingredients across the duo, and wrapped everything together; the fire-fighters took the creation back to the station and returned soon after for more. Other customers asked for that same remodel, and Ontiveros figured this Siamese twin wasn’t a onetime special.
Ontiveros found a tortilla factory and asked them to make a flour version much larger than what was generally available at supermarkets at the time, the better to create his new find. The rest, as they say, is historia. El Faro spawned imitators across town and became a multi-million-dollar mom-and-pop still run by the family. “I’ve been able to demonstrate what can be done in this country with a good idea,” Ontiveros told a Spanish-language newspaper years later.10 Others further innovated the art of burrito-building in the Mission. El Cumbre claims they innovated the assembly line, with owner Raul Duran getting the inspiration to enter the business after “a friend from Los Angeles told him that people there were making money selling them.”11 By the 1980s, the foodstuff was a Mission mainstay; by 1990, more than a hundred Latino restaurants operated in its few blocks, almost all of them serving burritos in the same fashion.12
Such a unique, specific means of production inevitably emerged in the Mission, according to John Nuño, a Mission native and reporter. “It’s the working-class background of the neighborhood, the ethnicity of the Mission’s Mexican immigrants, the scale of the neighborhood, and San Francisco’s transformation into a technology hub,” he says. Historically, the main restaurant customers were blue-collar stiffs “who don’t have time to sit with plate of carne, beans, and rice. And for working people, who often don’t have much money to spare, cost is important. A burrito is a full meal that can last a long time.”
He also points to the district’s compact nature, which forced kitchens to stretch out in their narrow spaces from front to back and offer cheap, fast meals lest impatient customers just walk over to a taqueria next door. But the Mission burrito didn’t draw non-Mexicans in earnest until the late 1980s, when a new wave of immigrants—young, mostly white professionals—moved into the barrio, drawn by its cheap rents and vibrancy. Travel guides mentioned them as a regional marvel, drawing more first-timers to the Mission. One of those young migrants was Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle.
Ells grew up in Indianapolis before moving to Boulder during junior high. His wasn’t a family that favored fast food, though he admits to “sneaking out with my dad and eating crispy tacos at Taco Bell.” At home, “my mom used to fry corn tortillas for tostadas, with the ground beef and diced tomatoes and slices of avocado and shredded yellow cheese, and that was like the American taco.” For seasoning, instead of hot sauce or chilies, the family used cumin or oregano.
Upon moving to Colorado, the family entered an area with its own unique Mexican food. The southern part of Colorado had been colonized by Spain in the 1600s but didn’t get settled in earnest until the mid-1800s, when New Mexicans moved into the southern part of the state, in the San Luis Valley. Much of New Mexico’s culinary influence made the journey as well—the use of chile, mutton, and an appreciation for adovada (marinated pork). From this foundation, Colorado-Mexican cuisine evolved. The chile turned into more of a gravy, almost indistinguishable from nacho cheese to the outside eye but fierce, verdant, a Rocky Mountain ratatouille with pork bits, tomatoes, jalapeños, diced green chile, salt, and red chile powder, a soothing balm to guard against furious winters. The chile rellenos became smaller, sometimes blanketed in an eggroll wrapper and filled not with actual cheese but Tex-Mex–style queso. Burritos also appeared, perhaps most innovatively, in a marvel called the Mexican hamburger: a bean-and-meat burrito with a hamburger patty inside, smothered in Colorado-style gravy, and served on a plate and eaten with a knife and fork.
Unlike New Mexico, Denver’s Mexican-American community also featured a large segment of recent immigrants who adapted their tastes to Denver’s unique Mexican food needs. In the 1970s, burrito vendors hit the streets of Denver—first in the city’s barrios, then on street corners around the multistory offices of downtown. These burritos were more in the Los Angeles style than San Francisco—large but manageable, and wrapped in foil to keep them warm. Some of those vendors asked office buildings for permission to peddle burritos from office to office, a phenomenon that continues to this day.
Ells enjoyed those burritos and the smothered variety while attending the University of Colorado during the 1980s, graduating with a degree in art history. He moved on to the Culinary Institute of America, finishing in 1990, and shortly after scoring a job as a line chef in San Francisco under Jeremiah Towers, one of the pioneers of California cuisine. On his day off, Ells and a friend visited the Mission to try its famed burritos for the first time; he can’t remember which burrito spot they visited, but he still remembers his original sin.
“I unwrapped it completely from the foil, and my friend said, ‘No, no—wrap it back up,’” he says, laughing. “For me, forever, a burrito was from a plate and smothered in green chile. This was something completely different. It was delicious. And I started to eat them often.”
He had ambitions of opening an upscale restaurant back in Denver but had no way to fund it. But seeing the lines snake around the Mission’s many taquerias, viewing the Fordian assembly line methodically prepping the burritos without any loss of quality, hundreds throughout the day—“Each one at five bucks, they’re making some good money here,” he remembers thinking. “That’s what I’ll do—I’ll start one, but put my own twist.” Ells returned to Colorado and experimented in the kitchen.
Chipotle Mexican Grill opened for business in a former ice cream shop near the University of Denver in the summer of 1993 with the help of an $85,000 loan from Ells’s father, who was so skeptical of the idea that he required his son to draw up a business plan. Ells wasn’t the first person to try to introduce the Mission-style burrito to a non–San Francisco audience. In New York, Stuart Tarabour unveiled them at the Kitchen in the early 1980s, a takeout spot on Eighth Avenue; at about this time, another native San Franciscan, Mike Mercer, opened Harry’s Burritos and then Benny’s Burritos in 1988, which he promptly turned into a minichain.13 Chipotle wasn’t even the first Mission-style burrito to penetrate Denver. The previous year, Chez Jose introduced them to Denverites, much to their curiosity and annoyance. “When we first opened up, it was kind of funny—we had to explain to people what we were doing,” founder Dan Oholson told Westword. “They’d come in and say, ‘I want my burrito smothered.’”
Chipotle, on the other hand, became an immediate phenomenon. Ells told his father that he had to sell about a hundred burritos a day to make a profit; more than a thousand a day sold after the first month. Another Chipotle opened in 1995, and a third one soon after, with Ells still intent on using their revenue to open a formal restaurant. He dropped those plans after he had ten Chipotles, but people still ask when he’ll open his much-dreamed-about “real” restaurant. “I open three real restaurants every week,” he now replies.
But as he expanded and continued to experiment, Ells noticed a drop in quality in the products he used. One day in the late 1990s, as Chipotle readied for yet another expansion, he worked on a carnitas recipe but found nailing the flavors he sought hard, if not impossible. “It seemed that pork chops were better back in the day,” he says. “I was feeling the same way with carnitas—they really weren’t great.” He returned home and read an issue of The Art of Eating, a literary journal about the culinary world, with a profile of the Niman Ranch, a company that pioneered the promotion of organic, sustainably raised livestock. After tasting a sample—soft, juicy, nearly silky, nothing like what was readily available—Ells told his business partners he wanted to incorporate the meat immediately into Chipotle’s menu, but the number crunchers told him it was impossible.
The texture and flavor of the pork obsessed Ells. He visited the Niman Ranch farm in Thorton, a tiny town in the Iowa cornfields, then toured a factory farm. The latter sight horrified Ells. “These animals are so expressive and playful when outside; in these confinement operations, they’re just being tortured,” he says. “The bottom line was that I didn’t want my success or the success of Chipotle to be based on the exploitation I saw.”
A year later, Ells bought Niman Ranch pork for Chipotle. To keep the company profitable, he raised the price of a burrito by a dollar; sales not only didn’t suffer, they passed all previous records. “What it told me was that customers were interested in sustainable food. Then that begged the question—where did everything else came from?” He incorporated other naturally sustainable products into Chipotle, to the point that the company now serves more naturally raised meats than any food chain in the United States, convincing and pushing competitors to do the same—and endearing themselves even more to hipsters nationwide.
“People love Mexican foods because they’re craving exciting flavors,” he says. “A typical burger? A patty and ketchup and a bun. People want something different today. They want more. There’s something really great about the burrito in that people can make all different types of combinations of things. I can’t imagine people going down the service line and making a chile relleno. It doesn’t quite lend itself—same with the tamale. They’re delicious—I love them, they’re wonderful, but they’re something different. There is something great about burritos—because they’re customizable.”
Chipotle set off an American love affair for Mission-style burritos that continues. Its chief rival also is a Denver creation: Qdoba Mexican Grill. Tony Miller was an investment banker for Merrill Lynch who returned home and grabbed a bite at Chipotle. Company lore maintains that Miller proposed a business partnership with Ells, who declined. Knowing a great business idea when he tasted one, the Coloradan opened his restaurant in 1995. Instead of just burritos and tacos, Qdoba plays around with other Mexican foods, such as licuados (Mexican-style smoothies) and mole poblano, a style they label Modern Nouveau Mex.
“To me, it’s such a misunderstood cuisine,” says Ted Stoner, the director of strategic product development. It’s a long-winded title that means he’s the man trusted with keeping Qdoba relevant in an ever-changing Mexican-food landscape. “It took Chinese and Italian a lot longer to morph into regional inspiration because the immigrants didn’t saturate the country. With the population boom of people coming over the border, it’s allowed people to absorb them much faster.”
Qdoba lags behind Chipotle but isn’t an upstart, with about five hundred locations and expanding almost as rapidly as Ells. But Qdoba also is an unlikely guardian of the burrito’s honor in courts of law. In 2006, it tried to open a location in a Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, shopping plaza. It raised the ire of the Panera chain, which had a clause in its lease that prohibited any restaurants that specialized in sandwiches from opening in its Shrewsbury location. Panera tried to argue with its landlords that Qdoba fell under that category, since burritos were obviously sandwiches. When their landlords didn’t agree, Panera took them to Superior Court.
To bolster its case, Qdoba called a former USDA official who contributed an affidavit that stated, “I know of no chef or culinary historian who would call a burrito a sandwich. … Indeed, the notion would be absurd to any credible chef or culinary historian.” A judge agreed, noting in his decision, “A sandwich is not commonly understood to include burritos, tacos and quesadillas, which are typically made with a single tortilla and stuffed with a choice filling of meat, rice and beans.”
The case earned national headlines—who in the twenty-first century still thought the burrito was a sandwich?—and the Qdoba opened in Shrewsbury soon after. “Short story, it looked like a frivolous lawsuit and it was that,” Stoner says. Doug Thielen, former manager of nontraditional marketing and public relations for Qdoba, was working with the franchise group in Boston to promote them when Panera filed the lawsuit. “There was a little bit of surprise—people thought, ‘Really?’” he says, laughing. “With this country being immersed in Mexican food on a regular basis, you’d figure people would know this already. From a social media perspective, people still bring this up—it was great publicity for us. Legally, burritos now stand on their own.”
Burritos, while extraordinary, can bring trouble to those who aren’t careful. Hold it wrong, squeeze it a bit much, trust another to fold the flour tortilla that encases any number of ingredients, and the burrito collapses, its contents hopefully falling on the plate in front of the eater but more likely spilling across the chest in a grotesque spectacle of gluttony. Even wrapped in butcher paper, in foil, or some other superfluous sheath, this toothsome torpedo can make grubby kindergarteners out of the most refined men.
On the corner of Alvarado and Sunset in Los Angeles stands Burrito King, its logo a cute little donkey—a burrito—with a crown. Their chile relleno burrito nearly squirts congealed cheese if so much as a finger grazes it; it’s more dairy than wheat or even pepper, but legions of Angelenos work off hangovers with its loving caress. Colombian immigrant Julian Montoya bought the stand in the 1970s, tasting burritos in San Diego while stationed there for the navy. He positioned Burrito King during the 1980s to spread Los Angeles burritos nationwide and became a millionaire, establishing more than twenty locations from California to Texas to Colombia. But through a series of miscalculations, and, he says, thieving employees who took his recipes and money, Montoya was just reduced to this one Burrito King.
Los Angeles’s burritos never earned regional branding like San Francisco. But the burrito evolution continues. There’s the breakfast burrito, as an entity dating back to the 1970s—before then, Mexicans just called it “breakfast.” The wrap—a tortilla modified to take on a different flavor, such as spinach, then wrapped around tofu or other non-Mexican ingredients—emerged in the 1980s, eaten by people who wanted a healthier option than carb-heavy sandwiches. And there is another burrito emerging around the American Southwest poised to go national.
If you travel to San Diego, you will notice something odd: a subgenre of Mexican restaurants with the suffix -berto’s. Alberto’s. Adalberto’s. Nolberto’s. Roberto’s. Filiberto’s. Gilberto’s. Hilberto’s. All counted, there are more than a hundred such suffixed restaurants in San Diego County alone, with dozens more north, in Orange and Los Angeles Counties, nearly fifty in the Las Vegas region, and fifty more in Arizona and Utah—and this doesn’t count derivatives even more outlandish, such as Alberta’s, Albertaco’s, and Albatros. All are near-carbon copies of each other: a canary yellow/fire-engine red color scheme, a Mexican bandito logo, and a drive-through. Their menus feature tacos, taquitos (known in San Diego as rolled tacos), fries buried under carne asada and fistfuls of guacamole and sour cream, and burritos as sturdy as San Francisco’s. No frills, no add-ons, no fancy assembly line, just rapid-fire delivery. These -berto’s also prepare and originated the California burrito: the regular burrito, but now engorged with French fries: crunchy. It’s coming your way soon.
This informal federation is the legacy of one man: Roberto Robledo, the burrito Brahmin who never was. He was born in 1928 in San Luis Potosí, a state in central Mexico that historically didn’t have mass immigration to America like, say, Zacatecas or Sonora and thus didn’t influence Mexican food up here. Robledo signed up for the bracero program in the 1950s, bringing over his wife and seven children in 1957. The family settled in San Ysidro, a city right on the U.S.-Mexico border, but used it mostly as a base to follow the harvest seasons—apples, peaches, nuts, and more—up to the Central Valley and the Imperial Valley.
“My dad would always be working,” says Roberto’s son Rodolfo Robledo. “He always had construction work in the off-season. But all that traveling with [by then] eleven kids made Dad want to open his own business for the family, and a tortilleria came to mind, to stop the traveling.”
Opening a tortilleria so close to Tijuana and in the city where El Indio had attracted Anglos and Mexicans alike since the early 1940s was a risk. “There were people telling him, ‘What are you doing?’” says Rodolfo’s brother Reynaldo, who says with a laugh, he “thinks” he’s the eighth of his thirteen brothers and sisters. “‘Are you thinking right? There are tortillas across the border.’ But he was set on it and he did good. He didn’t let no one bring him down.”
Robledo bought two houses, one behind the other, turning the front structure into a tortilla factory in 1964 while housing his family in the back. Every morning, the children prepared tortillas before going to school; after they returned and finished homework, back to tortillas, with Rodolfo following his father on deliveries he made across San Diego’s Mexican restaurants, a large number of which called themselves “taco shops” because they served only tacos and burritos. Intrigued, Robledo opened his first restaurant, La Lomita, in 1968, and others followed. It wasn’t until opening the fifth restaurant, Jesse’s Place, in 1971 that Robledo’s wife suggested he rename the restaurants Roberto’s Taco Shop. Most Mexican restaurant owners named their eateries after themselves, so why not Robledo?
From the beginning, Roberto’s emphasized fast-food delivery with sit-down flavors. “Fast food was a lot better concept, a lot less overheard,” says Rodolfo. The first hit for Roberto’s Taco Shop was the Poor Boy: a bean burrito, nothing else, small and steaming, for a dime. Roberto sold so many Poor Boys, and opportunities for expansion emerged so rapidly, that Robledo brought over family, friends, and others from his birthplace of San Juan de Salado, his home village in San Luis Potosí, to work his taco shops. Some he brought over legally; others, not. Robledo taught them how to run an operation and left them to it.
In 1976, Robledo allowed his cousins, brothers Juan Diego and Alvaro Rodriguez, to open their own taco shop using the Roberto’s name. But the relationship soon soured—Robledo felt they weren’t following his freshness standards of making a daily batch of beans and rice—and he gave them an ultimatum: start following my orders, or stop using my name. The Rodriguezes changed the name, but wanted to keep their association with Roberto’s Taco Shop in the minds of customers. They bought a can of paint, changed the cursive R in Roberto’s into an A, and the O into an L; everything else was left the same. Alberto’s became even more popular than Roberto’s, and the Rodriguezes immmigrated more villagers from their hometown; those workers itched to open their own places but wanted the cachet of Alberto’s/Roberto’s, so they modified the name into the constellation of -berto’s of today.
And the expansion wasn’t limited to San Diego. In 1989, Roberto’s relative Filiberto Tenorio transplanted the Roberto’s template to the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, naming it Filiberto’s. Filiberto’s now has more than fifty locations across Arizona and the American Southwest—and this number doesn’t include its rip-offs. The domino effect emptied San Juan de Salado but brought back hundreds of thousands of dollars in remittances; it was the town the burrito built.
As the -berto’s evolved, so did the offerings. The burritos enlarged, to about the size of a Los Angeles version. Fish burritos appeared. Carne asada fries emerged. The Flying Saucer—a bowl made from a fried flour tortilla filled with beans, meat, cabbage, sour cream, and guacamole—was born. Neither Rodolf nor Reynaldo know who created the California burrito—“When I got my first restaurant in 1985, it still wasn’t on the menu,” Reynaldo says—but both acknowledge that one of the clone -berto’s was responsible. The Americanization of the burrito ensured that San Diego’s surfers mythologized their offerings and took them around the world, wherever there was a wave to catch.
All told, the number of -berto’s across the United States is into the hundreds and represents millions of dollars in annual revenue. But the Robledo brothers claim their father never felt betrayed. “He wanted to better the village,” Rodolfo says. “No resentment. I never heard that from my dad or mom. ‘There’s plenty of customers for everybody,’ he’d say.”
Not everyone in the -berto’s galaxy was as grateful. In 1998, operators of two Alberto’s successfully sued the Rodriguezes in San Diego County Superior Court for a broken contract. That same year, the Rodriguez brothers pleaded guilty to tax evasion and to convincing other Alberto’s operators to cheat on their taxes; a judge sentenced them to thirty-three months in federal prison. A couple of years later, Alberto’s newest owners sent cease-and-desist notices to all the knock-offs of the -berto’s brand, claiming it as their intellectual property. That went nowhere, however, as the deluge happened years before.
Roberto Robledo passed away in 1999 in Las Vegas, where he had opened more restaurants after noticing that the area lacked the Mexican cuisine to serve the immigrants and transplanted Mexican Americans from Southern California who were relocating in droves. Roberto’s numbers forty-seven in Las Vegas as of 2011; Reynaldo runs them and continues his father’s legacy, hiring people from San Juan de Salado and offering them opportunities to open their own Roberto’s. More might be on the way soon—Reynaldo says he gets at least five requests a month from across the country, asking when Roberto’s Taco Shop will set up in their state. “San Diego is a military place and a college place,” Rodolfo says. “We get young people from all across the United States, some who don’t know what a burrito is, or think they know what a burrito is. They go to Roberto’s, and they realize what a great product we make. And they never forget that burrito, and all the memories they have of them are [from] when they were young.”
The burrito, finally, turned into an object of upward mobility for Mexicans. But with more immigration, aspiring restaurateurs discovered that they didn’t have to rely on tacos and burritos anymore to ensure a livelihood. Once again, America wanted newer, better Mexican food.