There’s a Much Better Type of Burrito Out There. You’re Not Supposed to Know That It Exists.

Of all the nefarious exports that have flowed from San Francisco over the past few decades—the Big Tech hegemony, the NFT bubble, the Golden State Warriors—the one I find most oppressive is the Mission-style burrito. The dish was developed in the 1960s by the taquerias in the city’s Chicano-heavy Mission District, and if you aren’t from the greater Southwest, then there’s a good chance that its recipe serves as your basic comprehension of the burrito’s culinary form. It’s constructed out of a flour tortilla about the size of a trash can lid, and it’s loaded up with heaping ladlefuls of beans, rice, salsa, and your preferred south-of-the-border protein before being wrapped into a carb-saturated parcel sheathed in foil.

If this formula sounds familiar, it’s because Mission-style burritos are extremely popular. They’ve become the marquee item at every major fast-casual Mexican chain in America—Qdoba, Chipotle, Freebirds, and so on—all of which have relentlessly colonized the nation’s strip malls, airports, and soulless beige subdivisions. Some foodies have even gone so far as to argue that the Bay Area burrito-making tradition has become California’s sacred dish—enshrined like the Philly cheesesteak, Texas brisket, or a pepperoni slice from a greasy New York pizzeria. But that, my friends, is a tragedy because a far superior burrito hides in plain sight a couple of hundred miles down Interstate 5. I speak, of course, of San Diego’s own “California burrito.”

Like the Mission-style burrito, the California burrito is built out of a gigantic flour tortilla, but rather than defiling it with a dull, dehydrating base of beans and rice, San Diego’s culinary conventions are, in a word, moist. The burrito’s contents vary depending on the restaurant, but they generally include gratuitous scoops of guacamole, cheese, sour cream, and salsa nestled beneath freshly blistered carne asada still dripping with marinade. There is no filler in a California burrito, no chaff to artificially expand the dimensions. The only moisture-soaking agent in the recipe is a pile of french fries—yes, french fries—that are mixed up in the milieu until they become swollen and gummy. It’s a foodstuff that is both sinful and obscene. It tends to run around 1,100 calories. It’s also, by far, my favorite thing to eat on planet Earth.

And yet, despite all of that vulgar splendor—and the uniquely American desire to insert french fries into every epicurean language—the California burrito has not penetrated the wider world beyond San Diego. If you wish to luxuriate in its sublime blend of fat and acid, you’ll be out of luck outside Southern California, to say nothing of the brutal San Francisco imperium and its relentless interstate transfer of inferior Mission-style anathemas. No, the greatest burrito America has ever produced is eternally imprisoned in the corner of the Pacific coast. Someone, or something, is holding it back.

The burrito, as a calorie-delivery system, has been subject to constant regional reincarnation for as long as it has existed in North America. The original dish—a loose wrap crammed with a whatever-you’ve-got assemblage of proteins and vegetables—likely originated in northern Mexico in the late 19^th century, but since then, imaginative cooks have treated the tortilla like a canvas. There are the sloppy Tex-Mex burritos, with crimson peppers and melted cheese slathered atop the tortilla’s broadside, which are often served in a saucer to collect the tangy spillover. Farther west, you can find the Arizona-native chimichanga—a burrito dunked in a deep fryer in order to achieve artery-calcifying decadence—and the breakfast burrito, a staple of New Mexico, with its cornucopia of fluffy, diner-style scrambled eggs and Hatch chiles swapped in for the lunchtime condiments. Your personal preferences will likely be tied up in your own geographic adjacencies, which is why I must disclose that I am unfathomably biased. I was born and raised in San Diego, and more or less subsisted off California burritos until I left for college.

“In San Diego, back in the 1980s and 1990s, you saw this shift with young white residents who were suddenly totally cool with Mexican food,” Gustavo Arellano, a food journalist and the author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, told me. “It was a generation shift. You can blame the San Diegan surfers. It made sense that the burrito caught on there, more so than tacos or nachos. You order your California burrito, hit the waves, and when you get back, it’s still going to be warm and delicious.”

The dish is hard to avoid around town. Like San Francisco’s overwhelming selection of Mission-style eateries, the streets of San Diego are tiled with hundreds of Spartan taquerias that cater to the local taste. The typical Mexican–American takeout spot in San Diego bears a name that ends with the genealogical suffix -berto—Alberto’s, Hilberto’s, Adalberto’s—and Roberto’s Taco Shop, which celebrates its 60^th anniversary this year, was among the first to perfect the California burrito’s volatile chemistry.

“In the ’90s, we started getting customers requesting the California burrito. It was a novelty back then. I distinctly remember asking a customer, ‘What is that? What’s a California burrito?’ They told me that it was just a carne asada burrito with french fries, so we had to adapt,” said Jose Robledo, the second-generation owner of Roberto’s. “Our original version was just carne asada, fries, cheese, and sour cream. It blew up.”

Roberto’s Taco Shop currently operates more than 80 locations, many of which are strategically positioned around San Diego County. Robledo told me that his clientele often assumes that his restaurant was the progenitor of the California burrito, which isn’t exactly true. The origins of the burrito have been contested for years: Some claim that a defunct chain known as Santana’s first came up with the idea of stuffing a fistful of fries into a tortilla, while Robledo himself asserted that a restaurant belonging to one of his family members—the exceptional Lolita’s Mexican Food—can rightfully claim a patent on the beast. The real story will likely be clouded by folklore forever, which is a common saga in hyper-regional cuisine. (After all, nobody is certain who invented the Mission-style burrito, or even the burrito writ large.)

Creation myths aside, there is no doubt that Roberto’s has been a singular force in the popularization of the dish. When Robledo’s father opened the first Roberto’s in 1964, his family members immigrated across the border to San Diego in order to work in his kitchens. Eventually, some of them branched off and opened their own dining rooms, initially doing so under Roberto’s name. As time went on, they switched to subtle phonetic permutations of the original brand—like the aforementioned Alberto’s—while keeping essentially the same menu. “They had no problem covering up the R-O and the A-L,” Robledo said. By the 2000s, the scions of Roberto’s empire had thoroughly reseeded San Diego’s counter-service infrastructure. Today no burrito within city limits is complete without a pupil-dilating shock of crystallized potato.

Roberto’s has expanded as far east as Texas, but if you’re looking for a California burrito in other enclaves of the nation, you will likely be funneled into a hipster-ish boutique that offers a loose approximation of laid-back San Diegan cooking at a bougie tax. (Case in point: I live in Brooklyn, and if I want a California burrito, my best option is an East Village joint laden with reclaimed wood and custom neon that sells them for $14 a pop.) Compare that to the proliferation of the infernal Mission-style burrito, which, again, can be reliably sourced anywhere from Toronto to Miami thanks to the besieging forces of Chipotle and Qdoba. If this is an intrastate culture war, then San Diego is getting blown to smithereens.

“When my kids were in high school, I spent a lot of time at Chipotle. My kids loved it. When you mention burritos or Mexican food to most people, they automatically jump to Chipotle,” said Robledo when I asked him about the overwhelming Mission-style dominion. “The Mission District is in close proximity to the high-tech areas of Silicon Valley. There’s a lot of money there. There are people networking or building startups or moving on to bigger things. I think that’s why Chipotle was born, and that’s why that style of burrito is so prominent.”

Robledo might be onto something. The reason why San Francisco–style Mexican food is so prominent, while its San Diego counterpart is not, may come down to simple math. Chipotle is worth $74 billion, thanks in no small part to a controlling investment by McDonald’s in 1998 that supercharged its growth. The chain now has more than 3,000 locations across the United States, with no signs of slowing its expansion. Last year, the company unveiled plans to open new eateries in small towns with populations hovering around 10,000, strengthening its vise grip on the American palate and, according to data harvested by the Wall Street Journal, depressing business at the other restaurants in its territory. That’s why local business owners sometimes treat the prospect of an invading Chipotle like the grim reaper. In 2022, when the company was gearing up to put down roots in East Harlem’s Little Mexico district, a community board meeting passed a resolution recommending that the city reject Chipotle’s liquor license as a last-ditch defense.

“Out of all the blocks they could’ve gone to, why did they have to choose 116^th Street?” said Pilar de Jesús, vice president of the neighborhood group East Harlem Preservation, per Patch.com. “As a Mexicana-Puertorriqueña, it’s disrespectful to my culture.” (The Chipotle did eventually open as planned.)

But despite that backlash, the fact remains that for a lot of Americans, from San Diego to New Haven and everywhere in between, Chipotle has become effectively synonymous with good Mexican eating. When the Wall Street Journal interviewed Mary Hawkins, the mayor of Madison, Mississippi—one of the tiny population centers Chipotle has in its sights—she said the town had recently polled its citizenry about the brands it would most like to see take up residence on its streets. Chipotle, perhaps unsurprisingly, came in first, and Arellano does not see that trend slowing down.

“It’s like Galactus from Marvel Comics. It’s eating up burrito cultures from across the country,” he said. “Chipotle taught an entire generation of Americans to eat a very specific style of burrito. If they want a burrito, they’re going to want the one they grew up with and neglect the other styles.”

Ironically, Chipotle’s repossession of the Mission-style burrito mirrors what happened to the homespun Chicano-owned taquerias that initially made them famous in San Francisco. When the Mission began to gentrify in the late 1990s—and the rents began to climb toward the unlivable ranges the city is notorious for today—the greasy-spoon burrito shops slowly evaporated under the shadows of the newly built high-rises. Replacing them were a series of mediocre, Caucasian-friendly eateries serving up an ersatz version of the Bay Area’s soon-to-be-world-famous burrito. Felipe Velez, a teacher interviewed by the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2000, reserved special contempt for a chain called the Green Burrito, a sister brand of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s.

“In ’79 and ’80, Anglo families were chased out of taquerias. There was no way there was gonna be any gentrification back then,” he told the paper. “At El Castillito [a Mission taqueria], they’re wearing uniforms now. They’re charging for chips and salsa. I will shoot my son and daughter if they ever order a Green Burrito.”

The fraught nature of these cultural and economic violations makes me wonder, if fortunes were reversed, and an uber-rich benefactor wished to invest in a San Diego–style Mexican outfit, perhaps the good people of Missouri, Minnesota, and North Dakota would finally thirst for the rhapsody of a tortilla swollen with french fries in the same way they pine for Chipotle. However, Arellano does wonder if the California burrito—with its appealingly generic name—is burdened with its own inherent branding problems. He cites a short-lived Mexican chain that bloomed out of New York during the 1990s, while San Diegan fry cooks were experimenting with the burrito’s potential. Its name? California Burrito Co. Naturally, the restaurant was serving hulking, bone-dry Mission creations—suffused with the accursed beans and rice—forever cementing an East Coast misnomer. You can’t really blame those clueless entrepreneurs. After all, Mission-style burritos do come from California, right?

“It’s a great term. ‘The California burrito.’ You’re encompassing the whole state,” said Arellano. “But they didn’t sell the California burrito we know today.”

It honestly is shocking how long the dish has flown under the radar. The first recorded reference to a California burrito—crafted in the way God intended—didn’t appear in a California newspaper until 2004, long after Roberto’s added the item to its menu. In other words, the California burrito has always been a neighborhood-scale institution, and maybe its lack of cultural penetration is less of a problem than the emergent reality: a centralized, high-tech burrito brand stomping out all other regional quirks and eccentricities in the name of bloodless, fast-casual supremacy.

Because here’s the ugly truth: Despite all the shots I’ve taken at the style, I actually don’t mind a Mission burrito. I’d never order one in lieu of a California burrito—God no—but sometimes a foil-wrapped missile packed to the gills with golden rice that glues to your guts like a barnacle can be exactly what the doctor ordered. Society is brighter when one culinary tradition is not choking another one out, and Robledo remains confident that someday, a San Diego Mexican restaurant will get its big break. “Our style is unique, our style is different,” he said. He’s waiting for the day the rest of the world falls in love with the California burrito. Trust me: It only takes one bite.