Burritography

Tuesdays are $6.99 burrito night at Tortilla Coast. I did not know this fact before I met up with my girlfriend there tonight. Indeed, I hadn't even planned to eat dinner there. Just a drink. Maybe some chips and salsa. But the little square on the menu taunted me. Burritos -- regularly priced anywhere from $7.99 to $9.50 -- cost a mere $6.99 on Tuesdays. Tonight was Tuesday. And I had to have a $6.99 burrito. I had no choice. With apologies to Kanye West, like Chester the Cheetah needs Cheetos, I need burritos.

The Tortilla Coast burrito was about average -- certainly not the best I've ever had. That honor belongs to the barbecue tri-tip burrito (the "numero cinco") at Chilango's in Santa Barbara, California. A large tortilla is stuffed with grilled tri-tip sirloin, black beans, barbecue sauce, shredded romaine lettuce, diced white onions, salsa, and chiffonaded cilantro. When rolled up, the burrito is quickly rotated over the grilltop. When bitten, the slightly charred burrito shell bursts open, expelling into your mouth the aggregated scent and taste of all of Santa Maria.

Perhaps in memory of this burrito, I had ordered the barbecue chicken burrito at Tortilla Coast. This burrito was essentially nothing more than grilled chicken, peppers and onions wrapped in a large tortilla, which was then smothered in industrial-grade barbecue sauce and melted cheese. The barbecue sauce's sweet tanginess overwhelmed the burrito such that Tortilla Coast should rechristen it a "barbecue sauce burrito." Yet I ate the whole thing. If it were anything but a burrito, I might not have done so.

Although Columbia, Md., where I grew up, fancied itself a diverse social environment, its culinary options were anything but. Accordingly, my early dining-out experiences consisted of fast food, oddly outstanding New York-style bagels from the Bagel Bin, and Chinese take-out -- often from as far away as the China House in Silver Spring, about 25 miles away.

Whenever we got Chinese, my mother ordered moo shu pork. The moo sho pork required assembly from the contents of three separate packages. Inside the "white-paper-Enjoy!" box was the core part of the meal: shredded pork tenderloin with sauteed cabbage, wood-ear mushrooms, and bamboo shoots in soy sauce. A foil wrapper hid four small flour pancakes, each with the thickness of a crepe and the consistency of a fresh tortilla. A tiny transparent Solo plastic cup held a generous dollop of sweet hoisin-plum sauce.

To construct the dish, you placed a pancake flat on your plate and spread some of the plum sauce over it. After placing two large spoonfuls of the sauteed pork mixture in the center, you draped the nearest pancake edge over the top of the mixture, folded in the sides, and rolled up the lumpy cylinder. The moo shu pork was now ready for a good scarf-down.

The tightly packed moo shu pork inherently created a layering of flavors. And the stuffed pancake set the stage for my affinity for the similar burritos. The Chinese dish was merely an ethnic variation on a burrito. An egg roll is perhaps an even closer relative. European sandwiches, Italian canneloni, the Greek gyro ("Say yee-roh!") and North African brik are among its cousins, all created generally independently from a desire to combine multiple types of food in an easy-to-handle format. The burrito is a more recent entry in this genre, its origins in Northern Mexico in the early 1930s.

When I moved to Philadelphia for college, I began to frequent a local place called the Santa Fe Burrito Company. It was a far cry from the El Torito Mexican food of my youth. The ingredients were completely fresh, and the contents of the burrito were prepared when you ordered them. My favorite was the chicken mole burrito -- a multi-ingredient, slow-simmered concoction that veered between chipotle and chocolate, similar to the famous Oaxacan mole dish, which itself was an herb-based Jersey stir-fry. I don't know if it was great, but it was my first burrito, and I remember it as if it were momentous.

Not soon after I had discovered my love of burritos, my dad drove the car onto the sand during a winter family trip to Ocean City, Md. The car, which did not have four-wheel drive, got stuck, stranding us on the cold beach. After a tow truck extracted the car and sent us on our way, we searched for food and found a place called La Hacienda -- one of the few spots open in the quiet off-season. Starved, my brother and I each ordered a deluxe beef burrito -- a behemoth burrito the size of four Taco Bell burritos, but far more elegantly spiced (not to mention that the ground beef mixture wasn't prepared en masse in a trash can lined with plastic). The kitchen finished the burrito in the oven, providing it with a charred crust beneath a coating of cheese and pico de gallo. I was content, but I would later find out that this was still the child's play world of the burrito.

During law school, I made my second trip to California to interview with a federal judge for a clerkship in Santa Barbara. I had heard about the renowned Santa Maria tri-tip steak (California-speak for the bottom sirloin cut of a cow), but didn't want to shell out a staggering $20+ for a sample. As I walked down State Street for the very first time, I looked at the menus of the many restaurants that lined the thoroughfare. Chilango's offered a tri-tip burrito for around $5, and I jumped at the opportunity to try tri-tip. This burrito was ideal.

After I moved to California, I sampled probably hundreds of burritos. The ones I liked best were relatively unadorned -- grilled marinated meat with beans, cilantro, salsa, and onions. No cheese, no guacamole. You know, it's the notion that the Holy Grail was not gilded, but wooden.

Now that I live in Washington, a quality fix is harder to come by. Chipotle and Baja Fresh are quite excellent substitutes for the West Coast's real deal. But smaller, local outfits such as the hidden Well-Dressed Burrito and Tortilla Coast stand out simply because they are an oasis in the desert. But does it matter if the water is muddy?

My good friend from work recently moved to another one of the company's offices. She invited me out for lunch, and we ate at the Red Sage's Border Cafe. Among the daily specials, our server listed roasted duck enchiladas, which sounded quite appealing.

"What would you like?" the server turned to me and asked.

"I'll have the steak burrito."