Burritos are Coming

Something very exciting is happening next week.  A Chipotle is opening in Latham, less than ten minutes on the Northway from Albany.

This town needs a Chipotle.  Badly.  We also need a Trader Joe’s, but that is an entirely different subject.  The most popular burrito joint by far is a disaster of a place called Bomber’s.  And people love it.  But it seems they mostly love it because they are drunk and/or stoned at the time.

I love Chipotle.  Maybe that’s a bit too strong.  Maybe not.  Let me try it this way.  I love what Chipotle tries to do.  Especially the part about using happy meat.

Next week before the official opening, I am going to a tasting at Chipotle, where apparently I will learn more about their “farmers and ranchers across the country” who provide their high quality ingredients.  My hope is to use that opportunity to see how much of this is marketing, and how much is legitimate.  (Apparently in our modern age, I am considered to be a member of the media, and thus get asked to attend these events.  Who woulda thunk?)

It all sounds good on paper.  And part of me wants to accept the company line and not ask too many questions.

They say:
All the pork and chicken Chipotle serves is naturally and humanely raised (an all vegetarian diet, no added hormones or antibiotics and responsible animal husbandry).
And
All the East Coast Chipotles serve naturally raised beef.
Also
Its sour cream and cheeses are made from milk that is rBGH-free (recombinant bovine growth hormone).

Certainly they do a very good job using all of my hot-button trigger words.  This is exactly what I was talking about in food versus restaurant food and what got my ire up in the yogurt aisle.

My guess is that once they are open, they will have more throughput of happy meat than all of the other high-end restaurants in the region combined.  Not because I am expecting a perpetual line around the block, but because there is so little of this high quality meat available at any price around here.

And at Chipotle, you can walk out with a burrito filled with the stuff for well under $10.

Let’s focus on the burrito part for a moment.  And let’s take my perspective out of the mix, because I am clearly biased.  Plus I have been living in a burrito wasteland for far too long.

There is a dedicated group of burrito lovers who are more obsessive about the form than I could ever be.  They have a site that is dedicated to reviewing all the taquerias in San Francisco.  Every burrito they eat goes through a twelve-stage evaluation.  In theory the top score would be a 10, but to date the highest scoring taqueria has earned only an 8.82 (for comparison’s sake the lowest is 5.67).

Competing against the best and most authentic burrito specimens in the burrito capital of the country, Chipotle’s downtown location scored a 7.42 – ultimately brought down by the bland white rice that I wholeheartedly agree is the weak link of the restaurant’s ingredients.

That’s a respectable score, for what its detractors deride as “just another chain.”

B-Day is Friday, November 6, when the doors open to the public at 2 Wade Road (just off Troy-Schenectady Road) in Latham.

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Heads up.  The Profussor is going to Washington D.C. later today.  My copyeditor has a conference (oddly not copyediting related).  There may be some unexpected disruptions of service over the next few days.  Thanks in advance for your understanding.  It may be a great time to catch up on the archived posts you somehow missed the first time around.