The Curiosity Order

I was staying in West Hollywood for the weekend. One morning, I woke up craving a breakfast burrito. There’s something about being in Los Angeles that makes me want one more than I would at home.

I ordered it on Uber Eats.

What arrived

Wake and Late, on North La Cienega in West Hollywood. Three breakfast burritos and one Juárez, four items, $55.00 of food that cost $75.59 delivered, after $8.49 of Uber One savings. Ordered at 10:37 on a Sunday morning, at the door at 11:05.

The breakfast burrito is twelve dollars and the menu describes it precisely: house organic tortilla, pasture-raised eggs, organic avocado, tater tots, cheddar, choice of sauce. Bacon is four dollars more, and it is a specific bacon. The menu says Neuske’s, the way a restaurant does when it is proud of a supplier. Two of ours came that way. All three came with cilantro crema. The menu marks the breakfast burrito as its most ordered item.

It was very good. The tots stayed crisp, which is the whole difficulty of putting tots in a burrito. The avocado was ripe without going to mush. The tortilla was toasted just enough to hold together.

Then there was the Juárez.

The one I ordered to find out

I added it for no reason except that I did not know what it was.

The menu is exact about it. House, organic tortilla, organic refried pinto beans, grass-fed mozzarella. Garlic crema, pickled onions and blistered chilies on the side. Three things in the tortilla, three things next to it.

It was delicious.

So the difference between the two is not care. The same kitchen sources both and says so about both, in the same words, on the same page. The difference is how much is in it. One is the breakfast burrito as a thing to add to: eggs, avocado, tots, cheese, a sauce, bacon if you want it. The other stops at beans and cheese.

The burrito is a northern Mexican invention, out of the wheat-and-cattle states and specifically Ciudad Juárez, and the northern format is small: a flour tortilla around one or two fillings. The version most Americans picture, big enough to need two hands and packed with rice and beans and everything else, is the Mission burrito, which appeared in San Francisco in the 1960s, a thousand miles north.

So the Juárez on that menu is not a callback. It is the older thing, still being made, sitting one line below the newer thing on the same list. Beans and cheese in a flour tortilla is what a burrito was before California got hold of it.

A shop selling the bigger version keeps the smaller one on the menu anyway. It would be easy not to. Somebody decided both should exist.

Why I ordered it

Because I was never coming back.

I was eating a regional food I cannot get at home. There was exactly one order to place, and no second visit to learn anything on. So I spent an extra $8.50 buying information instead of breakfast.

That is the opposite of the sushi place I have been going to since 2016, where I have ordered the same two things for a decade and never once looked at the rest of the menu. Same person. One place I go often enough that I stopped deciding; one place I would visit once, so I had to decide everything at once.

Both are reasonable.