The Curiosity Order

One morning, while staying in West Hollywood for the weekend, I woke up craving a breakfast burrito.

I ordered on Uber Eats.

The spot was “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, it was at the door by 11:05.

The breakfast burrito was twelve dollars and the menu described it precisely: house organic tortilla, pasture-raised eggs, organic avocado, tater tots, cheddar, choice of sauce. Bacon was four dollars more. It was a very specific bacon. The menu named Nueske’s. It’s rare I see the supplier named like this. I have to say it was interesting. We ordered two that way. All three came with cilantro lime crema on the side.

It was very good. The tots stayed crisp. If you’ve ever had tots in a burrito you can imagine my surprise. The avocado was ripe and chunky, not mush. The tortilla was toasted just enough to hold together.

The Juárez

I added it for no real reason other than I didn’t know what it was. Having a name like Juarez made me think there was something interesting about it worth trying.

The menu explains 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.

The tortilla had flavor of its own, which many tortillas don’t. The menu says why: housemade, fresh daily, organic regenerative flour, no preservatives or fillers or seed oils. The filling-to-wrap ratio seemed just right.

The three things it comes with are not garnish. I put them on each bite myself, a little heat and a little cream at a time. It made each bite different. My last bite was different from the first.

That’s one difference, and it’s not that one arrives finished. Both come with something on the side. The breakfast burrito comes with a sauce. The Juárez comes with half of itself. One you can dip. The other you can build.

To understand how we got here, I had to do some searching. The burrito is considered northern Mexican. Flour tortillas belong to the north, where Chihuahua and Sonora grow wheat and the south grows corn, and the northern format is small: one or two fillings, wrapped. Ciudad Juárez, on that border, has called the burrito its own for a hundred years. The version most people picture, big enough to need two hands and packed with rice and beans and everything else, is the Mission burrito. It appeared a thousand miles north in the 1960s, in the Mission District, San Francisco’s historic Latino neighborhood.

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.

Why I ordered it

Because I was curious.

I had already ordered the breakfast burrito I wanted. Then I saw the Juárez. For $8.50, why not?

So I ordered a second burrito I didn’t need just to find out.

It turned out to be beans and cheese. A very delicious beans-and-cheese burrito. A couple of people had a bite and I ate the rest. The information cost me $8.50.

Except that’s not what it really cost. The Uber One savings that morning came to $8.49. The burrito was $8.50. I’ve chosen to see that as a wash.

Have you ever done this? Something ordinary catches your attention and you want to know what it is, how it works, or why it’s there. Sometimes the answer is a rabbit hole. Sometimes it is beans and cheese. This time it was both.

That’s the opposite of a sushi place I’ve been going to since 2016, where I order the rainbow roll and miso soup. Same order for a decade and never look at the rest of the menu.

Same person. Both are reasonable.