I wake up hungry, most days. Not peckish, not in need of a little boost—hungry, immediately and completely, hunger as urgent as any alarm clock. The morning appetite is a different animal from its midday and evening counterparts; there is no growing anticipation, no gradual negotiation, no consideration of snacks or other stopgaps. This is partly why I so love a breakfast burrito. Two scrambled eggs on a plate can feel like nothing, a wisp of a meal, but wrap them in a tortilla and they change almost existentially: the burrito doesn’t increase the quantity of the food very much, but it increases the density of its intention. It is a splendid efficiency both in concept and in form, although, really, if I’m being honest, it is an efficiency in service of one thing above all else: the glory of the flour tortilla.
Not all flour-clad burritos make this case equally well. The Mission-style burrito, with its monstrous circumference and segregated ingredients, strikes me as a variation best loved by the people who grew up loving it. (To me, this particular torpedo is, well, torpid.) The Santa Fe burrito is a genuine pleasure—more restrained, built on a smaller scale, with green chile doing the complex, vegetal, low-burning work that other versions might leave to salsa—though, again, the tortilla serves its contents, rather than the hosannas going the other way. My real allegiance, if burritos can inspire allegiance, is to the northern-Mexican style, made with a modest amount of filling and rolled into a consequentially narrower cylinder.
I can trace the origin of my appreciation of the northern-Mexican-style burrito, or at least its sharpest articulation, to one photograph. A few years ago, the food writer Ruth Reichl shared an unadorned overhead shot of a single, slender specimen on a plate next to a few long peppers and a little sidekick of salsa. The pale tortilla was dappled with shades of brown, toasty and tawny—simplicity, done superlatively. Alas, for Brooklyn-dwelling me, the burrito in question was from Burritos La Palma, a SoCal-based micro-chain whose Zacatecan-style burritos inspire uncommon passion in Angelenos, including the late food critic Jonathan Gold. But, in a caption, Reichl mentioned that the burritos were available via mail-order, from Goldbelly—at $89.95 for eight, which is either an absurd price or a perfectly reasonable amount to pay for transcendence.
Thankfully, New Yorkers have recently been freed from the agonizing personal calculus of whether to air-freight burritos across the landmass of North America. Flour tortillas have been having a moment here for a while, and now the trim, tortilla-forward northern-Mexican burrito has stepped into the spotlight. At Vato, in Park Slope—which, blessedly, opens at seven in the morning—the tortillas are thin and rich, with chewy interiors and a flaky, blistered outside from the heat of the flattop. Vato’s tiny storefront is austere and modern, an aesthetic that extends to the burritos themselves, which are long, lithe roll-ups with a sort of gamine appeal, svelte as a Virginia Slim. My standard order is the bean and cheese: soft, warm, subtly rich, with a bit of tang from asadero cheese. A more breakfast-oriented option contains an inspired combination of silky scrambled eggs, cheddar, and shreds of smoked brisket, a tender, sweet, complexifying alternative to bacon or chorizo.
