Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  The Mission burrito is a thing so fused to California’s relationship with Mexico that its evolution is nearly impossible to chart. You can see the embryo of it in the burrito de carne, the rolled taco of Sonora in northern Mexico. It’s plausible that some version of that spread to California through proximity. But the Mission burrito is specific to San Francisco, and a thousand miles of mutation separate these from the ones in Sonora.

  San Diego has what it calls, with bombast, the California burrito. It matches in heft, except its bulk comes from fries, which kicks it closer to drunk food. The breakfast burrito, reportedly born in Santa Fe in the 1970s, is a hyperbolic blowup of Austin’s breakfast tacos. And the Tex-Mex wet burrito, ladled with enchilada sauce, is a clunky scan of enchiladas suizas. Simply put, California’s burritos are better than other states’ burritos, but none are as good as San Francisco’s. (I’m aware of the controversial nature of this truth.)

  Los Angeles has spare, delicious burritos, sometimes only beans and meat, like the frozen ones you buy at 7-Eleven. San Francisco hardcores say they’re weak; Los Angeles hardcores think Missions are vulgar. Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold once called San Francisco burritos “monstrous things wrapped in tinfoil, and filled with what would seem to be the contents of an entire margarita-mill dinner.” It’s hard to defend the aesthetics, except that a good Mission burrito requires talent. It’s as dependent on proportion, balance, and ingredient quality as pastrami on rye or a bowl of ramen. It’s just… big.

  That girth has fueled their appeal since the beginning. Burritos are Chicano roots food, born as rations handed out to pickers at the huge produce farms in the central state. In the 1960s, restaurant consultant Peter Garin was working the lettuce fields. “I remember the texture of the shredded beef,” he told SF Weekly in 1993, recalling field burritos, “the heat of the green peppers, and the proper proportion of rice and beans.” You didn’t need a fork, or even clean hands.

  Taqueria La Cumbre is one of two places in San Francisco that says it invented the Mission burrito, down to the exact day: September 29, 1969 (the other, El Faro, claims an earlier date: September 26, 1961). La Cumbre’s Number Six, a regular with carne asada, was my burrito initiation. It was back in the 1980s; I had moved to San Francisco from Berkeley with a few crates of English-lit paperbacks and some Hefty bags of clothes.

  That carne asada burrito was one of the first things that sold me on the potential of cheap food. It demonstrated how a few basic ingredients can become perfected—unpolished, but perfected. You peeled back the foil and chewed at the compressed magma of grilled skirt steak with soft ranchero beans and rice rolled up in a flour tortilla with a slice of Jack cheese. It was large enough that you could feed like a ball python; after finishing, your body could forgo a few meals.

  Today I’m a couple of bites into the loose roll of carne asada, shedding pale amber rice onto my plate, and La Cumbre feels like a place with its best burritos behind it. Same for El Faro, its historic rival. San Francisco’s first generation of burrito creators is kind of like Madonna. The old fierceness is gone, but she’ll always have your respect, even when she face-plants on stage. Don’t worry, girl: In my heart, I’ll always pick you up.

  La Cumbre’s sign juts out onto Valencia Street, its heavy black Mexican Gothic font looking defiant, like a collarbone tattoo with three-inch letters. It’s at odds with the Valencia of 2016, a row of restaurants and boutiques with prim fronts and minimal signage, coding for the expensiveness within.

  Of course, as with the rest of San Francisco, there’s been a push to recast the burrito in upscale terms. In Hayes Valley, a central neighborhood that’s in the throaty flush of trending up, I order a duck confit burrito at Papito Organic Mexican Cuisine. When I take a bite, it spills a pile of duck slicked with sugary mole, unloading so much confit that I worry about the number of birds compelled to sacrifice their legs. It’s not bad, but it smears the original, dresses it up in a summer-weight linen blazer to accessorize the Mission right the hell out of it. I notice that the guys cooking are behaving just like the ones at El Farolito, though the confit they’re heating up is a dubious update of crisp carnitas. Good for them, I think, working their way up. But I wonder what they think of this burrito.

  Another, bleaker, version is a burrito I sample at ground zero of the tech capital that San Francisco has become: Twitter’s headquarters. The Mission burrito is a pillar of that company’s origin story. In 2006, lore goes, Jack Dorsey and a couple of buddies ordered burritos. It was then, while peeling back the foil, that Dorsey shared his vision for the social network. (Now Twitter’s CEO, he declined to be interviewed for this story.)

  The Market is a public food hall on the ground floor of the Twitter building. I order a chipotle chicken burrito from its taqueria, Taco Bar, and find a table outside. As millennial tech workers cruise by in their workout gear—guys wearing Vans with high socks, backpacks with logos for companies like Uber and Optimizely, vintage striped basketball shorts—I face the worst burrito of my life. The tortilla is stiff and cold. I get a mouthful of frigid sour cream in one bite and then slack white-meat chicken embalmed with cumin. I drop its heavy remains in the compost can, pick my way past young bearded guys wearing chambray shirts, and escape.

  Bearded bros are nowhere in sight on the Mission Street sidewalk in front of El Castillito. There’s only a mighty cliff of a man, sucking at the remaining inch of what must have been an epic blunt. Nearby, businesses sell car insurance and cheap bleached jeans—this is the kind of place where the Mission burrito was nurtured.

  Since the 1950s, when the neighborhood started to change from Irish and Italian to Mexican, the Mission has been a place known for its texture. There’s physical texture, in the crates of bruised plantains and shiny yuca fronting corner markets. But also cultural: the overlap of Latino and gay, wealthy and not, tagged-up and mural-covered. It’s the San Francisco of cultural compression, which is the best San Francisco. You can’t blame Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and all those condo buyers for wanting to live here. It’s nice, and it’s got a real patina—despite changing demographics, classic places like El Castillito haven’t been squeezed out.

  Inside, a guy with a sparkly ear stud leaves the cash register, walks toward the ceiling-mounted TV, and flicks the remote at it. A telenovela flashes on. “Ay güey!” he says, clicking his tongue at the screen. He jabs the remote again and the Giants-Padres game stutters into focus. Half a dozen men slouching over burritos turn toward the screen, all speaking Spanish.

  The cook reaches for a gob of al pastor from a bin on the line, spreads it down a tortilla piled with orangey Mexican rice and black beans (“You want espicy or mile?” he asks, salsa ladle poised), then twists it in foil.

  El Castillito didn’t make it into FiveThirtyEight’s greatest-burrito bracket. But Gustavo Arellano, a member of the selection committee and author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, loves these burritos—so much, he says, that he felt they were too personal a choice to lobby for. Chef David Chang, another voter, stopped by after the bracket was set. “I don’t know,” he said at the time. “It might be the best burrito I’ve ever eaten.” Anna Maria Barry-Jester, the bracket’s author, called it the one that got away. I’ve been eating in San Francisco for decades, and I’ve never made it here.

  I feel sort of ashamed.

  I call Arellano to ask why a place that makes such good burritos has kept such a low profile. “Because it stayed resolutely working class,” he says. “There’s ones that become Instagram and Yelp sensations, and then ones that are better.”

  The pastor pork is crisp around its dark edges, chewy, animated by a charge of vinegar and heat that bucks like a gun in recoil. The rice has tooth, the beans a fine grain. There’s a satisfying tightness to the roll, it feels good in my hand, and it cost less than ten bucks. This could be the best Mission burrito in San Francisco. This could be the best Mission burrito in the world. Damn, I’ll go Chang one better: This is t
he best burrito I’ve ever eaten.

  Maybe it’s survived, with original Mission soul intact, by building enough of a wall to obscure it from the tourists, the techies, and the condo buyers. That’s some irony: The most authentic Mission burrito is also the most obscure. Long may it roll.

  I Want Crab. Pure Maryland Crab.

  BY BILL ADDISON

  From Eater.com

  As Eater’s restaurant editor and national critic, Bill Addison constantly eats his way around the country; with previous dining critic stints in San Francisco, Dallas, and Atlanta on his resume, it’s fair to say he’s an expert on the latest American food trends. In Baltimore, however, only one food satisfies his craving.

  The first steamed crab I pluck from the pile feels heavy in my hand, and I’m already content. The act of grabbing the shell smears my fingers with clumps of spices and coarse salt, but I don’t mind. As a native Marylander, everything about being here at L.P. Steamers, a crab house in Baltimore’s Locust Point neighborhood, feels familiar: its location in a tall, compact, red brick row house (Baltimore’s signature architectural style); the butcher block paper spread across the tables; the shoreline scent of seafood in the air; the thwacking and crunching as diners dismantle the spindly red bodies to eat them for lunch.

  I moved away from Maryland over 25 years ago, but if I don’t make it back to the state at least once a year for steamed crabs, I’m like a bird whose migration pattern has been disrupted. I’m unsettled in the world.

  But now I’m here, which is as it should be. I’m planted in front of a pile of swimmers, their raw blue shells turned brushfire-red in the steamer pot, a marvel of pigment and biochemistry. Ryan Detter, who covers restaurants for the Baltimore City Paper and writes the occasional Baltimore-themed Heatmap for Eater, sits across the table from me. This is our first meal together. We’ve met up to spend a few days gorging on classic Baltimore eats—especially crab, because it is high summer, and absolutely nothing tastes better on a sweltering day than buttery crabmeat zapped by sharp spices. Maryland’s official crab season runs from April to December, but late summer and early fall is when crabs are at their heaviest, sweetest, and most plentiful.

  Our server hustles by, and I call out the question that in my eagerness I forgot to ask when ordering. To me, it’s a crucial query.

  “Are these crabs from Maryland?”

  “Yes,” he says. “For now, our crabs are from Maryland.”

  For now. Meaning: When harvests of crabs fished from the Chesapeake Bay run low, or the prices become exorbitant, crabs may instead be overnighted from North Carolina, Louisiana, or Texas. This has become common practice in many Baltimore crab houses, and often the crabmeat used to make crab cakes and other local crab specialties comes from even farther afield. It’s how restaurants accommodate the appetite for Maryland’s most famous culinary tradition. Pollution and overfishing began taking its toll on the Bay’s blue crab population as far back as the 1960s, and restaurants have adapted over the decades by looking beyond the state lines.

  This year, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the blue crab populace in the Bay is more than 550 million, one of the highest tallies since the mid-1990s, due in part to a mild winter and recent crab harvesting restrictions. It seemed like an ideal excuse for me to spend some quality time in Baltimore, savoring the local catch at places like L.P. Steamers.

  It was about more than that, though, if I’m honest. I’ve been on the road for most of the past two-and-a-half years, reporting on the meals I eat in restaurants of all kinds across America. It’s the ideal life for a gluttonous wanderer like me, without question. But amid the heady dash toward constant, new-to-me experiences, I’d begun lately to feel a shimmer of loneliness, an ache to spend time in a place I know profoundly. That longing for connection ran deeper than me simply spending more time at my house in Atlanta, where I’ve lived off and on for two decades. I wanted to go home.

  Baltimore is where I fell in love with food, where my parents took me to restaurants with names like Haussner’s, Chez Fernand, and the Chesapeake—icons that no longer exist. Before weekend dinners my brother and I would often cruise around the city’s Inner Harbor in a paddleboat, skimming along the urban coast while dusk settled and the lit-up skyline appeared as a glimmery reflection in the water. Our mother and father watched us from a cafe terrace, where they sipped white wine spritzers or scotch old-fashioneds. Then we’d head off to one of our favorite neighborhoods to eat, perhaps to Fells Point, with its cobblestone streets and cozy Waterfront Inn, or to cloistered Little Italy and its red-sauce stalwarts like Sabatino’s and Chiaparrelli’s.

  But I hungered all year for family crab feasts, for their mess and their overexcited fellowship and the happy delirium that settled in afterward. As an adult, I’ve zipped in and out of my eccentric, complicated hometown enough to still grasp its essential character. But I was returning now to slow down, to reacquaint myself with the summer humidity, the occasional Patapsco River breeze, and the local treasures pulled from nearby waters. It would prove to be something of a hunt.

  Baltimore is not a trendsetting food town. No national publication has proclaimed it America’s surprise number-one dining destination. No Ace Hotel will be opening imminently to skyrocket the city’s cool factor.

  I’m not implying that my hometown is a culinary backwater. It keeps pace with your typical midsize American metropolis. Resident food lovers embrace new restaurants interpreting global cuisines: Indian, Peruvian, Basque, Vietnamese, Dominican. You can find solid examples of sushi and ramen. Upscale stunners in Harbor East, the buzzy neighborhood du jour, serve fancy pastas and flaming saganaki; they nod to the local love of Italian and Greek cooking, reflecting two of the city’s most deeply rooted immigrant communities. (Every time the Greeks showed up on the second season of The Wire, I twitched with Pavlovian cravings for the spanakopita I scarfed in restaurants as a child.)

  If you’re celebrating a special occasion in town, I will readily send you to chef Cindy Wolf’s beautiful restaurant Charleston. Mix-and-match options for her tasting menus might include sweet corn soup with summer truffles, heirloom tomato salad with lime and saffron vinaigrette, and grilled Chesapeake rockfish with fresh artichokes and a carrot puree. I will urge you not to overlook the cheese cart stocked with rare finds shipped from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London.

  Really, though, what makes Baltimore a special place to eat is that the city itself transcends any notion of fashion. Maryland’s love of Callinectes sapidus—the blue crab—may be a cliché, but it remains the defining food of our collective identity. Our devotion is primal. Crab cakes show up on higher-end menus around town; locals, however, tend to gravitate to versions served with saltines or on sandwich rolls in bars, cafes, diners, and at long-standing food halls. And crab houses—which first emerged post–World War II on Maryland’s Eastern shore, often run by crabbers and fishermen or crab processing facilities—can be scruffy, chaotic affairs. The caked spices get under your nails. Your clothes reek of brine and beer. Filling your stomach crab by crab is a laborious process of demolition, though the effort makes the meal that much more satisfying. It’s wonderful.

  Of course, not everybody wants to work quite so hard for dinner. My dad, who has lived in the same Maryland county his whole life, relishes crab but refuses to dissect one. And the menus at crab houses have evolved over the years to accommodate all kinds of appetites and dispositions—including his.

  Two classic soups appear nearly everywhere: Maryland crab (a tomato-based vegetable soup flecked with lattices of crabmeat) and cream of crab (roux-thickened, usually, and best consumed hot and quick before it congeals into a gluey mass). In this age of mash-ups, some customers ask for the two soups “half and half,” and some kitchens comply; when I was growing up, to even conceive of mixing them in the same bowl would have been heresy.

  I did, thirty-plus years ago, witness the emergence of “crab fluff”—a crab cake dunked in an excess of batter a
nd deep-fried until it resembled a balloon-shaped funnel cake. The crab fluff at L.P. Steamers has actual merit: the meat inside tingles with sweet-hot spices, and the cooks toss extra wisps of crisp batter into the plastic serving basket for munching. Cream cheese–based crab dip shows up in myriad forms at crab houses: poured into a hollowed-out boule, spread across toast, as filling for potato skins, and, most notoriously, slaked across spongy pretzels, covered with cheese, and broiled. I doubt an exemplary version of the crab pretzel exists anywhere; it doesn’t mean I’ve stopped searching for it.

  These days most Maryland seafood restaurants oblige divergent tastes by, well, being seafood restaurants. Their menus may have crab at the center, but they also serve oysters (I prefer local varieties in the winter when they’re generally more saline), clams, scallops, mussels, and fish, mostly from other waters. I have no interest in any of this. I am here to feed a rumbling homesickness. I want crab. Pure Maryland crab.

  Picking apart a blue crab can be unnerving to first-timers. For me it is instinctual; performing the ritual lives in the lizard part of my brain. Watch my family tackle a heap of steamed crabs and you know who we are. My 90-year-old grandmother prefers her seasoning spare. My mother likes her spices bolder, and having grown up on a farm she is patient and steady with excavating every fleshy filigree. My father can’t sit still long enough to really engage. My brother rips into his share like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil, scattering slivers of shells and debris in his frenzy.