Chipotle, the incompetent burrito shack.
Why I'm swearing off the unMexican grill.
American culture has a bad habit of cuisinial appropriation. All too often ridiculous ideas of international food take root in our country based on what amounts (at best) to a caricature. The classic example is chop suey—an entirely American dish that serves as the yard stick by which most Americans conceptualized allegedly Chinese cuisine.
This appropriation should not be mistaken with legitimate cases of culinary expansion that results in American versions of foreign foods. New York style pizza is an American food that doesn’t try to be anything other than American. Nor does the American version of French fries drape itself in the Tricolore. By contrast, most Americans still don’t realize that the crispy taco only exists south of the Rio Grande for the benefit of American tourists who can’t get anything else out of their head.
Don’t even get me started on the bastardization of coffee known as Starbucks.
Chipotle pretends to be Mexican food. It’s really Mexican(ish) shaped white Anlo-merican food. Why they bother to pretend is something I will never understand. Particularly in a modern day America filled with countless fusion concept restaurants, it would make so much more sense for a company like Chipotle to embrace the fact that it is nothing more than a Latin American inspired chain. Now that I’m thinking about it, the perfect slogan is right there: Latin inspired American.
It’s mine, now. Snooze, you lose, Chipotle.
Some people just can’t understand the power of honesty. They’d rather lie their way to a dollar than make an honest two. That mindset seems to permeate everything about the Chipotle experience, and it has for years. For an allegedly Mexican food joint, there’s no place on Earth where burritos are less competently made than Chipotle.
To fully appreciate how absolutely pathetic Chipotle burrito practice is, you need to understand what a burrito really is. Within Mexican food, the food names “burro” and “burrito” are basically regional names for the same food that is called a “taco” elsewhere. It’s believed that burro is the earlier word, and likely pointed to the use of donkey meat that was used in the tacos of certain areas. The term burrito would technically refer to a small burro, much like taquitos are small tacos. Over time a burro would come to use any kind of meat, but the local habit of fully rolling the tortilla contrasted with other areas where tacos with various meats were made by simple folding the tortilla.
Given that burros, tacos, and their respective -itos are all effectively the same food, and their the use of one or the other term by a Mexican had more to do with a speaker’s regional origin, Anglo-mericans struggled with a great deal of confusion trying to grasp what differences might define them. The American concept of a burrito eventually distinguished itself from the taco by retaining the wrapped form, often being fully enclosed, and (paradoxically) being larger than an average taco.
Just like Taco Bell invented the fried crispy tortilla to be used in a variation of the taco that fails to actually wrap its contents, Chipotle also invented tacos and burritos where side items (the rice and beans) go inside of the entree. And this miscarrage of culinary justice is the first step in Chipotle’s descent into gastric Hell. But would not be its last.
On its own, the idea of putting rice and beans inside of a taco/burrito might either be a silly example of American ignorance forcing itself upon another culture’s practices, or a clever way means of American innovation. If Chipotle had billed itself as Latin inspired American then the latter would have been the case. (Seriously people, copyright me. All rights reserved. I’m going to open a restaurant just to use that piece of linguistic gold, and I will sue your ass into oblivion if you steal my stuff.) Seeing as Chipotle claims to be a Mexican grill, the former judgement prevails.
Actually constructing the burrito is where the real travesty begins to take hold. Somehow every single Chipotle employee, no matter the location anywhere across the country, ends up being taught to slam the edge of the large, metal rice serving spoon right in the middle of the tortilla. This alone makes it nearly inevitable that the tortilla will tear apart. To make matters worse, in an apparent effort to trick the customer into believing they are getting a lot of food for their money, Chipotle teaches their staff to overload the tortilla with so much rice and beans that the burrito would already be overflowing if nothing else were added. Whatever else you want on your burrito, you should expect to be wearing it after the damn thing explodes.
It’s just stupid. There’s no reason for this at all. While rice and beans are cheap, and clearly an easy way to fill a burrito, nobody wants a rice and bean burrito. At least, if that’s what I did want, I would simply ask for a rice and bean burrito in the first place. And seeing as you’ve already set up the tortilla to tear apart by slamming it with a spoon, it’s hard to imagine how this can be a good idea unless you’re intentionally trying to ruin the food I’m paying for.
As bad as things are at this point, Chipotle isn’t yet finished finding ways to making as terrible of a burrito as humanly possible. As I’ve already explained, the essence of a burrito, whether Americanized or not, is in being wrapped. No destruction of the buritto would be complete without entirely botching the wrapping of the burrito. And this is where Chipotle fails the worst.
For years, customers have been watching Chipotle employees constantly pull and stretch tortillas before wrapping a burrito, in utterly stupid attempts to prevent the tortilla from tearing. It makes as much sense as drinking whiskey to sober up. And to help ensure that the tortilla will tear, they squeeze the contents as tightly as possible. Though perhaps the creme de la creme of burrito incompetence is the constant practice of wrapping the burrito perpendicular to its contents.
It sems that their only real goal is to avoid the tortilla from tearing while it’s in their own hands. When that happens, they have to deal with it. Once upon a time, they’d remake the burrito more carefullly. That gave way to dumping the contents of your burrito into a new tortilla (not a terrible alternative since it’s a shame to waste food, but in doing so they often end with the contents in a pile as opposed to a line, contributing to the stupidity). But in recent times that solution of choice has been to double wrap the burrito and call it a day. It’s often an even bigger mess. And hading a whole second tortilla means you’re now going to be eating a giant pile of bread and rice with a protein garnish.
The correct way to wrap a burrito is to gently fold a small portion of the top and bottom, to create a pocket that prevents the contents from falling out. Then fold one side over so that it cups the contents slightly snug. Complete by folding the second side, and rolling through to wrap the excess.
This isn’t difficult. Any idiot should be able to do it. Yet somehow Chipotle fails with more than 99% of the time. At least, that used to be the statistic, before COVID. Half the time, they don’t even wrap the burrito anymore. The most common practice by Chipotle employees is now to simply ball up the tortilla and quickly wrap up the resulting bur-bomb in foil. Two pieces of foil if the bur-bomb proves to be too large for a single piece. It always reminds me of how balling up fitted sheets always takes up more space than if you learn to fold them correctly. You always know it’s going to be a real mess when you see the staff grab that extra piece of foil.
It seems like not-so Mexican grill manages do every wrong thing possible when creating their burritos. But it turns out there’s yet another failure they manage to make. Chipotle isn’t just going out of their way to be as stupid as possible when making burritos. They actually adjust course and somehow find a way to go even further out of their way, finding new depths of stupidity, when customers try to preempt all their varying forms of stupidity.
That’s right. They fail at being failures.
One way for a customer to try to sidestep the fact that Chipotle is too stupid to make a burrito is to ask for light rice and light beans. This instantly becomes a debacle when, without fail, the staff member hears “white” rice, and proceeds to pile two pounds into the tortilla. When I try to repeat myself, they invariably insist they gave me white rice already but that they don’t have white beans. After a third attempt, having to invoke a metaphor for light, they will insist that I’ll just be getting extra rice.
I’ve had to insist on speaking with the manager on duty multiple times to convince someone that I should be able to have less rice. And more than once, I had to walk out when the manager even refused to remove some of the rice.
Attempts to change my verbiage have proven to be no more effective. Half white rice leads to them giving me both white and brown rice. Easy on the rice and beans is almost always ignored with an “Oh, I didn’t hear you.” And anything response I might give that takes longer than .73 seconds often results in a reprimand from the employee for taking too long, as if I’m getting paid by Chipotle to be here.
When I do finally manage to coax them into listening, I get a lot of arguments. I’m sternly warned that I’m not going to get extra meat just because there’s less rice and beans. Not that I said anything about extra protein. They just feel the need to scold me for wanting less rice and beans. But as I’ve learned, that scolding is a clear warning, because almost every time I ask for less rice and beans to be use, they actually reduce the portion size of the protein proportionately. And the only way they’ll fix the mistake is to charge you extra.
The customer is bending over backwards to fix your failure, Chipotle, and you still end up finding all new forms of failure, like you’re magnetically attracted to it.
It’s impossible for this many people to be this stupid, and all of them to incidentally end up working for the same company. Chipotle isn’t unlucky, they’re somehow creating this cognitive cesspit among their employee ranks. Not that fast food is meant to attract PhDs or win Michelen stars, but this is far and away ridiculous. And the most telling fact is that this is all consistent across Chipotles everywhere. Something cooked into the fundamental Chipotle way of doing business breeds this kind of contemptuous attitude towards customers, and teaches patterns of behavior that somehow seem to always result in the exact same outcomes—even after the customer makes multiple attempts to sidestep your failings.
Fifteen years ago Chipotle would have been a first choice when it was available. Over the years its antics have relegated it toward the bottom of my list of “acceptable” options, for those times when I’m already out and my mental energy needs to be focused on more important things than which of the three food choices in front of me I should pick. But now, I’ll be actively avoiding Chipotle whenever possible.
Who needs the risk of E. coli, anyway?