Burrito Trail
It begins as all great Richmond lunch pilgrimages do, a lazy scroll through reviews, and then there it was: #64 on the list of Mexican Restaurants in Richmond.
Cazadores Market at 1076 13th Street does not announce itself with fanfare. The mural does the talking: a wall-sized Carnitas Michoacan fever dream painted on cinderblock, a man stirring a vat of pork over open flame. At the same time, a cow watches from the left side of the frame with what can only be described as philosophical resignation. A pig is in the vat. The man is stirring. The cow has processed this information and arrived at a kind of bovine stoicism.
This is the art of a place that knows exactly what it is and has chosen to say so in fourteen colors on the side of a building on a busy Richmond corner where nobody is going to miss it.
The neighborhood is 13th and Barrett. There is a liquor store component to the operation, because of course there is. The sign above says Cazadores Market and Licoreria in lettering that suggests this place has been federated together from several different businesses across several different decades. The parking lot situation is, as one Yelp reviewer diplomatically noted, "weird." This is correct. We circle the block before parking illegally, so no one is blocked in. We go inside.
Inside, the geometry of the operation takes a moment to parse. It is bigger than we expected. It is much bigger than the exterior suggests, which is our way: buildings here contain multitudes. There is grocery shelving. There is a meat counter in the back. There is a liquor section. And there, in what feels like the center of this whole improvised universe, is a table corral: a kind of communal eating pen, a square of tables in the middle of the store where at this hour serious people are sitting with serious tacos.
The people ordering at the counter are ordering tacos. The people at the table corral are eating tacos. There is a general taco consensus in this establishment that we are about to disturb by ordering a burrito. We order anyway.
The cooks are working behind the counter in black gloves, assembling lunch on red trays with the focused calm of someone who has done this ten thousand times and who is doing it now with exactly as much ceremony as it requires, which is none. The burrito artist composing our burrito has a flat griddle going. In a display case, we can see products waiting: big cooked chunks of carnitas, fried dark. A lot of people come here for that. We are here for the burrito, and the burrito is coming.
The burrito arrives. 799 grams. Nearly two pounds of burrito, wrapped in foil, toasty from the griddle. The tortilla has char on it, real char from real contact with real heat, not the pale steam-table warmth that passes for tortilla preparation at lesser establishments. The inside has yielded. This is a properly constructed burrito tortilla, and everything flows from that.
Inside: carnitas in genuine chunks, not shredded into anonymity but present in big porky pieces that have flavor and texture and remind us that this is an animal product with a history. Spanish Rice. Refried beans are applied with an ideological commitment to abundance. Sour cream. Pico de Gallo provides a nice contrast to the pork-and-bean heaviness. The proportions are correct. The structural integrity is sound. This traditional-style burrito does not collapse. It does not ooze apologetically onto the tray in its first thirty seconds. Slap on the spicy red salsa to really wake up the carnitas.
Our burrito cost $17.55. Which is a lot, or maybe it isn't anymore. It's hard to say when exactly we stopped knowing what things cost and started just tapping the card and moving on. Three gallons of gas, roughly. A burger lunch on San Pablo Avenue. A dollar seventeen less than the last burrito, which is either a small victory or proof we're doing this too often, depending on your mood.
Once upon a time, when we were paid the absolute lowest they were legally allowed to pay us, a Mission burrito in The Mission and an hour of our labor was roughly the same number, a kind of accidental parity that felt like the universe was briefly being reasonable. Now, California's minimum wage sits at $16.90 an hour (Richmond's is a bit more). The burrito is at $17.55, and we have traveled a great distance to end up, more or less, exactly where we started.
Which we are not going to complain about, because we are lucky to be here. This is food people are sharing with us, and we are grateful for it. The table corral begins to fill up. The tacos keep coming. The aguas frescas sweat on the ice.
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