“Oh, so you're Bart Simpson, eh. Well since my breakfast burrito is congealing rapidly, I will be blunt. I sold your soul last night. I found a buyer right away for that item.” –Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.
Immortalized and endorsed by a Simpsons character even more slovenly than Homer, the breakfast burrito stands alone as the preeminent gut-busting morning-time meal. Think about what is inside and you'll agree: Take the fattiest, most starch-laden meal of the day, where bacon and egg are prerequisites, and roll it all up inside a lard-laden acre of flour tortilla. The default size is enormous. Vegetable matter other than potatoes are not welcome. Eat one and you can forget about lunch or any hope of work-time productivity.
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If you were to unfold one, scrape everything out and pile it onto a plate, you might be alarmed to know how MUCH you're actually eating.
To call any breakfast burrito the best is disingenuous. I am of the opinion that all breakfast burritos are good, even the teeny-tiny ones at fast-food drive thrus, which if I'm not mistaken, comes with eggs premixed in a milk carton rather than a shell.
Some are better than others though, like Qwik Korner's, a deli attached to a liquor store few blocks away from South Coast Plaza. Inside their hand-holdable blunt object of boulder-sized proportions is short-order cooked hash brown potatoes so soft and fluffy it melts and melds into the grated cheese. The bacon is cut into pieces so that when you bite into it, you're not dragging a whole strip out and leaving the rest pork-less.
But the eggs, oh the eggs! They've left it runny and bundled it inside the last outer layers of the tortilla fold. The yolk bleeds and functions as sauce, balm, and liquid gold.
You eat it with hits of Tapatio, of course, because, c'mon, it's still a burrito.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.