Super Burrito

At a Mission District taquería like El Farolito, a super burrito starts when a flour tortilla comes off the steamer and lands flat on the counter, soft enough to fold on itself and hot enough that the cook holds it by the edge. Rice goes down in a line, then beans, then a scoop of carne asada or al pastor fresh from the flat-top. Cheese, sour cream, and avocado follow, and those three additions are what the word "super" adds to a regular burrito. The cook pulls the near edge over the pile, tucks both ends, and rolls forward until the tortilla clings to itself. A sheet of foil goes around the log, and the heat comes through it as a damp warmth in the palm.

The first bite is a layered one. Rice grains give way first, then the creamy beans, then the meat, whose charred edges still crunch a little where the griddle caught them. Sour cream and avocado arrive cold against all that heat, and the salsa cuts through with a sharp edge of tomato and chile. Peel the foil down a few inches at a time and it crackles, then collapses into a collar that catches whatever slips out of the open end. Halfway through, the last bites sit in a warm, slightly sweating cylinder that has softened and fused, and the bottom half tastes of everything that settled into it.

The flour tortilla came to this counter from northern Mexico, where wheat tortillas are the everyday bread of Sonora and its neighbors, and many of the people behind Mission counters came from Mexico themselves. Francisco Hernandez of El Metate, who cooks as he did in Guanajuato, and Miguel Jara of La Taqueria, who makes his burritos without rice, are two cooks who have said they do not recognize "Mission style" as a category at all. The super, with its rice and dairy, is the version that grew up alongside that argument.

Ordering is a short spoken routine across the counter: the word "super," then the meat, then a yes or no on the extras, and the cook assembles it in under two minutes in front of you. That speed explains the layout of the build. Everything sits in steel pans in arm's reach, the tortilla gets only seconds on the steamer, and the roll is made while the fillings are still steaming. A super that cools on the counter turns dense and the tortilla stiffens at the seam. Eaten hot, it holds together in one hand, and its weight settles into the foil like a small, warm brick.

A super gives itself away when it is cut in half. The face of the cut shows a spiral of tortilla, a band of rice, the dark beans, the pale sour cream, and a green seam of avocado, all pressed into one dense disc that holds its shape on the foil. A tortilla pushed past its limit splits along the seam, and then the cheese oozes out of the crack and the foil becomes a tray. Stacking the heavy, wet fillings along the center line keeps the strain off the seam. The result sounds, when it is set down on the counter, like a small, soft thud.

Origin and history

Two Mission District shops claim the first Mission-style burrito. El Faro says its owner, Febronio Ontiveros, sold the first on September 26, 1961, to a group of firefighters, and La Cumbre dates its own burritos to 1969, with the Durans turning their meat market into a taqueria in 1972. Neither claim has been settled, and neighbors recall similar burritos on the same blocks. No record dates the arrival of sour cream or avocado inside the tortilla, so "super" comes down to the menu word and the shops that built their business on it.

The shop most tied to the super today is Taqueria El Farolito at 2779 Mission Street. Salvador "Don Chava" Lopez, who came from Guanajuato, had co-founded Taqueria San Jose near the 24th Street BART station, then sold his share and opened El Farolito in 1983, though some accounts give 1982. Its signature is a super stuffed with rice, beans, cheese, sour cream, and avocado, with a choice of meat or vegetarian filling.

Lopez died in January 2021, aged 70, and his family has kept the business running. The single counter he opened in 1983 has grown to roughly ten Bay Area locations, and each one still sells the super as the house burrito.