Burrito King, an Echo Park landmark, closed last week.
It had been listed for sale for years, including on Facebook Marketplace, but had been unsuccessful in finding a buyer for the space or someone down to pay $6,000 a month for the location. The fate of the business and the small corner building it occupies is unclear as of now.
For those who aren't familiar with the elusive charms of Burrito King—where does one begin? It's a little hard to convey the immense value—both culturally and in its menu—that Burrito King represented to the neighborhood in light of the present circumstances.
Is the food especially good? Is the service at least decent? Can it compete with more "authentic," regional Mexican? Has it adapted particularly well to recent changes in neighborhood demographics?
Fans of the place would be challenged to honestly answer in the affirmative.
But believe me when I say this place is worth its weight in gold. It might be that when I want a California burrito stuffed with fries that hits every time, Burrito King is first on my mind. Maybe it's the chile relleno burrito, fat and dumb, that doesn't need internet hype to satisfy anyone. Or perhaps it's the little counter with stools along the sidewalk that remind me a little of a diner. Or it could be that it's conveniently adjacent to a liquor store and smoke shop for a chemically enhanced meal.
Most of all, it's the place where, as an intrepid 18-year-old college student exploring the city unsupervised for the first time, I first felt as one with the city of Los Angeles.
This was a place that took a certain, special point of view to appreciate. For all the world, this little corner burrito stand looked entirely unremarkable to the uninitiated. Just one among countless, one-off fast food operations in L.A. that outsiders and interlopers wouldn't look twice at on the way to some hip joint elsewhere in the area, as they erroneously refer to it as "the eastside."
For years, Burrito King persisted in the hipster playground, drawing in generations of hungry souls looking for something cheap and filling, often late at night as they took advantage of their relatively generous hours.
For Echo Park locals, Burrito King was a constant fixture: dependable, affordable, and for the most part, satisfying, when cravings struck for a certain nostalgic brand of Mexican-American fast food. For Angelenos more generally, it was a solid choice for late-nite grub after a show at the Echo, or a night out at the Gold Room, or the Cha Cha Lounge when there was still a Burrito King location on Hyperion.
Burrito King was once a mighty chain, for a time even including locations beyond California. But the original shack in the impossibly tiny strip mall at the corner of Sunset and Alvarado was always the jewel in the king's crown.
This location held a prominent place in the music world; the likes of Warren Zevon, Tom Waits, and Gram Parsons literally sang its praises. Its affordability and late hours of operation likely had something to do with that; when Zevon brought a Dutch documentary crew there for a feature on Los Angeles, his beloved machaca burrito was only $1.50.
Legendary L.A. food critic Jonathan Gold also held a special place in his heart for Burrito King, calling it "L.A.'s classic burrito stand." In a review for L.A. Weekly in the early 90s, Gold compared Burrito King to the regional Mexican restaurants and taco trucks emerging at the time, saying that while the latter always "rocks harder," Burrito King promised something significant to the experience of being an Angeleno. Gold lived through a time in the late 70s and early 80s, where a late-night run to Burrito King was allegedly as much a rite of passage as a trip to Tommy's or Pink's.
Now, do we have to agree with Gold just because of his stature and authority as a food critic? Of course not. But as someone who was born and raised in Los Angeles, and also did the work of refining his palate to credibly and professionally review some of the finest of fine dining restaurants in the U.S., his endorsement of Burrito King, such as it is, holds weight.
Now let's be clear: Burrito King never aimed at gourmet cuisine. Indeed, some of you may be reading this eulogy and are wondering why anyone would make a fuss over its relatively unremarkable, bastardized Mexican food. The dense, starchy California burritos were a far cry from anything you might find in Mexico, and surely one could find superior machaca just blocks away.
But in a neighborhood that has changed vastly from the days of Burrito King's origins in the late 60s, where we've lost pillars of the old neighborhood like Taix, Patra Burgers, Happy Tom's, Casa Buona, Brite Spot Coffee Shop, and more; where new restaurants frequently make “best of” lists while appealing to new arrivals and people from out of the neighborhood looking for destination dining; where developers jump at any chance to grab valuable real estate—Burrito King was a link to the neighborhood's history, a valuable site of continuity between the Echo Park of the past, present, and future.
The food at Burrito King, while probably not contending for a spot in the Michelin Guide, represented a disappearing style of cuisine that was entirely unique to Southern California, and which for many years, both geographically and gastronomically, signaled to visitors that they were entering a very unique little slice of Los Angeles.
This was Chicano cuisine at heart, a blend of styles, ingredients, and history, originating as a way to provide a relatively familiar piece of home to a community of immigrants and their families, using whatever was available in that time and place.
But over the years, as people born and raised in Echo Park and similar parts of SoCal grew up with this style of cooking, it began to spread, appreciated by Angelenos of all backgrounds. Burrito King's overstuffed burritos, laden with seasoned grease and doused in salsa roja, were emblematic of the community that called this place home. It catered directly to them with its prices, flavors, and distinctive energy.
In contrast to new restaurants in the area always chasing "the best" or a taste of social media fame, Burrito King represented everything unpretty, unpretentious, and "good enough." That's not a backhanded compliment, by the way, at least not intentionally. There should be a place for restaurants that aren't trying to be the best in every way, but are instead just trying to be reliable, affordable, and accessible, or at the very least trying to preserve something that many people have fond memories of.
Anyone who's gone out to eat recently has likely felt the squeeze that comes with a meal. Lunch under $10 is getting harder and harder to find. A bean and cheese at Burrito King was $8.50 as of a few weeks ago. Not the cheapest in town, but they were comparatively hefty, and something that filling for that cheap was a rare find in modern Echo Park. One also has to keep in mind the cost of doing business in a neighborhood with skyrocketing commercial rents when comparing prices at spots in other neighborhoods. The fact that they could keep prices even that low for so long is admirable. But ultimately, perhaps, unsustainable.
Besides, maybe the most precious quality that Burrito King possessed was not found in its food, but in the experience that came with a visit there. These kinds of late-nite spots seem to be places where the veil between worlds begins to thin, so to speak. The propensity to have a weird, unscripted, only-in-L.A. sort of experience multiplied significantly if you found yourself somewhere like Burrito King after 10 p.m.
You never knew what sort of character might roll up and rub elbows with you at the counter.
Sometimes not always for the best, true; but the weird and the wonderful don't always coincide with the safe and predictable. I recently met a man with a broken leg at Burrito King around midnight, drunk out of his mind, rambling incoherently in both English and Spanish in a struggle for recognition, until eventually he lifted his shirt to reveal a massive hammer-and-sickle tattoo. He then offered me a joint, which I gratefully, perhaps unwisely, shared without incident. Whatever else you might say about it, Burrito King was undeniably, authentically itself, and unmistakably a product of its neighborhood.
So what becomes of Echo Park now that this last of the old school joints is gone? Will the neighborhood be recognizable in the morning? Do folks who've been living there for decades still have places they can feel at home as they walk out their door? And if change is inevitable, how do newcomers to Echo Park root themselves and form community in a neighborhood that, as far as they're concerned, is without a history?
Because once you let something like this go, you can't get it back or recreate it.
You can manufacture a facsimile, maybe, but you can't will into being the years of wear and tear that gave Burrito King such a distinct personality. You can't mass produce the stories and the memories people have of this janky little burrito stand. You can't go back in time and have Warren Zevon wax poetic about whatever comes in to replace it. The scratches in the counter, the wobble in the stools, the patina of seasoning accumulated on the flat-top. You can't make all that up out of nothing.
So what do we do now?
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, Echo Park is a poorer place for losing Burrito King.
Burrito King (RIP) ~ 2109 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90026
