On the Richmond Burrito Trail: Tacos El Panzón's $25 behemoth (Fat Tuesday edition)
Welcome to the Richmond Burrito Trail Fat Tuesday edition, featuring the fattest slab we’ve attempted to eat yet.
This Fat Tuesday, we embark on the biggest, most daring adventure yet in our Richmond Burrito Trail journey — chasing down the legendary burrito that's as big as your arm from Tacos El Panzón.
This week, we finally checked off a Richmond Burrito Trail bucket list item! We’ve been on the hunt for one of those comically large, social media-photo-worthy burritos. Getting one took us three visits to 23rd Street’s Tacos El Panzón.
Tacos El Panzón has been the subject of Instagram fame and local food critic praise, including a shout-out in the San Francisco Chronicle. After three attempts and one fiery setback, we finally landed the colossal challenge: a $25 behemoth burrito, part carnitas, part buche, with a size that could feed a whole village — and maybe leave us questioning our life choices.
El Panzón has appeared in the Richmond Burrito Trail before. In fact, it is also a favorite of food bloggers and local food critics, having appeared in the Grandview Independent AND the San Francisco Chronicle.
Apparently, social media is fueling a new era of ‘Latinextravagant’ restaurants. But if a neighborhood taco truck is going to serve up a giant burrito, we are going to try to eat it.
Alan Chazaro
We started researching Tacos El Panzón last year when we walked past one night and saw a huge crowd. Several people on Instagram posted pictures of giant burritos from the taco compound, and we just had to go. We really wanted one of the ridiculously oversized burritos.
The next day, we headed down and immediately struck out on the burrito front. El Panzón wasn’t serving burritos that day, so we returned with a very good and very big torta, but not a burrito.
Soren Hemmila
Recently, we heard that Tacos El Panzón was serving burritos again. We set out for the one burrito we’ve been chasing, rumored to exist at a nearby outdoor taqueria, and wrapped in foil like the shimmering surface of the sea, daring you to conquer it.
A burrito so daunting, so overstuffed, that finishing it feels like a quest doomed to end in madness.
So we headed out on our renewed quest, and as we did, we started hearing sirens. A scanner jockey was breathlessly posting online about an accident on the freeway, and we paid no mind as we continued to the ATM. Having some cash is good because some taquerias, like Tacos El Panzón, don’t take cards.
Traffic was strangely heavy as we inched towards the intersection of Garvin Avenue and 23rd Street, where Tacos El Panzón is located. Then we saw the fire trucks. Oh no.
Firefighters were rolling up their hoses while taqueria employees were hurriedly cleaning up. No one was hurt, but word has it that a heater in the sitting area set a canopy on fire.
Running a business in Richmond is hard enough. We weren’t about to ask if they could whip up a burrito for us, so we returned home burrito-less again.
Ye, which were before us, warm and whole, yet fate — cruel, inscrutable fate — hath snatched ye from our grasp!
Un daunted, we returned the next day and bagged a 2-kilo, nearly 50-centimeter goliath. Concepts like regular or super burritos don’t apply here. Tacos El Panzón offers a $25 burrito which is two big freaking tortillas rolled together, AND a $35 three-big ass tortilla burrito that’s nine miles long.
We went for pork two ways: carnitas on the first half and buche on the second half. We cut the monster slab in half for photographic purposes and because we couldn’t fit the big fellow on our kitchen scale. We had to weigh the two foil rolls separately.
Even half of a $25 burrito is still a heavy 1,000 grams. We started on this little piggy’s stomach side of the burrito. Both sides are just absolutely packed with meat, along with rice, beans, cilantro, and onions. For a giant burrito that cost just $25, we were expecting an overloaded rice burrito with not that much meat.
The buche was fried crispy and just slightly chewier than the carnitas. It is not as strongly flavored as some other organ meats, but it is still there. Add a splash of spicy salsa, and something magical happens — a perfect harmony between the rich umami depth and the fiery kick of the peppers that we can’t quite explain. This is probably why buche tacos taste so good, and we started regretting ordering the giant burrito instead of a plate of tacos.
So, there is absolutely no reason to order this burrito that could feed the whole village. It is unwieldy and just a pain to try to eat. Just get two or three burritos.
The rest of the burrito was just so arid, with the ingredients not blending together as they should. This sauceless burrito would have benefited from some cheese, some guacamole, some sour cream-anything to offset the lack of liquid elements inside.
All three sauces were excellent. Our favorite was the orange, peppery, spicy salsa, but the green and orangey emulsified sauce was tasty as well. We loaded up from the salsa bar, which also offered self-serve chips. But it didn’t matter. No amount of sauce could overcome the dryness. Each bite was too dry, with bits and pieces of beans and meat plopping out all over the Thanksgiving turkey platter we were using as a plate.
Towards the end of the first half, we found a pocket of cilantro and onion that was refreshingly welcome as we slogged nearly all the way through the parched burrito. We were unable to finish even half of the 25-dollar wonder. We ate the first part for lunch, then skipped dinner and were ready to finish it off at lunchtime the next day.
Day 2
We saved the other half, the carnitas half, for the second day. We’ve never had a leftover burrito before. It felt like boozehounds joking about wine stoppers—whoever has leftover wine? Who has leftover burritos? What is the best way to heat a leftover burrito?
We unwrapped the big fellow for the microwave. It was cold and stiff and took a very long time to reheat, and by the end, we were not sure you could still call it a burrito. It deconstructed and returned to its natural form of a plate of carnitas, beans, and rice. We ate it with a fork.
We really liked the carnitas, which were still lovely and crispy. The heating process also coaxed some more fattiness out of them, which melded with other ingredients more nicely on day two. So we searched for pockets of rice and greasy tortillas among the big piles of carnitas. We couldn’t even finish half of the burrito from the previous day.
So happy Fat Tuesday – Let the good times roll, as they say. The Richmond Burrito Trail will give up what we hold most dear and will be back in 40 days.
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