On the Burrito Trail: El Cerrito's Los Moles Beer Garden
Tuesday came at us like it always does, the busiest day of the week, the kind of day where you need something substantial to anchor you to the ground. We rolled into Potrero Avenue’s Los Moles Beer Garden with questions that needed answering: Yes, we're pretty sure this building was once a Carrows restaurant.
Chef Lito Saldaña built this place on family recipes. His parents, Pedro and Luisa, providing the kind of instruction you can’t get from culinary school. Coma sano, será feliz. Eat well, be happy.
We’ve enjoyed Chicken Mole Poblano from Los Moles’s San Rafael location, but now we’re going to shoehorn a burrito review into the restaurant with mole in its name.
We ordered two burritos: a veggie, and a grilled chicken wet one. The veggie is the kind of burrito that implores you to keep eating it well past the point of common sense. The vegetables were grilled just right, and the sauce did everything a sauce should. The combination of the Spanish rice, cheese, sauce, and vegetables was just as it should be.
The tortilla absorbed the sauce like it had been waiting its whole life for this moment. It absorbed the tomatoey sauce’s flavor. So the wrap also had a really nice flavor. That’s the kind of integration we’re talking about.
Also included is Pico de gallo or maybe just tomatoes and cilantro making appearances.
Up next is Burrito Mojado, a WET BURRITO with mole on top filled with Mexican rice, pinto beans, pico de gallo, and Jack cheese.
Here’s where Los Moles makes a choice: wet burrito style. Loaded with chicken, grilled, or so we asked, though it’s hard to tell under all that sauce. Spanish rice that’s really close to our old favorite Gonzales, same style, the good stuff. Melted cheese. Tomatoes. Cilantro. Pinto beans. Well, they were a little dry.
The thing about wet burritos is you lose some of what makes a burrito a burrito. The things that we usually like about a burrito, like a flaky tortilla, can’t really be found because it’s covered in sauce and gooey. Plus, forking and knifing it seems wrong when blessed with God’s own forks.
But here’s the thing: the combination works. Rice, cheese, sauce, and vegetables are coming together like they rehearsed this. It’s not what you expected, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
Ok, so the mole. We ordered the mole poblano from the family recipe, as it was the most popular on the website’s ordering platform. The chefs reportedly use more than 50 ingredients, including SEVEN different types of chile peppers, cinnamon, and chocolate. We were not able to ID 50 ingredients, but the overall flavor was nutty and slightly sweet. The mole burrito weighed a respectable 842 grams.
The chips are light and crisp and just greasy enough to keep them flavorful without feeling heavy.
Both salsas are fresh. Both are actually spicy. The green might be spicier than the red, which is not always how these things go.
Would we eat it again? Yes. Much later. That’s not a criticism. That’s respect. These are hearty burritos. The kind that exceeds your planned calories for the day. And sometimes that’s all you need to know. Sometimes a burrito doesn’t need to reinvent itself. It just needs to be good enough that you’ll come back, much later, when you’ve recovered from this round. Unfortunately, the two burritos somehow cost $43.65.
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