Mission Mission

Pitchfork 2010 was rad. If you haven’t been, do try some day. Apart from the epic lineups, the festival is very friendly and local, out in a neighborhood park your concierge and your cabbie have never heard of.

LCD Soundsystem nearly killed me with how perfect they are.  Totally cried during “All My Friends.” The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion are back, in good a form as ever. Surfer Blood continue to impress. Girls win the award for best shirt on a frontperson.

There were lots of cameras:

And LOTS of Ray-Bans:

Lots of trees and lots of people:

MORE AFTER THE JUMP . . . . .

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Gotta give it to Detroit for keeping it real. The white hipsters that made this thing might’ve gotten their message through to working-class black folk easier by making the person holding the sign a working-class black person. But they kept it real. Will it do any good?

What??? What do you expect? A bald spot?

Coming down from a burrito high is the worst. If you find yourself in NYC needing quick fix, there are apparently options.

When a bartender heard that we were from San Francisco, he raved about Dos Toros in Union Square.

Another staff member who claimed to be from Berkeley (and later proved this by knowing intricate details of student co-op living) confirmed that it’s pretty awesome, so I checked it out. This is a taqueria modeled directly after the bay’s own Gordo Taqueria by two fellows from Berkeley who wanted to bring bay area burritos to NYC.

Here’s what their carnitas burrito looks like:

First of all, the pierced and tatt’ed young lady who wrapped my burrito really didn’t know what she was doing. Her end folds were way too big pushing all the contents to the middle. She tried to cover things up with an exaggerated triangle fold to bring the edges in, but this just resulted in burrito contents shooting out of the tip at a higher velocity after the second roll. The whole structural integrity of the burrito was therefore compromised, as you can see from the cracking of the overloaded bottom half:

This was a far cry from the burrito wrapping mastery one would see at any taqueria here, but I was in a forgiving mood. Maybe she was new here.

Anyway, when I could keep the burrito from spilling everywhere I thought it tasted really good. The carnitas meat was moist and flavorful. If I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the humidity and tourist swarms outsides I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about this being a bay area burrito. It’s really hard to be objective on the matter, of course the Mission in me wanted to hate it, but honestly I didn’t.

One of the guys working there must have picked up on my SF-ness because he asked, “did we pass the test?” Yeah, I think so. In any case, you’re definitely better off there than the Chipotle Mexican Grills that seemed to be everywhere.

One takeaway from this experience is that NYC is clamoring for a good burrito. Just about every NYC resident I talked to had heard of or eaten at Dos Toros. Other SF businesses are opening franchises in the area, so it doesn’t seem out of the question for taquerias to follow. Here’s to El Farolito East in 2011.

No matter where you live, work, walk, or ride throughout the City, you must have noticed the recent installations of  many more bicycle parking racks on sidewalks everywhere.  The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has made significant progress working with the SFMTA to make it much easier to request bike racks for specific sidewalk locations that you may particularly notice need more bike parking. 

While it’s FANTASTIC to see such progressive municipal cooperation in the name of expanding bicycle safety and ridership, am I the only one who’s getting tired of the utilitarian standard grey bike rack design?  Don’t get me wrong; they are clearly sleek, strong, and functional but I feel that a jazzier design would not only help further excite the population about cycling, but would also look way cooler! 

A recent trip up North to visit our Canadian neighbors in Vancouver presented a colorful and stylish alternative.  I walked up and down city streets for two days and could not even find two bicycle racks that looked alike!  Perhaps some criticism can be leveled at the apparent flimsiness of those triangles, but no doubt San Francisco’s intelligent creative artistic community can come up with some aesthetically pleasing marriage of form and function. 

H&R Block Bike Racks

Also, to the business-minded folks out there:  countless potential branding opportunities! 

More examples of bicycle rack awesomeness (and a locked up lawnmower) after the jump . . . 

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Our friend Lisa has had the pleasure of living in Berlin for the past few months and finally made it over to that Dolores Burrito place that purports to serve real “Mission-style” burritos stuffed with all the same excellence that you would find at El Farolito or Cancun.  Her verdict?  Mixed, of course:

They cost about the same amount that you’d pay at a taqueria on 24th St. And they’re also comparable in monstrosity.

Menos puntos: they’re very very stingy about the chips!! Which I was very disappointed about. A side order of tortilla chips was 3 euros (= $3.68). Which is a heck of a lot more expensive than their usual price of…free.

Die Amerikanerin has the scoop!

Previously:

Guten Tag! Mission Burritos in Berlin!

Dolores Burrito in Berlin Obviously Not as Good as Taco-Truck Burrito

The Best Way to Transport a Mission Burrito to Somewhere as Far Away as Berlin

Just saying.  Here’s one that pays proper homage to the city’s Asian heritage.  And crows, one of the smartest birds around [citation needed] and obvious heir of Tyrannosaurus Rex.  Look how majestic they perch!  Vancouver has the crows to thank for the city’s lack of pigeon epidemic.  Also:

They take their Commie shit very seriously

An epic standoff of purple proportions

I think this is the crow lady when she was younger

Bonus:  Urban farm!  With people working on it in the rain.  Vancouver is hardcore.

We’ve got plenty of murals in San Francisco.  We need more farms.  Case closed.

Just had to stop by the Jimi Hendrix shrine in Renton, WA, on the way to our show with Citay in Olympia.  Judging by the mementos left behind, it appeared that a number of folks had similarly visited to pay their respects.  American flags, beads, flowers of all shapes and colors, Taz (!!!), and . . . what’s this?

I can’t decide who’s the sadder hypothetical person.  The one who was all, “Dude, we have to leave a nug for Jimi!” or his buddy who probably responded with, “Duuuuude, you can’t just leave one nug for Jimi!”

I guess I’ll have to go with C, the inevitable stoner who eventually would stumble onto this scene and think to himself, “Jimi won’t miss these nugs.”

PS.  DO NOT fuck with the Renton PD

While up in Vancouver, BC this past weekend to play a show with some rad Canadian punk bands, we came across TACO DEL MAR, alleged purveyors of the elusive Mission-style burrito.  Unfortunately, we were unable to sample said Mission-style burrito due to the fact that the “taqueria” closes at 11pm on a Saturday!

If they can’t even get authentic operational hours right, I shudder to imagine what sort of blasphemy they might be trying to pass off as a burrito.  The fact that their mascot appears to be a chili pepper with a dirty sanchez wearing a sombrero does little to comfort me either.

Previously:

Australian Mission Burritos Revealed!

Guten Tag! Mission Burritos in Berlin!

 The Best Way to Transport a Mission Burrito to Somewhere as Far Away as Berlin

Bobby Flay Can Eat A Big Fat Burrito

Our friend Katie is visiting Berlin and seems to have encountered an interesting phenomenom: 

Well, since those feisty Berliners already appropriated our beloved mission burrito, the least we can do is adopt something from them!

[Photo by andrewlove]

Previously:

Move Over Dolores Chiller, Meet The ‘Beerdolero’

Guten Tag! Mission Burritos in Berlin!

Eastern Euro Kitzch at Walzwerk