How San Francisco's Famous Mission-Style Burritos Were Born

San Francisco's culinary charms are a testament to the city's diverse cultural makeup. And if you were going to spend 24 hours eating your way through the City by the Bay, you could indulge in everything from dim sum to Burmese cuisine to Mission-style burritos. The last of these has a special relationship to San Francisco and a relatively young birthdate, although, like with most food history, there's room for debate. What most easily distinguishes this super-sized burrito is the filling. It's often stuffed with rice, beans, seasoned meat, guacamole, cheese, lettuce, and sour cream, wrapped up tight in a steamed flour tortilla, and covered in foil. 

This isn't to be confused with a California burrito, which typically leaves out rice and beans and adds french fries into the mix. The Mission-style burrito was born in this Latinx district in Southeastern San Francisco that gave the dish its name (the Mission District), most likely at either El Faro (The Lighthouse) or La Cumbre, two of the many taquerias dotting the area, in the 1960s. More than 50 years later, the debate continues. 

Like the disputed birth of this San Francisco dish, there's a bit of mystery around the history of the burrito itself. The burrito's most likely origin lies in Northern Mexico, a region where wheat tortillas, rather than corn tortillas, predominated, and where they may have been used as portable meals for ranchers and miners. The name itself translates to "little donkey," and may relate to the most common pack animals used there.

What we do know for sure is that by the 1960s, Mission-style burritos were being born in San Francisco. El Faro claims to have begun serving them to customers in September 1961, when owner Febronio Ontivero used two regular-sized tortillas to create a super burrito for some local firefighters. They proved to be so popular, Ontivero had larger tortillas specially made. The other origin story starts eight years later at La Cumbre. In September 1969, Raul and Michaela Duran began using an assembly-line system to make burritos using fresh-made, in-house flour tortillas for their blue-collar customers when the shop was still a meat market. In 1972, they transitioned to a taqueria and rose to prominence with their Mission-style burritos.

Whether it was El Faro or La Cumbre that gets credit for the birth of Mission-style burritos, what isn't contested is that the Denver-based fast-casual chain Chipotle commercialized the style and brought it to the rest of the country beginning in the mid-1990s. The chain made Mission-style burritos the de facto version in the United States. Chipotle serves about 1.5 million burritos a day, taking the style from a Latinx San Francisco neighborhood to the rest of the country.