Burritoburgh, aka Burlington

Forgive me if this blog post is a bit, well, uninspired. There is a below average band playing just under my office window in the Red Square alley (um, who thought that would be a good idea? Let’s play loud music under the windows of Free Press reporters. Sounds like a Seven Days trick. Well, lo and behold, who sponsors the gutter music series but our favorite alt weekly. Interesting. But of course, I digress. Like, a lot).

But really, the main reason why I’m sort of uninspired (also, uninspiring) is because I didn’t eat enough mini burritos at the extra special person free burrito party at Burlington’s newest burrito joint, Boloco. Apparently, the New England burrito chain is supposed to serve “inspired burritos” and frankly, I’m not sure what that means. Does it mean that the burritos themselves- their ingredients, their packaging, their aura- are supposed to be inspired? Or does it mean that I will become inspired by eating them? Can someone answer that for me?

Anyway, basically everybody who works in the editorial department here at the Freeps got an invitation to the big burrito bash. On the front of the invite it said “celebrate burrito innovation.” Yes, please! So when 5 p.m. rolled around today, six of us from the newsroom nipped out for a bit to dodge the Church St. tourists and eat some free food. When you’re only paid $2.75 an hour, you take all the free provisions you can get.

All of us were feeling a wee bit queasy about the fact that we were journos getting free food. We’ve all been browbeaten with the unwritten rules of journalism that say thou shalt not eat free food lest ye have to cover the maker/giver of said free food. But the economy is in the toilet and half of us have to Dumpster-dive for our meals, so we threw ethics to the wind and paraded into Boloco for our free burritos.

We were met at the door by some dude who was the owner or manager or publicist or professional greeter. He shook all of our hands with his meaty mitts and directed us to the cocktail waiters/servers who were passing out mini burritos on little platters. My coworkers grabbed a few teriyaki burritos (do they have teriayki in Chihuahua?) and had a seat. I milled around looking for something that didn’t have meat in it.

A friendly fellow dressed in a short white chef jacket told me his line of fresh-faced burrito assemblers would make me anything I wanted. How about a teriyaki with tofu, I asked. Chef jacket said no worries and soon I had a mini burrito of my very own. Yum-mmeee! I grabbed some napkins and headed to the table. The big-mitted chap who greeted us told me that the napkins contained super secret instructions on how to unpeel the foil wrapper on the burrito so I could eat it on the go. No way!

I followed the Ikea-esque instructions and all of the sudden I had a portable snack. Get out! I ripped into that thing like a Christmas cracker, only to have the “teriyaki” juice splat all over the table. It literally spurted out, which made me feel dirty and not in a good way. I needed more Ikea napkins to mop up the goop. I finished my explosive burrito, grabbed another 19 to go (for my poor, hungry coworkers) and headed back to work. I’m sad I left before they busted out the smoothies, though the fact that I don’t really like most fruit probably would have been a slight impediment to my enjoyment.

Ok, can I just take a detour for a moment and talk about how unawesome the tunes are coming from underneath my window? Some might think it’s jamtastic, but in my opinion if you can’t convey your musical message in four minutes or less, I don’t want to hear it (free passes given to Mogwai and Sigur Ros).

So anyway, Burlington’s got another burrito place, bringing the grand total of restos that serve burritos to go up to about 13. They had free stuff today for very awesome people and I ate some of it. Now I’m listening to spacejam tunes that are making me wish I was blasted into the next galaxy on a Chinese spy satellite. Soon I will go home. I’ll eat food I had to pay for and hopefully it doesn’t splat all over me.