Sign up to get Matt Kettmann’s Full Belly Files, which serves up multiple courses of food & drink coverage every Friday, going off-menu from our regularly published content to deliver tasty nuggets of restaurant, recipe, and refreshment wisdom to your inbox
Let’s just call this week’s newsletter “Full Burrito-Belly Files.”
I come to you from the frontlines of reporting for the Santa Barbara Independent’s Burrito Week 2025, in which more than 30 restaurants will be serving you $9 burritos from September 18 to 24.
As usual, each burrito will be detailed in next week’s paper, thanks to our team of hungry reporters. Every year — well, three times a year, thanks to Burger Week and, as of this past summer, Sandwich Week — we take a brief break from our usual duties to fan out across the region to eat, photograph, and write short descriptions of every offering. I’ve described the development and details of that process in past columns, specifically in advance of Burger Week 2024 here and Burrito Week 2024 here.
After years of honing, the process works pretty well, but restaurant life can be messy. There are often gaps in communication, misunderstandings of what we need for our stories, and even last-minute menu changes that throw wrenches in the flow. Those things are bound to happen more often when the restaurant list grows to its largest ever, although the increasing number of returning restaurants who know the drill tend to make our lives much easier at those establishments.
Add to that what I’m diagnosing as a touch of “Week-related eating fatigue,” a mild syndrome stressing some of our team members’ once-insatiable appetite to gorge for free in exchange for a couple iPhone photos and a 150-word description. There have also been a couple of real sicknesses in our ranks, so this confluence of complications is making Burrito Week 2025’s preparation stage a bit more chaotic than the past.
As the editor of the section, the burrito stops with me, so I’m the one who must deal with it, at least editorially. (Shout out to Richelle Boyd, who deals with the business side of the equation.)
What’s the easiest and safest way for me to deal with the mild chaos? Eat more burritos myself.
As such, I’m setting a personal record this year. So long as more don’t land on my plate after I write this — which would be tough, considering I leave town Thursday afternoon (that’s “yesterday” to you newsletter readers) for my 30th high school reunion in San Jose this weekend — I’m covering six restaurants and a total of nine different burritos. (Well, if you throw in various protein options, it’s more than a dozen, but I didn’t try all of them.)
It sounds like this might be the record for our writing team, although I did hear there was some heavy lifting during last March’s Burger Week, which I missed since I was in Bolivia. I am certain that my nine is not a record for readers. If you follow our fans on social media, some take down more than a dozen burgers or burritos during their respective weeks.
The work is, of course, not that horrible. The burritos are all delicious: I’ve had mac-and-cheese-laced versions from Happy Cat Eats; breakfast bacon and chipotle chicken lunch options from Cristino’s; a shrimp with crispy cheese from S.B. Fish Market; a perfectly toasted chile verde from White Caps; a juicy, fresh, Korean-inspired wrap from Rinkside; and two “Bear Hugs” breakfast burritos from Crushcakes, one with avo, one with bacon.
But the better part of rounding up these write-ups is talking with the restaurant owners, managers, chefs, and servers about their establishments, their menus, and the food business in general. I spent about an hour with Tina Takaya and my kids sitting outside of Happy Cats on the waterfront, talking about her long career in the Santa Barbara restaurant world. Then I met Sean Bentley at the Rinkside Café inside Goleta’s Ice in Paradise, where he’s finally working with a proper range hood in the kitchen, enabling a sprawling list of sandwiches and specials.
And the best part of those visits is hearing how impactful the Independent’s series of Weeks can be for their bottom lines. At S.B. Fish Market Café in Goleta, for instance, Chef Paul Osborne told me that the surging sales from Burger Week helps lift an otherwise slow month of March and tee up the rest of spring.
At White Caps, manager Enrique Hernandez said their participation in Sandwich Week brought tons of people through the doors, leading to a noon sellout on the first day. (He prepped better for the rest of the week.)
When we started Burger Week back in 2017, the whole point of the promotion was to celebrate Santa Barbara’s restaurants, help them get new customers in the door, and keep those customers coming back. When I’m out reporting — a k a stuffing my face — like I have been the past two weeks, it’s very encouraging to hear that the formula is indeed working.
From Our Table
Here are some stories you may have missed:
- Callie Fausey checks out Pints for the Park at Elings.
- George Yatchisin gets the mother lode at Mother Dough Bagels.
- Yatchisin also heads to the harbor to learn about Gracie, where I plan to eat next week.
- I wrote about Little King Coffee, both its origin story and about its new location at The Post next to the bird refuge.
- And after some wild speculation online about the Ellwood at Goleta Beach — NextDoor’s nostalgia nuts really have it out for the former Beachside Café location — I talked to co-owner Omar Khashen for an update, and he told me this. That said, I do keep hearing rumors about staff shakeups, so maybe there is more smoke there than I’ve been told. Plus, a new management outfit that’s involved also reached out. Hopefully I’ll have more time next week to follow-up, once Burrito Week is digested.
You must be logged in to post a comment.