tomatillo, overtoom.

Intuitively enough, the remedy for a repetitive stress injury is to stop repeating the stressful motion. So I'm taking the weekend off from playing, all I ask is that my new and hard-won right-hand callouses still be there on Monday please.

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On Friday night, instead of me hunching improperly over a torture device of a guitar, we hung out and cooked together, always a pleasure, and on Saturday night we spent some quality time in the old hood, revolving around a trip to the Filmmuseum to see Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg.

Those are indeed dead horses buried in snow. After the movie, we pretty much had to pop into Vondelpark's new burrito joint, Tomatillo, to see what was what.

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As you may know, we don't really do restaurant reviews here, and what follows here shouldn't be considered one. One of the main reasons we don't do reviews is that we are a biased-ass motherfucker (one who obviously hasn't quite grasped the subtleties of the editorial "we"), and we are getting too old and tired to worry about trying to put this bias aside, even for a couple of paragraphs.

And so thusly we stumble forward, biased. The relevant bias in this particular case is minor but still I suspect that it held some sway over my assessment of Tomatillo: that I really wanted a shrimp burrito.

Like, for hours before the movie, there was a gently pulsing thought balloon over my head filled with a plump shrimp burrito (salsa verde, monterey jack, no rice). I knew Tomatillo had no shrimp burritos. And yet, my mind kept generating the thought balloons. People behind us in the theatre could barely see the screen through all the shrimp burritos.

Once we were at Tomatillo, a Plan B needed to be examined. We ended up getting two things to take away: a steak and black bean burrito with tomatillo salsa, and a chorizo taco with pico de gallo. Sounds good, right. When we got them home, this is what they looked like:

Sorry for the crap pictures, but still, do you see any problems? That's the chorizo taco. Yes, I'm talking about the lettuce. OK, yes we are 7000 miles from Mexico. I hear you. OK, slack has been cut. I liked this in spite of the abundant wilted lettuce (maybe shredded cabbage is a better idea for to-go orders?) and the lack of shrimp. They make their own chorizo, and it tastes almost exactly like the chorizo I used to make, so...yes. That's good. Also, their pico was exemplary.

And the shrimpless burrito? Also pleasant, though I can't say it was 100% my style, I don't really love rice in my burritos. But the steak was nicely seasoned, featuring a prominent cinnamon note (and maybe apple in the background?), which I like...but the tomatillo salsa was pretty undetectable (Mara said she had some in her half), and this left the whole thing lacking a tiny bit of tartness.

But I'm nitpicking, yo, probably because neither item was a shrimp burrito: both the taco and steak burrito hit the spot and I'll probably be back to try the pork before long. Service was totally friendly, and the place seemed like an alright place to hang out and eat, with nice non-cheezy uptempo jazz standards on the stereo, etc.

Ah yes. My only other gripe would be the €9,50 price tag for the steak burrito...dass expensive, and it's not like it's because of the steak: the chorizo burrito is 7,50. The ingrained values of the American eater in me know that a burrito should not be more than twice the price of a falafel (the last carne asada burrito I had in Phoenix cost $4.45, which is just about 3 Euros). But...the rest of me understands, really it does, and I'll be back to support them (as my local Tex-Mex establishment) before too long.

Tomatillo

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