While intra-city burrito debates are a San Francisco tradition, we were a bit shocked to come across this article from a San Diego-based pub in which a "burrito expert" of sorts totally disses the San Francisco burrito! It's on!

The money quote from this Mr. Crawford: "Having lived [in San Francisco], I know that they're really good only if you're drunk, but compared to the San Diego burrito, they're not even close. They're wrapped in foil, steamed and they put beans and rice in everything."

Sir, we drink frequently, and enjoy our local burritos equally sober as we do inebriated. (We will, perhaps, cop to eating with a little more gusto when altered).

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Wha-ha? We're at a loss of words. We've surely had great Mexican food in San Diego -- particularly the fish tacos -- but to paint with an equally broad brush as Mr. Crawford did: sorry, San Diego -- your burritos ain't even close to ours. We asked our own expert panel of highly-regarded, Bay Area-based burrito enthusiasts -- Dan Johnson from Burritophile and Charles Hodgkins from Burritoeater -- for responses to this piece.

Mr. Johnson corrected Mr. Crawford's assertion that "There's really no telling when burritos started."

"It's really easy to find out the origins of the burrito," said Johnson. "Check it here."

Further, Dan tells us that San Francisco burritos are wrapped in foil for two reasons: 1) To keep them warm if you get 'em to go; and 2) To help thwart leakage problems like we see in [as pictured in the article] chile relleno burrito.

Finally, in Mr. Johnson's opinion:

"There are some pretty awesome burritos in San Diego, but it's kind of like the Triple-A baseball of the burrito world. You can get a really good one every now and then, but you'll see consistently more boneheaded assembly errors than you will up here in the big leagues."

In the spirit of brevity being the soul of wit, Mr. Hodgkins stated: "San Diego's OK with me. 72 and sunny all the time, right? And where would we be without Stone Temple Pilots? Not sure about the fries-in-the-burrito thing down there, though."