Marfa Burrito

Marfa is a town where a gallery dinner can cost a day's wages, and the most beloved food in it comes out of a small kitchen on South Highland Avenue. Marfa Burrito is Ramona Tejada's place, and the press has long called her the Burrito Queen: flour tortillas rolled by hand, fillings cooked the way ranch and railroad kitchens on both sides of the border have always cooked them, seven or so items written in marker on a poster and no interest in adding an eighth. The asado, pork slow cooked in a deep red chile sauce with no rice padding it out, is the one the pilgrims order. Anthony Bourdain ordered it when his crew came through Far West Texas for Parts Unknown and pronounced it a serious burrito, the real deal, which for a certain kind of traveller settled the matter permanently. The walls carry framed photographs of Ramona with the famous people who have found the place, signed and covered in well wishes, and the room stays what it is: a home kitchen serving strangers. There is something worth noticing in the arrangement. Marfa's art economy imported a great deal, but the burrito was already here, the borderland's ordinary genius, the food of people who worked with their hands in a county that is nearly all sky. That international visitors queue for it alongside ranch hands and Border Patrol agents is the closest Marfa's several economies come to agreeing about anything.