Burritoville offers plenty of comforts
old-school veggie hangout, this gem has organic, nutritious, meatless meals — but no margaritas
2055 Bishop St. (near de Maisonneuve St. W.) Phone: 514-286-2776 Website: www.burritoville.ca
Licensed: Yes Credit cards: Cash or debit Wheelchair accessible: One flight
up Vegetarian friendly: Completely Open: Mon.–Sat. 11 a.m.–11 p.m. Price range: Dishes $4–$8, trios
$13–$14, desserts $2
Icaught my first glimpse of Burritoville from the window of the 105 bus, not long after it first opened a tiny storefront on Sherbrooke St. in 2005. Cute name, I remember thinking as we inched past, I wonder if they serve margaritas, too? I’ve been meaning to try it ever since.
The restaurant expanded four years ago with the move f rom N.D.G. to a brick walk-up on some prime downtown real estate. The three-storey building has gorgeous bones, particularly the dark wooden staircase with its turned balustrade, which leads from the main dining room to a second-floor coffee house area (more tables, piano, small stage for music and comedy shows) and art hall, to a lending library (3,000 titles, apparently, many of them English lit) and function space on the top floor. If you’ve ever spent time at a youth hostel, then you know the vibe. Those creaky floors, pockmarked plaster walls, and chairs with one wonky leg (three out of four ain’t bad) invite you to linger while warming your hands around a pot of tea.
A stone’s throw from the Concordia campus, Burritoville’s mission of providing accessible, organic, nutritious food is very much in keeping with the university’s culinary ethic. However, as a glance around the dining room reveals, it’s not just crusty, consumer-conscious students who eat here, but a range of people looking for an alternative to mindless eating in the downtown core. With its emphasis on responsible sourcing, minimizing waste, and meatless Tex-Mex food, it’s somewhat of an antidote to the yuppie burgers and food courts in the area. Owners Jono Aitchison, Steve Aitchison and David Tamas belong to a breed of socially engaged entrepreneurs: They walk their compost across the street to be brought out to Loyola, take on the cost of using environmentally responsible takeout containers made of sugarcane fibre or corn syrup, and make everything except the tortillas and nachos from scratch.
Meal service operates cafeteriastyle, from a menu that reconfigures a few big-pot, bean-driven preparations into different formats — burritos, tacos, quesadillas or simply bowls. The cooking isn’t pushing new creative directions territory, but it’s done with care (vegan and gluten-free needs can be accommodated). The rootsy use of bulk ingredients promised to remind me of CEGEP roommates, whose cuisine I would describe as 50 shades of beige. The results were far more colourful, if still a bit of a nostalgia trip for me.
Once I adjusted my expectations of the mushroom and spinach quesadilla — losing the thought of finding woodsy and wild varieties inside the tortilla — I appreciated the copious greens, and the morsels of button mushrooms mingling with grains of rice.
The chili taco was exactly as I imagined, which is always comforting, with the bonus of melted cheese that had oozed out of the fold to sizzle up on the griddle. The chili itself — beans, carrots, celery, peppers, chunks of tomato — was more balanced than bold. Enter the army-size bottles of Valentina hot sauce.
The signature item is the sweet potato burrito, and it’s very good. Somehow I’d anticipated caramelized sweet potatoes, but these had their own spot on the flavour spectrum, thanks to the cinnamony holiday seasoning perfect for this time of year. Another nice touch: what appeared to be chunks of potato but were in fact pieces of stewed apple. All that plus black beans, brown basmati and pico de gallo was tucked into a white-flour tortilla with the tail end wrapped in soy-based waxed paper. Easy to enjoy, and the most original dish we tried.
We rounded out our plates with quinoa, and a sprout salad in a nice zingy dressing. There was no guacamole left at supper hour, the counter guy explained to us, because they make small quantities from perfectly ripe avocados, which often sell out at lunchtime. To argue about how much I wanted guac would, I thought, made me seem grossly greedy.
For dessert, there were oatmeal-pumpkin cookies, carrot and pineapple cake, and a chocolate-zucchini loaf, the dryness of which could have been cut with a little fruit coulis, syrup or preserve.
As it turns out there’s no hard alcohol, so this isn’t Margaritaville. But there is beer, and it’s McAuslan.
Burritoville seemed such a classic old-school vegetarian hangout to me — in fact, a retro film about vegetarians in love would scout a location like this — that I was surprised that it deliberately doesn’t bill itself as a vegetarian restau- rant. When I followed up with owner Jono Aitchison (the second owner of a vegetarian restaurant I’ve spoken to in as many weeks who is not vegetarian), he said they like to avoid the labelling.
“We get people who come in and say: ‘Oh it’s vegetarian? Well, I’m not a vegetarian.’ ” He added that some customers say they have not eaten a meal without meat in years, breakfast, lunch and dinner. “They don’t believe nutritious good food can be filling with no meat,” he said. Well, believe it. If I wanted a bit of creativity from the food at the restaurant, the fact is that it’s more than a restaurant — and its comforts go beyond comfort food.