We’ll call it the van Gogh effect:
if commerce is anathema to the artist, then the artist
without money is anathema to himself.
Toxic.
Even deadly.
Vincent van Gogh sold but one painting
in his lifetime,
The Red Vineyard near
Arles, and the combined enormity of his artistic obscurity and financial
penury—it’s widely believed—compelled an already-troubled van Gogh, at a
still-wet-behind-the-ears 37, to walk to a sunny wheat field and forever stop
his own heart with a bullet fired from a pretty blue gun.
The same effect is true for the
restaurant business.
No matter how
many Michelin stars, Beard awards, or appearances on
Top Chef, no matter how impassioned or earnest a chef’s attempts to
revolutionize gastronomy and forever change the way we eat, if a restaurant
fails to be busy, fails to consistently turn tables one-and-a-half times a
night and burn through a hundred-or-so covers, day in, day out, the restaurant
is inevitably shuttered, and the chef’s vision, however grand or noble, is
doomed by the cruel and irrefutable truth that nowhere outside the restaurant
business is it ever truer that numbers never, ever fail to tell you the truth.
To the uninitiated, the calculus of restaurant math must
surely read like some mathematical Gordian knot of tangents, differentials, and
functions.
But it’s not.
Restaurant math is simple.
It’s easy.
The math can be expressed in a single word:
margins.
To operate in the pink, a restaurant’s margins must be three
times greater than its cost on everything.
What are those costs, exactly?
A restaurant’s financial pie is typically portioned like
this:
30% food and wine cost, 30%
labor, 20% is everything else, including rent, leaving—in the very best of
times—just 20% profit for owners and operators.
Ideally, a restaurant’s monthly rent should not exceed what
it grosses on its slowest day.
In
haute cuisine, a restaurateur has several ways of making his margins.
While he takes a beating on the veal
chop you just ordered (he’s lucky if he’s broken even), he’ll recoup his losses
on the protein, the napkins and table lines (among the many things he
can’t directly charge you for), through
the Chardonnay-by-the-glass you’ve ordered (marked up four times its cost) and
the crème brulee (which costs him virtually nothing) with which you finish your
meal.
Ten percent profit at these
margins makes him a success story.
Twenty percent gives him the biggest swinging dick in town.
But how, then, does the restaurateur who sells no alcohol,
no appetizers, no cheese course, no dessert, possibly navigate the turbulent
waters of financial solvency and stay afloat? How does a purveyor of street food possibly sell something
as calorically massive and protein-dense as a burrito and still make his
margins?
He gets creative.
He opens and operates the remarkable Pedro and Vinny’s in a double-wide
trailer, a veritable white trash special, retrofitted with industrial cooking
space, refrigeration, and a glassed-in customer waiting area (evocative of the
American front porch) that stands, proudly, less than a mile from the Pentagon
building itself, along the quickly-gentrifying Columbia Pike corridor of
Arlington, Virginia, and he sells one thing, and one thing only: burritos.
And sells lots of them.
For me, the burrito occupies that liminal culinary space of
middle distance between all that’s astonishingly good about Mexican cuisine
(that it would come from Guanajuanto as the penultimate people’s food, there
called the
taco de harina), and all
that’s bad following the there’s-smallpox-in-the-blankets contact with Anglo
agents of culinary armageddon like Taco Bell.
The burrito is stoner food:
always filling, rarely anything special.
But let’s not blame the burrito for not
trying hard enough.
It’s ungainly.
A clumsy food.
It throws like a girl and has two left
feet.
And its failure lies in that
typical over-pleaser’s overreach of trying to be everything to all people all
of the time.
The typical burrito
is a veritable riot of competing tastes, textures, and culinary interests,
wrapped in the straightjacket of a flour tortilla, and forced to fight it out
for dominance in the flavor profile.
The burrito is a gastronomic
Lord
of the Flies.
Beans.
Rice.
Steak or chicken.
Tomatoes.
Avocadoes.
Corn.
Cheese.
Sour
cream.
In there, inside that
tortilla, within that very non-Mexican dairy product, there are no survivors.
It’s a Jim Morrison biography and
Shakespearean bloodbath rolled into one—no one there is getting out alive.
It’s a culinary equation whose value is
often
less than the sum of its
parts.
And it’s the only time a
burrito is ever really a good idea—when, as They Might Be Giants will testify,
the statue got you high, dude.
Except here.
Except at Pedro and Vinny’s.
Here the burrito begs clear-minded consumption.
Here the burrito transcends the middle-brow
aspirations of its flour tortilla brethren and becomes something truly
remarkable deserving of daily use.
Richard (pictured left) is the owner/operator of Pedro and Vinny’s, and
what he has done is truly remarkable.
He has found two ways to make his margins.
Each is risky.
Each is highly creative.
First,
he’s decided to slash overhead by operating in a parking lot, out of a ramshackle
double-wide, in one of the most hyper-inflated and rapidly up-and-coming
commercial real estate markets in suburban Washington.
Second, he’s decided to manage food
cost by eliminating food waste in offering a menu made of a single item—the
burrito—and a very finite compliment of accompaniments.
It’s a ballsy restaurant model to say
the least.
It bets the ranch that
his burritos are good enough to sustain an entire culinary enterprise.
Lucky for Richard (and you and me), the
burritos really and truly are exceptionally good.
Oh sure, Richard offers a “bowl” option for the khaki
wearers of the world, and the word
salad
does, in fact, appear above the plating line, but burritos is really all Pedro
and Vinny’s serves and all you should really ever eat.
To enter Pedro and Vinny’s is to undertake the architecture
to your own immediate culinary destiny.
You are asked to choose from one of four tortillas (herbed and
tomato-heavy varieties augment the “white” flour standard) and whether or not
cheese will adorn that
tabula rasa of
culinary possibility.
Then you are
asked to choose a protein from a trio of usual suspects:
beef, chicken and pork (there is a
vegetarian option as well, though I suspect its inclusion is intended to
placate the local chapter of PETA).
I go with steak.
With the
foundation laid, it’s on to the expo line for adornment and architectural
detail.
I ask Richard for
everything and am given black beans, avocado,
pico, sour cream…you get the idea.
It’s the everything-and-the-kitchen sink approach to gastronomy.
All that’s missing here, I think, is a
hookah full of Humbolt County, Calfornia’s, most celebrated export, and a
poster of the Red Hot Chili Peppers taped to the wall.
But the next question I’m asked
assuages all doubts, and I know that I have, in Richard, a true collaborator
and kindred spirit:
how hot do I
want my burrito?
That’s the
question,
how hot, on a scale of one
to ten.
I consider the question
and quickly find my answer.
Kill me, I say.
Richard smiles, then administers
four—count ‘em,
four—pepper sauces
from a series of unmarked bottles whose combined arsenal of Scoville heat units
could, I fear, blister parts of me where, as they say, the sun don’t
shine.
So I pay, find a seat on a
parking lot picnic table, and prepare, best I can, to be repaid my hot-sauce
hubris by being destroyed, as it were, from the inside out.
But no.
This
burrito is different.
It’s like no
burrito I’ve ever encountered before.
It’s…it’s…it’s…
balanced.
Flavors are layered.
They work singularly and together, like
some weird burrito hippie commune, where the avocado is always giving the skirt
steak a back rub.
But there’s more
to it.
Sure, its flavor points
are dancing together like the cast of
Hair,
and sure, it’s spicy enough to have made me sweat, profusely, while sitting
outside on a brisk November day, but there’s an element to the burrito that is,
in every way, novel and divine.
So
I cut it in half and eviscerate the fat bastard.
I gut it and go in for a look.
And immediately I have my answer:
there’s a dice of cucumber in my burrito, fucking
cucumber.
It’s madness.
It’s also a masterstroke.
What’s achieved is texture—crunch—and a slight bitterness to act as
ballast against the mighty tug of sweet dairy, not to mention the water content
needed to blunt the infernal blaze of pepper sauce.
It’s a small thing, putting those cucumbers in my
burrito.
Some might even call it a
heresy.
But I call it genius,
because it tells me that Richard is paying attention to the small things.
Genius because a restaurant is, after
all,
all about the small things, and
how all those small things add up.
The restaurant game is a game of inches.
I’ve done the math, and I don’t know how it was possible for
Richard to make much money (if any) on what he served me.
But he’s been doing fine this year, he
tells me.
Business is good, and
getting better every day.
He says he’s
pleased by the yuppie filing cabinet of luxury high-rise apartments (my words)
built directly behind him, pleased by the nearby high-end grocery store,
pleased by the yoga studio newly built but a stone’s throw from his back
door.
He thinks the new influx of chai-mocha-latte-sipping
yuppies and their concentration of relative wealth will bring him and his
burrito shop prosperity in the coming year.
But I don’t share Richard’s optimism.
Richard doesn’t know white people the
way I do (being a white person myself).
White people drive Volkswagens.
They listen to the Dave Mathews Band.
They shop at the Gap.
And they will likely find Pedro and Vinny’s a not-so-charming eyesore of
dubious culinary merit consuming commercial square footage that could otherwise
be occupied by a Starbucks or Smoothie King.
But Richard has one significant talisman in his gastronomic
pocket to combat the corruptive forces of gentrification:
he has the best burrito in town.
Richard also knows a thing or two about
Volkswagen-driving, Gap-loving, latte-sipping, Dave-Mathews-listening white
people that I have failed to consider:
they smoke weed.
They get
stoned.
And when stoned, white
people buy burritos.
Enough burritos to
make his margins.
Go to Pedro and Vinny's. Eat one for me. Just remember: I like mine hot.
Your link:
Pedro & Vinny's
