Burrito House

(608) 782-1622

1205 La Crosse St.

La Crosse, WI 54601

For La Crosse, this is an excellent and authentic taco shop.

But it is not exactly what you would readily find in Mexico or even in the US's southwest.  

The good: 

Burrito house has burritos (of course), tacos, tortas and quesedillas.  The main difference between burritos and tacos is that burritos come wrapped up in a big flour tortilla and tacos come sort of half wrapped in two corn tortillas.  Tortillas are (in Mexico) unleavened flatbread.  Tortas are Mexican sandwiches on "normal" bread, and quesadillas are two flour tortillas filled with cheese (at Burrito house at least; at home I use one folded tortilla) and other things, that are grilled or griddled until the tortillas are browned and the cheese is melty.  

One can have each of the above with beef (carne), pork (al pastor), chicken (pollo), vegetarian filling, or cabeza (which means "head," usually part of a cow's head, but they call it "mixed" in English).  So far West Coast Guy (WCG) has had tacos, tortas, and quesadillas filled with chicken, pork and beef.  It is all pretty good.  The meat is obviously not the choicest of cuts, but the way it is prepared, in actually Mexican style, makes it all worth it.  WCG's favorites are the chicken or pork tacos and chicken or pork tortas.  

The tacos come with cilantro and onions.  Strangely enough, the guys making your food at Burrito House will always ask if one wants cilantro and onions on their tacos, which seems very strange to WCG because a taco without cilantro and onions seems like a pizza without cheese and tomato sauce.

The tortas come with lettuce, cheese, avacodo, and mayo.  It is a delicious combination.  (For those of you that think Mexicans only eat tortillas, not leavened bread, not only does Mexican cuisine include such bread, it also includes delicious sandwiches.)  Each order comes with optional hot sauce (WCG recommends the red, hot one, or both the red hot one and the green one - which is probably green because of tomatillos).  Each plate is also adorned with a lime wedge and a radish.  Squeezing lime on one's Mexican food is a good thing, and the crunchy radish is nice to eat along with your sandwich, taco, etc.

The not so good:

WCG really loves two things: seafood and Mexican food.  He really, really loves them together.  In fact, in WCG's home town, there is a street where there are about 20 Mexican seafood restaurants.  (Disclaimer: WCG is NOT referring to Rubio's, no, very far from it - give WCG a little credit, please.)  This is about a 5 minute drive from the border, and sometimes, in some of these restaurants, the wait staff actually speaks no English.  WCG thinks that Mexican people actually cross the border from Mexico to come and eat in these restaurants.  They are that good.

Besides that, in WCG's home town and nearby areas, there are 24 hour taco shops everywhere, usually with a name that is some variation of the Mexican Spanish version of "Robert's," although between the Chinese restaurant and the 7-11 down the street from where WCG used to live there was a place called Lolita's that was quite good (and though tempted I will resist trying to make a Nabakov joke).

Anyway, all of these inexpensive taco shops in the region - including all the Roberto's, etc., and Lolita's - have a variation on a shrimp burrito that is usually quite good, surprisingly good.  One neighborhood taco shop near where WCG lived for a while also had a delicious fish torta.

So, Burrito House is great - for La Crosse (and WCG, fearing that La Crosse people will in general prefer the crime against culinary nature called Taco Bell, prays to his pagan gods that they stay in business) - but it sure would be nice if they had a menu that was a bit fuller, a bit more like what one can find in the southwest.

Back when WCG was a kid fresh out of high school, attending community college in the southwestern corner of the country, he and all his friends would go to Tijuana a lot.  The scene was fun, with masses of college kids from just north of the border coming down to take advantage of the fact that the drinking age in Mexico was 18 instead of 21 and there were many discos and bars to cater to them.  We used to go to a place called Mike's Bar a lot.  It was downstairs in a basement, dark, loud, and smokey.  So when we got tired of the dark and the music and so on, and a little hungry, we went upstairs and around the corner to a taco shop called Chuey's (the standard nickname in Mexican Spanish for a guy named Jesus).

Chuey's had Coronas for 75 cents and delicious tacos.  Before Chuey's and a few other places in Tijuana, WCG didn't even like Mexican food.  Chuey's had real tacos al pastor.  Al pastor doesn't mean "pork."  It means shepherd style.  It is a reference to a style of cooking brought to Mexico by Lebanese immigrants.  It involves meat (in the Mexican case, pork, but obviously for Muslims, something else, usually goat or lamb) that is cooked on a vertical spit that revolves.  In other words, al pastor refers to Mexican pork gyros (Greek cuisine is part of a larger, especially eastern, Mediterranean food continuum that includes the cuisines of Turkey and Lebanon).  

Burrito house cooks all their meat on one large griddle.  (In all fairness, I highly doubt the gyros at the Greek restaurant Gracie's on the other side of UW-L are cooked as gyros should be cooked either.)  According to the La Crosse Tribune's Steve Cahalan, Burrito House is owned by Jose Maceda, a guy who has served Mexican food from a truck for years in Sparta and at Fort McCoy.  This makes sense because essentially, Burrito House is food truck food served in a restaurant, which doesn't mean it is not good.

Nonetheless, WCG would love it if Burrito House would expand their menu.  A few seafood items would give Onalaska's Manny's a run for their money (a colleague of WCG who knows about such things once dismissed Manny's offerings as "resort food").  Side dishes such as rice and beans would be nice too.  (There are vegetarians in these parts of course.)  But actually, in all truthfulness, the one thing WCG really misses from his homeland's taco shops are the spicy pickled carrots and onions (usually referred to as "jalapenos" even though the ratio is usually about 98% carrots and onions to 2% jalapenos in a typical bag) that one can get at just about any taco shop in the southwest.