San Francisco has the “Mission burrito” (beans, rice, meat), San Diego has the California burrito (replace the beans and rice with french fries, add pico de gallo and guacamole). Fresno has… well, both of those, but also so much more.
The trouble with defining a “Fresno” style of burrito is that variety itself is one of the hallmarks. Central Valley Mexican food is unique, even among American regional Mexican cuisines, for being dynamic and diverse. The produce, the ever-refreshing pool of migrant workers from all over Latin America, the ample space (sprawl?) and relatively low barriers to entry for vendors all contribute to this.
Tacos Morales truck at Academy and 180 (dog included for scale).
Broadly speaking, Fresno burritos seem to fall into two main categories. You have your portable, taco-truck style burrito, closed on each end (something they don’t do in some parts of Mexico) served dry on the outside and wrapped in foil for maximum portability. They’re ideal for grabbing on the go, eating in the car, or saving for later.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have your slathered, family dinner burritos – probably created when some of the first Mexican food families in the Central Valley decided to open up brick-and-mortars.
They opted, somewhat logically, to adapt the hand-held burrito to more of a formal meal setting, meant to be eaten on plates, with full sets of utensils. This also gave restaurateurs the freedom to smother them, Americanly, with more sauce, meat, and cheese on top.
The “fancy burrito” at Sal’s (the name alone tells you a lot about its evolution) is probably the archetypical example – a traditional burrito filled with refried beans, rice, and meat (chile con carne, specifically) made gigantic, and slathered in more chile con carne and cheese on top. The fancy burrito has been around since I was a kid, and it’s still pretty good. Perfect construction and filling ratio matter a little less when you can just cover a burrito in sauce and cheese (note: not a complaint).
For our first installment of In Search of Fresno’s Best Burrito, we’re highlighting a burrito that belongs distinctly to the former camp – portable, wrapped in foil, meant to be eaten with your hands – and yet still seems to defy categorization. While it vaguely resembles a few entries in Serious Eats’ studious taxonomy of burritos (“13 Burrito Styles Everyone Should Know,” 2022), it isn’t a perfect match with any of them. (Nary a mention of Fresno or the Central Valley in that piece either, natch).
It comes from Tacos Morales, an unassuming taco truck you can usually find parked at the Valero at the southeast corner of Academy and Highway 180. They opened a brick-and-mortar in downtown Sanger last year, with a slightly different menu, but the truck came first. The area is not really Clovis and not quite Sanger; it’s distinctly a pit stop, and true to its venue, this is a traveler’s burrito.
The seating at Tacos Morales.
The venue doesn’t have indoor seating, or really much seating at all, outside of some picnic tables. There’s usually a stray dog or two hovering around for scraps. When you get your burrito, it’s served in a bag. Plates and utensils are mostly BYO.
While a Tacos Morales burrito certainly looks like an SF Mission-style burrito (decent sized, wrapped in foil) it stands out as something different. Where those have refried beans, rice, and cheese, the Tacos Morales burrito comes with whole boiled beans – more like the pot beans your grandma makes – no rice, and shredded lettuce standard.
Meat options are asada, pastor, chile verde, carnitas, cabeza, pollo, and tripas – my favorite is the pastor – and all come with chopped white onions, cilantro and a blisteringly spicy red-orange salsa. The “supreme” adds guacamole and sour cream.
Per Serious Eats, that would put it somewhere between an “LA-Style Burrito” (“Guisado with stewed or refried beans, salsa, chile, and cheese”) and a “Mission/San Francisco-style burrito” (“a wide variety of fillings wrapped in a tortilla, including ground beef, carnitas, carne asada, beans, rice, guacamole, pico de gallo, cheese, and sour cream”). Of course, both of those have cheese and neither have lettuce.
Grande Burrito (pastor) from Tacos Morales.
Tacos Morales owner Marco (who runs the business with his wife, Norma) says Tacos Morales burritos are Michoacán-style, the Mexican state west of Mexico City from which the couple hail. It’s hard to find anything online about Michoacán-style burritos that look anything like this one, but the Tacos Morales burrito does feel more Mexican than Mexican-American or Tex-Mex.
Either way, it’s delicious.
The whole beans, as opposed to the usual refried bean puree, give it a distinctive textural contrast – arguably they add a hearty note and compete with the meat less. The shredded lettuce adds even more texture plus some freshness, and the omission of rice (plus partially caramelized onions if you order the pastor) keep it very moist – no slathering necessary. The pastor itself is also nice too, but this burrito is more about balance, a combination that’s more than the sum of its parts.
Burrito, with salsa.
It’s also spicy. Assuming the best Mexican food is the kind that’s the spiciest is generally a mistake, but this one happens to be both very good and also very spicy. I order it knowing I’m going to sweat through my shirt, but it’s worth enduring a little suffering. Sure, I could ask for the salsa on the side, but that would be cheating.
If you’re hoping to find Tacos Morales, well, get in your car.
It’s one of the rare local taquerias without much social media presence (and don’t get them confused with Taqueria Morales at 466 Academy in Sanger — that’s a different place). The brick and mortar is open 8 am to 8 pm, Monday through Saturday at 1711 O St. in Sanger, and the truck, where it all started, runs 10:30 am to 10 pm every day. They have a few different phone numbers, but I’ve yet to find one that works.
But hey, with burritos this good, everything else is just details.
Got a burrito we should definitely try? Let us know!
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