The Last Burrito

Nothing lasts forever, even things you take for granted

I had dinner with my family last night at El Burrito. It’s a family Mexican restaurant in Fort Collins, Colorado, that has been around our town for what seems like forever. I don’t remember, but there is a high likelihood that it was the first place my parents ever took me “out to dinner.” For years, it was on the other side of the tracks, in the sleepy edges of what had once been called Andersonville. When El Burrito opened, Andersonville was where the Hispanic families of our town lived, and while it was a wonderful community of people, people’s opinions and sensibilities about culture were different back then, so that part of town wasn’t as celebrated as other parts were. But El Burrito, or Sam’s Place as it was affectionately known by the locals, was a unique spot where none of the cultural stereotypes or prejudices mattered. When El Burrito opened, they served the Godinez family recipes. If you know the more savory version of what passes for Mexican food in the United States, called TexMex, this is not that. I am unsure of the history of the Godinez family, but the recipes that they serve at El Burrito are much more in line with what I think food might have been like when Colorado was a part of Mexico. Hearty chilis and homemade tortillas give the food a different quality and flavor than any other Mexican food I have tasted anywhere else.

El Burrito has been a fixture in our community forever. It is a place where everyone comes. It was never fancy, and the family has run it continuously since its opening. When Jesse and Dorothy Godinez opened in Sept. of 1960, with the help of Agustina Godinez (Jesse's Mother), I would imagine that no one who came to dinner there that night thought it would be in business for 65 years. But it has, and they have served the same hearty and delicious food for all of those years. The family members changed over the years, but the place never seemed to. As the town grew up around their adobe-style restaurant, and towering glass modernist buildings were smashed up against their old family home and dirt parking lot, El Burrito stayed the same. In all of my years of going to the place, I never remembered them being under construction for a remodel. If the carpet needed replacement, they would do it with the same color and style as the last one. The chairs, the tables, and the old photos of 1980s Denver Broncos stars still adorn the walls.

El Burrito has been stuck in time, and every time I have eaten there, it brings back memories of my youth. I remember my aunt from Texas coming to town and taking us to eat there as an almost religious pilgrimage as she tried to recapture some of her youth too. There was the night my bandmates and I had dinner there after our first “skateboard successes,” and we headed out to the skate park after two or three hours of practice in the cul-de-sac near our rental house. Our confidence at the table that night, boistered by a margarita and several spicy burritos, couldn’t save us from a hernia, a broken wrist, and a hip pointer injury that we all individually suffered at the skate park after our departure from the restaurant.

And then there was last night. In November, El Burrito announced that it would be closing on New Year’s Eve this year. My sister, the master organizer of our family, sent out the text and asked if we wanted to all go for “one last meal” at El Burrito. Without hesitation, we all said yes. When we arrived at the restaurant, it still looked the same. The building, like the little house in the movie Up, just seems to somehow fit in between all of the newness around it. We walked in to where my parents were sitting, and they proceeded to tell us that they had both been there on different occasions just this week. They were all making their last rounds with old friends to the tables they had sat at for decades. My dad, with his old high school buddies, who are still here in town. My mother, with one of her friends from her youth. It is hard when time changes things. We aren’t really good at it as a species. The moments when we have to deal with the passing of time is one of the best arguments I can make for why we are more than a mass of cells. When our souls know we need one last meal inside of a place so filled with memories, it is one of the strongest arguments for the existence of God that I can articulate.

El Burrito has always felt like a reunion. No matter how many times I have eaten there, I always run into someone I know. I had built houses for people who worked there. It was never uncommon to see the wealthiest people in town sitting down with some of the least. City workers, consultants, friends, and old neighbors always find their way to “Sam’s place.” Last night was no different. The owner, Phil, recognized me as my dad’s son the moment I walked in, and he waved at me that our table was ready upstairs. It was good to see him. He is as much a part of the El Burrito experience as the food or the building. His always subtle smile was a little larger last night, and I have to believe that the number of people who are having their “last supper” there is a part of why he seemed a little brighter. Running a restaurant in America has always been hard, but the last five years seem to be impossible. COVID, inflation, and a lack of help would all wear someone down. The El Burrito Facebook page is a running scroll of “help wanted” ads and “part-time cook needed” posts. I can’t imagine what they have been through these last five years. Seeing Phil “smile” (which is always a bit of a stretch to call it that) made my last evening there even more special.

The dinner was exactly as I expected it would be. The same homemade chips and salsa, the plastic 70s pizzeria-type cups of water, the green tables and chairs were all there. The old photos of past customers pinned on the wall have faded now, but it still, despite the weathering, somehow felt like any other time I had been there. My 50-year-old body doesn’t handle high-calorie, carb-loaded Mexican food like it did when I was younger, so over the last few years, when I have gone to eat at El Burrito, I have tried to eat a “healthier” version of their food. But not last night. I got my favorite dish they serve: the bean and beef burrito, smothered in their famous Godinez green chili. I didn’t care about the calorie count; I wanted to experience those flavors for the last time. I even ordered a Coke. I haven’t had a Coke in 15 years, but I did last night. I will spare you the late-night suffering from both choices, but I will say that it was worth it.

As we sat around the table sharing memories and basking in the ordinary-ness of the place we find so familiar, I found myself thanking God for all of it. The prayer my dad prayed before dinner for Phil and his family was lovely and reminded me that in our world, the things that change do so at the hand of the Lord. It is scriptural to lean into the seasons of life. Solomon said it in Ecclesiastes.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

It’s easy to get sideways with our world. I have to wonder how much of the hardships of the modern business climate contributed to the Godinez family's decision to close. If I allow myself to, I can easily turn to anger instead of gratitude. But part of life is letting things go. I am in the thick of that season of life. My children leaving home, my son getting married, and my parents aging — it’s all out there on my horizon, which made a last meal there a strange combination of sadness and hurt, paired equally with the kind hand of God upon my shoulder, reassuring me that this still remains His world despite my best attempts to make it my own. At one point in the meal, one of the people for whom I built a house, who had worked at El Burrito for years, came up to my table.

“Hey! It’s great to see you!” he said. “I came back to help Phil out these last few weeks on Fridays because it’s been so busy.”

“Amazing!” I said.

We spoke of the changes in his life and how he had worked his way up at a retirement home as the office and staff manager. In life, it is easy to lose touch with people because of the demands that daily work and responsibilities place on us, but there is something so good about reconnecting with someone in a familiar place.

The waitress took our order with a pen and a ticket pad. There was no Toast computer with a Make-Everyone-Feel-Awkward-About-My-Tip-Point-of-Sale handheld that she entered our order into. She wrote it down and took it to the kitchen. At the end of the night, we paid at the cash register, the same one that has been there since the 70s. El Burrito had wonderfully escaped the tyranny of the computer age. I saw my friend in the “hole in the wall” bar making margaritas. There was no machine turning them out in perfect proportions. The room, disproportionately filled with Boomer-era people, still left cash on the table for a tip, and El Burrito is the last place I know that still takes a “check” for payment. (For my Gen Z readers, that’s a little piece of paper that you write some stuff on and sign, and the bank processes it from your account. I know, it sounds weird, but so does Bitcoin to my parents.)

We had a lovely time at the table, and as dinner wrapped up, none of us really wanted to leave. We slowly walked through the place, taking photos and collecting our last bits of memory. We took a photo in front of their Aztec sun medalion that will be heading to a local museum about Mexican culture in Fort Collins, and we shook Phil’s hand and paid him our compliments. As I wrote my thank-yous on the index cards at the entrance, I found myself struggling to capture it all in a few short words.

“Thanks for making a place where anyone could come and have a meal. Thanks for serving delicious food that always made the conversations last a little longer. Thanks for being a part of what it means to live in and know Fort Collins. Thank you for a thousand memories.”

El Burrito is the last of the local businesses of my youth. Everything else from that time is gone: Steele’s Market, Caninos, Catacombs, The Foothills Mall, Joe’s Fireside Cafe, the Toy Dungeon…all just memories now. I suppose that is a part of living. Maybe because they are businesses, we think they will always be there. We take it all for granted as we move through our busy lives. We never think there will be a day that we can’t sit upstairs at El Burrito and have dinner together. But those days always come, and we always remain surprised. God works in our memories. He uses that tool to remind us of our contexts. We see the flashbacks and hear the faint laughter of people who have gone on to remind us that we are eternal creatures. That even when this life ends, we somehow know that we join in an everlasting chorus.

It isn’t necessarily theologically sound to think about the pleasures of this life being a part of the next, but I don’t really care. I live my life enjoying what has been placed in my path, and when something here feels like it has a connection to God or a glimpse of what Heaven might look like, I file it in my memory and wonder if I might experience the goodness of that moment again when I finally am called home. It might be hearing my grandpa Vic’s laugh again as he claps his hands and rubs them together. It could be that I hear my grandmother slap my grandpa on the arm and say, “Bob!” Maybe it will be my old Labrador dog, who will greet me as I arrive with his silly smile and caved-in head from his battle with a UPS truck in Wyoming.

But maybe, just maybe, there’s a corner of Heaven where the carpet is green, and the photos are fading, and the green chili tastes like nothing else I’ve ever had. Maybe one night in the distance, I will be around those old pine tables with my mom and dad and my sister and my old band mates and my wife and children, and we will be laughing again about how beautiful it all was “down there.” Maybe I’ll hear my aunt from Texas, in her sweet southern drawl and larger than life laugh, say “Yeees” as the angels set a plate of delicious El Burrito food in front of her.

If only I could be so lucky.