It might seem baffling, at first.
The ambience drifts from the familiar chatter of a neighborhood diner or favorite highway joint into aisles filled with hardware, power tools and the like. The menu jumps from workaday grilled hot dogs to delicate prawns.
And one of the most popular items is a breakfast burrito smothered in rich country gravy.
Yeah, Woody’s Cafe Grill & Pub occupies a corner of a hardware store — Kelseyville Lumber & Supply, to be specific. Maybe that’s why they were able to piece together such a remarkable example of culinary architecture.
The burrito appears formidable. Inside the oversized flour tortilla they manage to pack sausage, ham, scrambled eggs, cheese, a goodly portion of hash browns and perhaps a few bits from the kitchen sink.
“It’s the size of a brick — that’s what I tell people,” said Woody’s Natalie Torres with a laugh.
Yet the hefty construction creates an illusion. The eggs are fluffy, the potatoes svelte and the gravy almost delicate, in spite of a hearty measure of pepper and rich mouthfeel. The snap of spice from the sausage provides inspiration while cubes of ham counter with a warm, soothing note. It’s a burrito you can readily finish.
“It’s very popular,” Torres noted. “We go through a ton on them a day.”
Indeed, the combination of flavors is so comforting, so familiar — the mystic chords of culinary memory strike with each bite. This is the essence of the American road, of the drive ins and diners and haunts visited by chrome-bumpered cruisers along the Lincoln Highway and Route 66. It’s lineage can also be found on farmstead tables and grandmothers’ kitchens.
And this all comes wrapped in a tortilla — a tortilla drapped in country gravy.
Oh, you can order the breakfast burrito with salsa. First the novelty of cream gravy on a tortilla, and then the way in which it complements the filling makes it the more intriguing option.
After all, the burrito ignores the usual cultural blueprint. It relies on a flour tortilla, more common in the northern reaches of Mexico. According to some stories it first became widely known during the bracero program, when agricultural workers were welcomed across the border to assist the harvest during World War Two.
Only in the 1960s did the idea of a massive burrito catch on, first in San Francisco’s Mission District then nationally — in the ‘90s — when Chipotle exploded on the scene.
The breakfast burrito was created in a Sante Fe restaurant not that long ago (1971), according to food historians.
So the foundation of the burrito, as well as its framework, owes much to inventive cooks on both sides of the border.
Which is why Woody’s breakfast burrito makes sense.
As to why it nailed a permanent spot on the Kelseyville cafe’s menu — well, to understand that you just have to order one and reach for a knife and fork.
And famous?
“It should be,” Torres explained. “We throw in everything but the kitchen sink.”
Dave Faries can be reached at 900-2016
