Vendor Gallery: Matt Hinton of West End Burritos
Posted by Christiane Lauterbach | May 10th, 2010 | Filed under Carts
In the last ten years, Matt Hinton has been a theology professor, a dealer in architectural antiques, a pressman for his wife’s letterpress print shop, a carpenter, a photographer, a guitar player, a video editor, a guy who drove the carts that go “beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep” at the airport, and, most recently, a filmmaker and a record producer/label owner.
Hinton went to Tortillas for the first time when he was a student at Georgia State University, sometime in the early 1990s. “It and Frijoleros were the first burritos of their kind that I ever had,” Hinton writes, “though I had always loved Mexican food (one of my earliest gustatorial memories, apart from huge meals at my grandmothers’ houses, was the El Toro in the very seedy Georgian Motel on Buford highway, which was established in the same year that I was: 1974).The blend of tastiness and seediness of Tortillas was deeply fulfilling to me from the outset. It was a DIY operation–like the Little Rascals had opened a restaurant, and if you went in the back room, you were liable to see Pete the dog powering the whole ramshackle affair by chasing a rabbit while on a treadmill. Or maybe the Bad News Bears. Anyway, theirs were clearly the best burritos that have ever been sold in Atlanta.”
Last year, when Morehouse College reduced the hours of adjunct professors, his included, Hinton set himself a goal: he would recreate the menu of Tortillas, the famous restaurant on Ponce de Leon whose burritos still loomed big in his mind, and start a delivery business. “First, it was just friends, ” he says, “then friends of friends.” Now, he has no idea who his customers are.
By trial and error, he was able to reproduce the exact same product we all loved. The big flour tortillas contain the right amount of cheese, beans, and seasonings. The two salsas are completely convincing. The burrito is insanely juicy yet doesn’t leak. Perfect digestion ensues. Eaten the next day, the burrito is still magnificent, in a denser way.
Screening his documentary about Sacred Harp singing (recently aired around the country on PBS) in such cities as New York, Chicago, Portland, Louisville, and Los Angeles, Hinton discovered food-truck culture. His participation in the latest Sweet Auburn Curb Market Urban Picnic, where he steamed his tortillas on racks balanced on big pots of boiling water, showed what a man can do in a brilliantly improvised set-up.
You will find Matt Hinton and his delivery schedule on Facebook. If you live within a couple of miles of his weekly trajectory between West End and Decatur, you can order enough burritos on Monday to last you through the week and live another day to hope for his next appearance on the street.
[photos by Vené Franco]
