🌯 Longfellow Breakfast Burrito Checklist (feat. Heavy Table's James Norton)

James Norton writes really fast. 

Within an hour after we parted from doing the digestively punitive research for this article, he’d already e-mailed a sparkling draft of his half of the writing effort. Not an outline, but a fully written draft of clean prose, complete with a fully realized conceptual framework and all manner of insight and evocative description. 

Which makes sense when you dine with him. He’s spent so many years writing and thinking about the Twin Cities culinary world — and, being a longtime resident, eating within Longfellow’s slice of it — that he can make nuanced meaning out of a dish before he’s finished chewing.

James is the proprietor of Heavy Table, an ambitious chronicle of local food that he started in 2009 and rebooted in 2020 after a few-year detour to run food and drink coverage for the defunct Growler Magazine. He’s also lived just off of Minnehaha Avenue for 15 years and regularly writes about neighborhood cuisine with an authority few, if any, can match. 

While Heavy Table’s output is as varied as it is prolific, a personal favorite is the East Lake Checklist, an eight-month journey to eat at all 91 non-chain restaurants along the length of East Lake Street. James, his photographer wife Becca Dilley, writer M.C. Cronin, and illustrator WASCO published the results in a 14-part series throughout 2017 and 2018. (They've begun updating it with loose plans to turn it into a book someday, alongside similar endeavors on Central, Lyndale, and University Avenues.) Eight years later it’s still a fresh and fun read, both for the context it gives to restaurants that are still here, and for the time capsule of those that aren’t. 

So when I got a checklist-y idea for this newsletter — a rundown of every breakfast burrito in the neighborhood — James was the obvious collaborator for the job. Over two mornings we split a breakfast burrito at every Longfellow establishment that is known to have one, and wrote them up in the style of Heavy Table's checklists: A bit about the place (by Longfellow Whatever) and a bit about the food (by Heavy Table). We also added an unrigorous scoring system out of five, presented here in ascending order. The result is a bit of a long read by the standards of this newsletter, though that seems fitting for the dishes in question, which are usually served in gutbusting portion sizes.

So, 10 establishments, $213.38, and a five-digit number of calories later, Longfellow Whatever and Heavy Table jointly present: The Longfellow Breakfast Burrito Checklist.  

James Norton's Brief Culinary Theory of Breakfast Burritos

Balance: A good breakfast burrito balances its fillings. You can use hashbrowns or rice or eggs as a base layer to cradle and moderate bolder fillings, or you can lean into the meat and cheese of it all while making sure not to get too greasy or heavy with a strategic mix of other ingredients.