So, Anna Maria Barry-Jester of FiveThirtyEight officially has the world’s best job. If you haven’t been following, early this summer Barry-Jester was tapped by America’s #1 stats wizard Nate Silver to conduct what was probably world’s most thorough burrito evaluation of all times. From a list of 67,391 burrito-selling establishments in the U.S., the number crunchers over at FiveThirtyEight selected 64 of the nation’s finest burritos to compete in the search for the pinnacle of burrito perfection (also known as the Burrito Bracket, also known as The Great Mylanta Binge of 2014). This initial narrowing down in and of itself required feats of mathleticism, since actually sampling burritos from all these restaurants would take one individual 60 years and close to 50 million calories to accomplish (assuming this individual ate three burritos a day).
Over the course of the summer, Barry-Jester traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and ate almost 100 burritos to arrive at a conclusion yesterday that we probably could have told her from the outset: America’s best burrito is in San Francisco. Specifically, it’s at the Mission’s La Taqueria.
You can check out FiveThirtyEight’s extensive coverage of the Burrito Bracket, which includes more detail about their quantification methods, here, or you can just watch this video below of the burrito dorado that took home the grand prize (and while you’re at it, snicker a little at Barry-Jester’s pronunciation of “burrito dorado.” Side note, what qualifies this gringa to be the arbiter of all things burrito anyway? OKAY I’M JEALOUS AND I’M HATING HARD).
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Bay area residents, pat yourselves on the back — you deserve this. As for La Taqueria’s owner Miguel Jara, when asked by SF Gate for his thoughts on this monumental distinction, he responded: “I’m kind of old and don’t get on the computer.”