London – Eating & Drinking – Fastfood & Takeaway – Eating & Drinking – Restaurants – Mexican
After months of hearing epic tales of Daddy Donkey from my closest network of burrito fanciers, my visit there today was completely by accident after walking to another nearby burrito vendor and finding it closed. My colleague’s eyes lit up, and he said in an excited low whisper, “We could always go to Daddy Donkey…”.
Approaching the van – I was surprised to see that it was a self-contained van, rather than the more “cart” arrangement at Freebird – the popularity of the place became apparent, by way of the blue Tensabarriers erected for crowd control, and also the apologetic notice that due to Friday popularity they could only now accept orders of up to 5 burritos per customer. They were getting through the orders fairly swiftly though, and so it wasn’t long before I’d negotiated the gauntlet of smiley burrito assembly line workers and was hooking with gusto into my first ever Picadillo burrito – a sort of spicy ground beef arrangement.
Maybe the problem was the constant hyperbole, however my burrito verdict on this occasion was “Good”. Even if you factored in the atmospheric component of sitting at the scattered handful of rickety furniture (which my colleague assured me was “very mexican”), there was no denying that what I had was a very tasty yet poorly constructed burrito… almost as if they’d rolled it sideways, such that with each bite you got a mouthful of a successive ingredient. And nobody wants a mid-lunchtime mouthful of cold sour cream. My burrito companion looked at me with deflated shoulders and confessed that he’d just chomped into a complete mouthful of rice, and that by comparison to usual it was all a bit bland.
To its credit, my final bite appeared to contain most of the salsa sauce, and as I wandered up and down Leather Lane waiting for my colleague to finish I noted that the flavour persisted and was incredibly tasty. But that doesn’t catapult a burrito vendor into the coveted 5-star category. There was absolutely no question as to the quality of the ingredients – however you’ve got to know how to assemble them right too, and on this occasion the donkey daddy made an ass of itself.
Check out my review of Daddy Donkey – I am mrfrisky – on Qype