A Tale of Two Tacos*

In the comparison that follows, I perform an action so egregiously unfair that it deserves no place in civilized discourse. It betrays the principles of sound logic, rejects the burden of simple honesty, and laughs in the face of human decency. What are we waiting for!?

In one corner, we have England, as exemplified by Mission Burrito, a small, six-location fast-food Mexican restaurant across the street from the Oxford Union. In the other corner, the U.S.! represented by Chipotle, a multi-million dollar restaurant chain with a stellar marketing team, highly paid executive chef, and vertical controlled supply chains ensuring only the freshest ingredients and most satisfying flavors. Chipotle has rightfully opened its own six locations in London, thereby exemplifying the inevitable journey of American capitalism to the cultural re-conquest of its former imperial master.

This is obviously no fair fight (nor a fair mapping of national identities), but in the interests of shameless elitism, I am willing to put that to one side.

Begin!

Round 1: Ordering

Chipotle and Mission Burrito have identical service styles for nearly identical menus: starting from one end of a service line, you order a burrito, soft tacos, or a salad bowl, then go down the line adding whatever yummy fillings they have for you. At Chipotle, though, there seems to always be one more person than they really need, and everyone is so fast that the time from ordering to paying is tiny, even if the lines are longer. Mission Burrito isn’t as well staffed or quite as well trained, but its lower volume means that service is also pretty quick, unless you get it at its very busiest.

This round: Draw

Round 2: Cost 

This round is a cut-and-dried knock-down by Chipotle. Mission Burrito keeps its meal costs pretty comparable to Chipotle’s, even accounting for the horrid exchange rate, but its higher drink prices, its extra charge for cheese, and its legal obligation to charge VAT tax when you eat in** make it noticeably pricier even pre-exchange rate calculations, all for the exact same amount of food.

**Normally, I just take my food and walk, but who wants to eat in a dark street on a windy night?

This round: Chipotle

Round 3: Dining Room

Chipotle’s dining rooms are large, modern, and organized to allow maximum movement. Mission Burrito’s dining room is sparse, early 2000’s with cheap plastic stools, and packing in a large table to maximize seating, but at the expense of easy access to the street-side bar.

This round: Chipotle

Round 4: Selection

Both restaurants provide lettuce, rice, black and pinto beans, cheese, guacamole, pico de gallo, three intensities of salsa, chicken, beef, pork, etc. Chipotle does give you an extra choice between white and brown rice, but Mission Burrito gives the option of roasted peppers and red onion, which I don’t think I’ve seen at Chipotle. The round is practically a draw, so if Chipotle really does have that option, it is a draw. Otherwise, slight edge to Mission Burrito. Congrats England! … don’t get cocky.

This round: Mission Burrito

Round 5: Taste

Comprehensive, knock-out win for Chipotle. I’m shocked it went to this many rounds! Let’s just list all the advantages:

• Chipotle serves cilantro-lime rice. Mission Burrito’s rice is plain, bland, steamed white rice.
• Chipotle dices its meat, then cooks it, so every piece is covered in seasoning. Mission Burrito cooks their meat, then shreds it, so the chicken tastes exactly like… well… unseasoned chicken.
• Chipotle’s pico de gallo tastes fresher and more flavorful.
• Chipotle gives you roughly twice as much guacamole, which is of course the best part of everything.
• Chipotle is actually named a flavor. Mission Burrito has a name a facade tastelessly reminiscent of Spanish Catholic conquerors’ attempts to coerce labor from heathen Native Americans.

This round: Chipotle!

 

The obvious and infinitely predictable result is that, despite its minor advantages, England (i.e., Mission Burrito) gets absolutely crushed by the U.S. (i.e., Chipotle). I will retain this arbitrary and inflated sense of national superiority until the U.S. gets shit-stomped by Ghana in the World Cup group stages,  at which point I will whimper sadly in a corner for some ten minutes before remembering that no REAL American cares about soccer, anyway. Then I’ll probably go console myself with gratuitous amounts of Mexican food… from Mission Burrito, which will be right down the street.

 

*As usual, I actually got the burrito, but that’s not nearly as good a turn of phrase. 😉

 

Bonus American advantage: Mission Burrito even expressly lists San Francisco as the source of their “authentic” burritos.

Last Day at the Opera

Time actually flies, and it’s now been a week since I made my last visit to London to see Bill, Tamar, and Ciara. Right now they are spending some time in Paris, and next week they will move to Ghana on a permanent basis, depriving me of their food, their company, and their theater tickets.* Obviously, my prudential reasons for wanting them around are far more important than any principled support of their life goals. Though they are family, and you might think that I love them and want the best for them, I insist that they abandon their plans and stay in London so that I might continue to mooch good food off of them. That is the only thing that a college student cares about.

In all seriousness, though, I wish them the very best in their new home. I understand that, on their last visit, Ciara enrolled in the local school and is excited to attend, and that she and Tamar found three viable houses. Bill showed me the pictures they took, and all of them look gorgeous. Tamar’s de facto job description continues to evolve, but I’ll let them update you on all the details of their move. The important point is that I’m very happy for them, and very grateful for the time that we’ve been able to spend together these last few weeks.

On this particular weekend, I took the bus into downtown to join them for The Phantom of the Opera, my favorite of the (admittedly somewhat limited) selection of musicals that I’ve seen. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s masterpiece premiered at this very theater in October of 1986, with an intended run of six months. Instead, it has run non-stop for the 27 years and change since, with the exception of a three-day closure in 2008 to install a new sound system.

In 2010, to celebrate its upcoming 25-year anniversary (which, for some reason, Her Majesty’s Theatre continues to celebrate on its posters and commemorative playbills), the rights to the musical were made available for lease, and Rogers, my high school, was one of the first to take up the show. I had the distinct pleasure of playing lead cello in the pit for eight sold-out houses, and it is possible that my love of the show comes as much from euphoria of finally mastering the difficult score as from the actual quality of the show; though neither of these is in any doubt. I had also seen the show on tour in Seattle, and thoroughly enjoyed it then. For whatever reason, I was very, very excited to get to see a second professional rendition, especially of Music of the Night and Point of No Return, which are (musically) my favorite songs in the show.

Of course, fate is never so kind. Our tickets were for the matinee, so I was set to board a bus in the mid-morning. Unfortunately, high winds the night before had knocked a tree across the freeway** and delayed all the buses indefinitely. I should have arrived an hour before the show – instead, I arrived ten minutes before intermission, right in the middle of All I Ask of You. Even though I knew the intermission was close and offered to wait in the back, the usher insisted on showing me to my seat mid-song, which led to my falling over a poor woman in the dark and nearly knocking someone over with my backpack as I sidled down the row of seats. Alas that I had to both miss a big chunk of the show and spoil a good song for a handful of the nearby guests, but that’s London wind for you.

We met up with some family friends of theirs for a pizza dinner afterwards, and had a lazy, chatty evening and morning before eating lunch out and parting ways. Setbacks aside, it was a great way to spend the weekend, and I’m sad that I won’t be spending any more such Saturdays with the itinerant Olmsteads in the Old City.

A short photo gallery of the weekend is below. I have to go back to my essays now (I have two to write before Wednesday), but I have at least three more posts in the making that I hope to have out this week, including my notes on a panel discussion this afternoon – the Oxford Union hosted the Winklevoss twins of Facebook lawsuit and now Bitcoin fame along with Michael Novogratz, a billionaire hedge fund manager with investments in Bitcoin, on the topic of Bitcoin as a currency and as a platform for distributed information validation across all social and business applications. So keep an eye out for that, it has some interesting investment advice. 😉

*Sorry, I meant “theatre tickets”.

**Err… “motorway”.

Life Update

It’s been far too long since I updated, but I guess that’s just a function of getting swept up in lots of going-ons. I haven’t entirely lived up to the timeline set out in my last post, but I have spent more time on my studies. For the past three papers, that has paid off tremendously – I have felt the payoff of immersing myself in the material enough to substantively contribute to nuanced conversations about it, and that has made my last three tutorials everything that I could have wanted them to be.

In the next few days, I’ll be much more active on the blog – it’s a one-paper week, I have another post already half-finished about a particularly eventful day last week, and I want to post a photo gallery of my thrice-weekly walk across town to the Humanities building. Amongst other things, there’s a really cool old graveyard between a fork in the road. I’m also going into London again this weekend to see Bill, Tamar, and Ciara again before they leave for Ghana, so expect some exciting stories about that!

For now, though, I pretty general life update about everything that isn’t on that list.

Debate

The Oxford Union continues to host stellar events, including an Al Jazeera English television series that I’ll attend (for a second time) tonight. Last Monday, they filmed a 90 minute informal debate with General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the British military for the first three years of the war in Iraq. Tonight, they’re hosting Dr. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, on the topic of whether the Palestinian Authority still has legitimacy to negotiate on behalf of its people.

On the debate end, I’ve applied to attend tournaments in Glasgow, Leeds, and Paris as either a debater or a judge. So far, I’ve only heard back about Glasgow – unsurprisingly, I was turned down, having only been a member for three weeks. But, I continue to attend to Sunday workshops, and they’ve now been supplemented by the Debater of the Year competition, which is a normal BP debate with individual preparation. There will be one round every Sunday for four weeks, and then the top eight speakers will compete in a finals round. Unlike the workshops, which generally do not attract the very best Union debaters, the Debater of the Year competition offers £1000 cash prize to the winner and a £300 cash prize to the runner up. Needless to say, that inspires some pretty high-quality rounds. The odds of my winning, or even making finals, are perhaps negligibly small – consider that at WUDC Berlin, Oxford’s worst competitor was 65 places ahead of me in the standings. But I’m very much looking forward to the learning experience of competing against some of the best debaters in the world.

Internship Applications

Over the weekend and into next week, I’ll be finally finishing and submitting summer internship applications to 11 national and international management consultancies (only looking for jobs in the states, though). My recommendations should be ready by then, and I’ll be just about to push up against some of the earlier deadlines, so it’s a good moment to finally get it down. It turns out the Oxford career services has a very detailed web page with links to all sorts of handy information, and I’ve been cleaning up my resume and and cover letter according to some the new information and examples that I’ve found. I was also reminded by email that the World University Debating Championships has a special partnership with McKinsey, the chairmen of McKinsey & Co., Asia himself having been the world champion in 1987. So in addition to the normal, online application process, I have an email address that allegedly will land my resume directly on the desk of the senior manager of recruiting. I’ll definitely be trying to capitalize on that, though I strongly suspect she’s more interested in soon-to-be graduates looking for a full-time post.

Relaxation

Aside from writing blog posts (or perhaps instead of), I’ve found my myself absorbed in Orson Scott Card’s Shadow Saga. I know there’s a good argument for why it’s wrong of me to support the work of a known bigot, but it’s also just very well written and entertaining. I find myself wondering if even a total jerk deserves to be rewarded for their good deeds, and, if so, the production of good young-adult literature probably qualifies as a good deed. At any rate, my moral uncertainty was sufficient that I bought the book when I came across it on sale at Blackwell’s, and I’ve been steam-rolling through it in the past 10 days. I’ll probably finish the series in the next couple of days. The geopolitical thriller is a nice juxtaposition to the really character-driven parallel stories about Ender.

Aside from that, I finally broke down yesterday and got the Steam-powered Civilization V Humble Bundle with all of the expansions, then proceeded to burn two hours on a game without even realizing it. I’m going to have to either binge on it until I get bored or exercise extreme self-control to keep myself away. In any case, it was a stellar deal. Between it, good books, good friends, and good events, I certainly have plenty to do.