Fat Burrito 2

Fat Burrito 2

2128 45th Street, Highland, Indiana

It was hot in there. Not warm. Hot. The kind of heat you feel in your sinuses before you've cleared the doorway, the heat of a small room with a working kitchen bolted to the side of it and nowhere for any of that to go.

I didn't mind at first. I've eaten some of the best food of my life sweating through my shirt. Heat like that usually means somebody back there is running hard over live fire, and the sweat is just the cover charge. So I sat down, felt my collar start to go, and got optimistic.

That was a mistake.

The room is small and it's charming, in the accidental way these rooms get charming. A dozen tables. Nothing in it was chosen by anybody who uses the word "concept." Nobody here is trying to be anything other than a place that feeds people, and I have never once had a meal worth remembering in a restaurant that was trying to be something.

The staff are lovely. I'm putting that up top because the rest of this gets ugly and none of it belongs to them. They were quick, warm, actually pleased to see us, which is rarer than it should be. Chips landed fast. Glasses never got below half. Somebody asked a question and got a real answer instead of a shrug. Whatever this restaurant has going for it, those people are it.

Then the food started.

Flautas first. A flauta is about the simplest good idea in the whole Mexican canon: corn tortilla, rolled tight around meat, dropped in hot fat until it shatters when you bite it. That's the dish. The crunch isn't a bonus feature. The crunch is the entire point, and if you don't get it, something has gone wrong in your kitchen and you should want to know what.

These were handmade. I could see it. Somebody in that kitchen is still pressing tortillas by hand in 2026 while every other place in a ten-mile radius is tearing open a plastic sleeve, and on any other day I'd be telling you to get in your car right now.

Instead they came out slick. Visibly slick, oil pooling off them onto the plate, the lettuce underneath looking like it had survived something. The fat had been too cool, or they'd sat too long, or both. They hadn't crisped. They hadn't gone soft either. They'd found some third condition, dense and leathery, a tube that fought your teeth the whole way and gave you nothing for the trouble.

And I mean nothing. Not bad, which I could work with. Nothing. No salt. No char. No chile, no cumin, no lime, no acid, no heat, no seasoning of any kind had entered the process at any stage. Fat, corn, and a rumor of meat.

One bad fryer on one bad afternoon, I thought. Then the rest of the table came in and told me otherwise.

The queso was bland. Warm, yellow, smooth, and completely undecided about what it wanted to taste like. Cheese dip is not hard, but somebody does have to make a choice, and nobody had.

Which brings me to the guacamole, and to the reason I'm not writing this place off.

It was the best thing on the table, and it was fresh. Obviously, unmistakably fresh. Made that day, by hand, with a fork, from avocados that had never seen the inside of a tub. You cannot fake that and you cannot buy it. It tasted like it came off a tree in the back, and given how green and alive the thing was, it might as well have.

And that's where it stopped. No salt. No lime. Not a trace of onion or serrano or cilantro. Just avocado, sitting there by itself, doing all the work alone.

That's when the whole meal clicked into place for me. Avocado without salt and lime isn't guacamole. It's an ingredient. Somebody sourced beautifully, prepped it by hand, put the bowl down, and walked away about thirty seconds before it became food. (The menu, I noticed later, says of the guacamole: NO MODIFICATION please. Under the circumstances that stops reading like a policy and starts reading like a dare.)

So the problem here isn't that nobody cares. Somebody clearly cares. Somebody is doing the hard, invisible, thankless part that most restaurants gave up on decades ago, the part you can't shortcut and can't buy in a bag. The problem is that nobody is tasting anything. Nobody put a spoon in any of this before it left the kitchen and asked the only question that matters, which is whether they'd want to eat it.

The menu goes on for a while. Burritos up to sixteen inches, fajitas, tortas, quesabirria, pozole and menudo on weekends, breakfast all day. That kind of range is either a promise or a warning and I can only tell you about what I put in my mouth. But when the guacamole hasn't been salted, I have trouble getting excited about the pozole.

Whatever credit this place has earned from me, the front of the house earned all of it. There's a good restaurant in that building, though. You can see the shape of it in the tortillas, in the avocado, in the hot little room and the people working it. It needs a thermometer in the fryer and salt in damn near everything else, and that's a smaller gap than most restaurants ever get handed.

Somebody turn on a fan while you're at it.