Boulder and Chipotle

During my weekend in Colorado, I made a little excursion to Boulder (home of the University of Colorado) to meet up with my brother for the morning and get in some tourism. We walked around the Pearl Street Mall, sort of the main promenade of Boulder, and also walked up to CU to walk around the campus. The campus was SO gorgeous… it really made me wish I’d gone to school there! Boulder is in the foothills of the Rockies so the weather was a comfortable 80 degrees with a breeze. I’ve decided I could totally live in Boulder should the need arise.

On campus

We lunched at Chipotle that day where I had the absolute worst experience I’ve ever had at a Chipotle. And I’ve been to Chipotle a LOT. First of all, they had signs up promoting their new “spring mix” burrito filling, which was supposed to be a mix of veggies marinated in adobo sauce. Sounds good, right? Kind of like a fajita mix? Since I hadn’t heard about it before and I’m all about veggies, I thought I’d try it.

When I gave the cashier my order, she goes, “So… I don’t think the spring mix is very good.”
What do you even say to that? I just said, “Oh, yeah? Well I hadn’t heard about it before so I thought I’d try it out. How new is it?”

Her: “Pretty new, only one other Chipotle has it right now but they’re discontinuing it because I don’t think people like it.”

Me, now getting stubborn: “I think I’ll try it then since it’s being discontinued… what if I’m missing out?”

She told me it would be several minutes because they were still making a batch of the mix so we filled out a sheet (like if you were to fax in your order) with my preferences: burrito bowl, corn salsa, sour cream and cheese.

Regardless of my checkbox marked “burrito bowl,” the burrito came out fully clothed in a tortilla and foil. I noted this to my cashier and she said, “Oh… do you want me to put in a bowl for you?” You think?? Geez. So she did. Back at the table, I stirred it around and noticed that it looked like there was chicken in it… no “spring mix” in sight. I tried a piece of what looked like chicken but it was actually TOFU. It didn’t really taste bad, just different, and certainly not like what I was expecting. Nowhere in the spring mix description was tofu mentioned. Nothing against tofu but if I would’ve known that this “spring mix of veggies” was ONLY going to be tofu, I wouldn’t have ordered it. Then I noticed there were indeed some veggies: tomatoes from the pico de gallo. Pico de gallo, NOT the corn salsa I’d ordered. What is wrong with the Boulder Chipotle?? At that point though I figured I’d been high-maintenance enough so I didn’t ask for a salsa change. But I was pretty disappointed that their spring mix of veggies contained NO veggies. Weird, right? I guess one could make the case that tofu is a vegetable but pure tofu just can’t be advertised as veggies. Tofu doesn’t have THAT bad of a reputation, does it? To compensate for my lack of veggies, Richard kept giving me the fajita vegetables that they’d for some reason put into HIS burrito bowl unasked for. So I suppose I did get some veggies out of it.