8/4/07

A Man with a Mission

Here are some facts.

  • I like burritos and other cheap Mexican food.
  • I work from home, am too lazy to cook, and therefore eat out for lunch several times a week.
  • I recently moved to a neighborhood -- Chicago's Wicker Park -- that features an abundance of good, cheap Mexican food.
  • Did I mention that I like burritos?
  • Mmm, burritos.
Put these things together, and you'll see that my mission is obvious: a 15-week quest to find the best taqueria in Wicker Park.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great blog, albeit peculiar. Just curious as to how you decided on the pairings of signature dishes. You could be arranging a round of weakest vs. strongest. Also, I have a bit of an issue with the order of dishes sampled. For example, shouldn't the first round be all tacos? Start with something simple - working towards the torta. Or perhaps the final week could be matchups based not on predetermined dishes, but on the restaurants self proclaimed signature dishes. You're pulling out the big guns too fast. Love the idea, though.

Nate Silver said...

Craig,

The main thing is that I'm trying to balance two different objectives, one being this competition and the other being maintaining a relatively normal lunch schedule. If Round 1 consisted only of carne asada burritos, for instance, then I'd have to eat 16 of them over an 8-week span, which is a bit much even for my tastes. Not only would that make lunch a chore, but it also might compromise the objectivity of my ratings, since the taquerias that came toward the end of the cycle would be adversely affected. I am going with the signature dish idea for the championship round, though.