Why Ireland is going loco for Letterkenny burrito bar

The award winning Burrito Loco team, Tommy O’Brien, Leah O’Brien, Dan Harkin, Muriel De Souza, Megan Doherty, Damien Gibson, Miya O’Brien and Ollie Neely.

SERVING decent grub is not going to win you a national award.

Most places serve relatively tasty food, particularly if you are leaving the pub at 1am when you only went down for a quiet couple of pints ten hours earlier.

But a chicken box and chips is never going to cut it when it comes to wooing the food industry’s finest.

So what does it take?

Tommy O’Brien, owner of Letterkenny’s Burrito Loco, knows the answer because his establishment has just been named Just Eat’s Best Takeaway in Ireland.

Rather than just ask him his secret though, I decided to pull on a Burrito Loco t-shirt and get in touch with my inner Mexican.

On Wednesday I got an inside look at what goes on behind the scenes at BL. And I even got to serve a few of the 500+ hungry customers who visit the eatery every single day. My apologies to each and every one of you although in my defence it was my first time and it is more difficult than it looks.

Burrito Loco customers Gemma Hume and Shannon McAleer.

The concept is simple: Good healthy food served quickly with a smile and at a price pretty much everyone can afford.

For around €5 you will get what is essentially a feast. Meat, peppers, rice, beans, onion, lettuce, sauce, the list of options goes on and on. You can have it tucked neatly inside a burrito wrap or you can go naked – all the ingredients in a container in the style of a mixed salad.

The average time from your order being placed to it being handed to you is around 45 seconds, making it ideal for employees in a rush, students on their lunch hour, gym goers on their way for a work out or someone like me who simply hates queues.

That level of precision doesn’t happen by accident though. Like most things in life, when it looks straightforward it rarely is.

Burrito Loco is a 24 hour-a-day operation. From 8am the prep chefs are there bringing in the morning’s stock, checking the meats that have been simmering away overnight before getting to work chopping the vegetables, checking the sauces and getting things ready for the day ahead.

Par for the course is for customers to be queued out the door.

By noon there will be seven, eight, even nine staff hard at work and as soon as the shutters go up, the customers start arriving. And from the gun, it doesn’t cool. Every second of every day it seems that there is someone at the counter wanting on one of those beautiful burritos. In fact par for the course is for punters to be queued out the door and down the Port Road.

Of those customers, at least one in every ten will ask for chips.

Who doesn’t like chips? I love chips. I like curried chip, gravy chip, cheesy chip, taco chip, pea and chip, chip with chip.

You’ll not find chips at Burrito Loco though and for a man who would eat those bad boys out of an ashtray, there is something strangely satisfying about that.

In fact one of the most impressive things about Burrito Loco is the fact that there isn’t a single drop of cooking oil in sight. Everything is prepared without the aid of fryers and in the absence of that thick batter smell, the brilliant aroma of spices reigns supreme.

It is that emphasis on health that has attracted the attention of Slimming World and they regularly direct their clients to the burrito bar.

In a bid to keep the Slimming World set coming back and even to help them as they battle the pounds, Tommy has designed an App that outlines the calorie count in his food and that can be used to design the perfect meal.

Burrito Loco boss Tommy O’Brien with his ‘Best Takeaway in Ireland’ award from Just Eat.

It is a rare phenomenon but Burrito Loco is a takeaway with a social conscience.

Not only do they refuse to push the prices up despite the fact people would be only too happy to pay that bit extra, they also make a point of stocking food and drink items made right here in Donegal.

On top of that they regularly contribute to local charities and only recently raised thousands of euros for Pieta House.

Tommy O’Brien and his wife Leah have been running Burrito Loco since 2012 and manager Daniel Harkin has been with them most of the way. Through working 12 hour shifts themselves during those early days they have established not only a takeaway but a brand.

Today Burrito Loco stands shoulder to shoulder with world famous names like Boojum, the burrito chain with outlets in Belfast, Dublin, Galway and Cork and Tolteca with its premises on Dublin’s Baggot Street and in Galway City.

After being named Just Eat’s Best Takeaway in Ireland though it is now a matter of time before Loco branches out and becomes a household name in its own right.

The sooner it happens the better.

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