A Times Critic's Favorite Long Beach Breakfast Burrito Costs $21

The El Ranchero tops Masa y Taza's menu in Long Beach, but the $14 red chorizo burrito keeps the same house chorizo.

The Long Beach burrito an L.A. Times critic just singled out, Masa y Taza's El Ranchero, is the priciest one on the menu at $21. Seven dollars cheaper, a few lines up the same menu, sits the one I'd actually order.

That's El Chorizo Rojo, $14 on the cafe's posted menu as of Oct. 5: the same house red pork chorizo, eggs, potatoes and cheese, plus refried beans, which the Ranchero's listing doesn't include. The extra $7 buys guacamole and sour cream. My verdict rests on the critic's review and the cafe's own menu, not on a meal.

Jenn Harris, the Times restaurant critic, made her case for the cafe on Monday, adding it as one more stop beyond the paper's August list of the 16 best breakfast burritos in Los Angeles. She describes a midmorning line out the door at the spot on the western end of Long Beach's 4th Street Corridor, and a dining room packed with families and run clubs.

The man behind it, chef-owner Gabriel Pulido, spent years in fine dining, his last job running the kitchen at Bourbon Steak in Glendale, before opening Masa y Taza with a friend he's known since childhood, the Times reported. He grew up in Whittier, and his tortillas go back to family visits to Chihuahua.

"Every morning we'd wake up to the distinct smell of flour tortillas being cooked on the plancha," Pulido told the Times. The cafe's menu says each Chihuahua-style flour tortilla is made by hand in-house and pressed one at a time, to order.

The chorizo is the other thing he makes himself, in two versions. The red is pork, built on cinnamon, clove, garlic, chile powders and guajillo paste; the green is chicken thigh and skin with parsley, cilantro, poblano and jalapeño. Harris wrote that the red, folded into the Ranchero, gives the burrito "a molten, goopy center," which is exactly why I'd skip the upgrade and put that chorizo in the cheaper burrito.

My under-$20 order: the $14 Chorizo Rojo, which comes with two salsas on the side, plus $1 for the salsa macha, the chile oil Harris picked as maybe her favorite condiment. Then a 12-ounce café de olla for $4.50, the house coffee spiced with piloncillo, anise, cinnamon and cloves. That's $19.50 before tax. For two, the $8 Papas y Salsa Macha, potatoes tossed in that same oil, is the side to split.

The Ranchero still has a job. It's the one burrito that lets diners pick any of five fillings, from either chorizo to bacon, pork sausage or turkey sausage, so it's the move for the friend who wants guacamole inside and won't hear otherwise. Lighter appetites can stop at a $6 red chorizo taco.

Masa y Taza is at 1538 E. 4th St. It opens at 7 a.m. every day except Tuesday, when it's closed, and shuts at 2 p.m. on weekdays and 3 p.m. on weekends. The cafe's website points drivers to street parking or the paid lot at Cherry and 4th, about a five-minute walk, and asks them to stay out of the Speed Queen lot.

Wear a dark shirt. The red chorizo, Harris warned, will "stain your mouth and anything it touches."

Source: Los Angeles Times, retrieved October 5, 2026. Other sources: masaytaza.com, masaytaza.com (2).