The Brief

For months, cities around the state have ramped up enforcement against people sleeping in tents on the street. Now, some are focusing on a new target: People who live in vehicles.

Wayne Gardiner, 58, watched his home of 20 years roll onto the back of a flatbed tow truck in San Jose on a recent Monday afternoon. Then he realized he’d forgotten something inside.

He threw open compartments in the bottom of the RV as fast as he could, looking for the pressure-washing tools he uses for cleaning jobs to make extra money. As the RV rose up onto the truck, about to head off to a junk yard, Gardiner found the black backpack full of tools and pulled it out.

Then he stood back with his rottweiler, Buddy, and some of his possessions in green trash bags at his feet, and watched the truck drive away. He held his emotions in check.

“If I get myself involved with that, I’ll be a wreck,” Gardiner said. “I gotta let it go.”

San Jose is towing vehicles from different areas of the city in a new effort to rid the streets of lived-in vehicles. Last month, it started clearing its largest homeless encampment – a makeshift city in Columbus Park, where Gardiner and hundreds of other people had been sleeping in cars, RVs and tents.

San Francisco passed a new policy this summer banning large vehicles from parking on any city street for more than two hours — effectively making it illegal to live in an RV on the street.

Even smaller cities, including Carlsbad outside of San Diego, and San Mateo in the Bay Area, have adopted new policies targeting people living in cars and RVs.

The issue has attracted the attention of state legislators as well. Assembly Bill 630, which cleared another legislative hurdle Friday, would make it easier for certain cities to dispose of RVs parked on their streets.

“We have stories from people who have inoperable RVs that are parked in their neighborhoods, under freeways, that they know are ground-zero for drugs, for prostitution rings, for other criminal activities that are happening there,” said the bill’s author, Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez, a Los Angeles Democrat. “So what we’re trying to do is address this issue head-on.”

The push comes as rows of RVs and lived-in cars line streets in cities across the state, frustrating voters and creating issues with trash, waste water and traffic visibility. The number of lived-in vehicles on San Francisco’s streets has risen over the past year — from 474 in July 2024 to 612 in June 2025, even as the number of tents dropped from 319 to 165, according to the city’s count.

Vehicle homelessness can be more difficult for cities to manage than tent encampments. People often are reluctant to give up the safety and security of their RV or car in exchange for a temporary shelter bed or short-term housing. And many cities have nowhere to store RVs, and nowhere for them to park legally.

Assemblymember Mark González speaks before lawmakers during an Assembly floor session at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Aug. 21, 2025.

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Fred Greaves

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Advocates for the rights of unhoused Californians say doling out punishment to deal with the issue will make the homelessness crisis worse. When cities tow lived-in cars and RVs, their owners often can’t get them back because they can’t pay the towing and storage fees, said Eleana Binder, public policy director for GLIDE, which serves San Franciscans living in homelessness and poverty. They end up with nowhere else to go.

“It does increase street homelessness, because people are right on the edge,” she said. “For a lot of people, a vehicle is their only asset, their last step before street homelessness.”

Tickets and tows

Ordinances that regulate homeless encampments often target people sleeping in tents, not vehicles. As a result, police have used parking ordinances to try to clear vehicle encampments by giving tickets and either towing or threatening to tow. But that approach doesn’t take into account the fact that the cars and RVs are people’s homes.

In some places, new policies that specifically address people living in cars and RVs try to address that problem by providing services as well as tickets and tows.

Gardiner, who watched the city of San Jose tow his home, was luckier than many. The city paid him $2,000 for his RV, as part of a pilot program intended to convince people to give up their vehicles and move indoors. He also got a free hotel room, where the city told him he could stay for up to a year.

Gardiner was one of several hundred people living in San Jose’s largest encampment — a sprawling collection of RVs, cars and tents scattered across a rutted, dirt field in Columbus Park and spilling onto surrounding streets. City crews began clearing the camp in August, and have towed 78 vehicles and moved 128 people indoors, according to the city.

The city estimates 370 people lived at Columbus Park when the operation started, but advocates say it was more. And not everyone has been offered the $2,000 buy-back program, a motel stay or other help.

Valerie Vallejos, who lives in her van at Columbus Park while she studies cosmetology at San Jose City College, said she was visiting her children in Stockton when outreach workers came to the park offering people services. Now she’s trying to get on the list, hoping to get a housing placement or at least a reprieve from threats of towing. So far, she’s had no luck.

“I’m going to keep coming back out until I get something,” she said. “It’s my only option. What else can I do?”

San Jose is cracking down in other places, too. Officials launched a pilot program earlier this year that bans oversized and lived-in vehicles in certain parts of the city. The city first posts signs and puts up flyers warning people to move their vehicles, then tows if people don’t move. Since January, the city has towed 19 RVs and trailers and 45 other vehicles, according to its online dashboard. But many vehicles return after the enforcement blitz. To date, the city has completed enforcement in 38 “tow-away zones,” where there were a total of 1,175 cars and RVs. Ninety days after that enforcement, 671 vehicles had returned to those locations.

Valerie Vallejos has lived in her van for three and a half years and was shortly forced to evacuate Columbus Park during a sweep of the city’s largest homeless encampment in San Jose on Aug. 25, 2025. “I have no idea where I’m going to go. It’s kind of scary, you know,” said Vallejos. “It’s just sad. It’s just sad.”

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“It’s a start,” said San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who acknowledged that towing won’t magically make street homelessness disappear. But he said even forcing RVs to move temporarily can help mitigate the problems the city has seen in long-standing encampments, such as methamphetamine labs, fires and the accumulation of dilapidated, abandoned vehicles.

“This is about providing relief to neighbors and small businesses that have had permanent RV encampments for years on end,” Mahan said.

Since the beginning of the year, San Jose has enforced three “tow-away zones” in the blocks around Barnard Avenue where 51-year-old Esmeralda Herrera lives in a parked trailer with her elderly dog, Kiba. She lost her job as a janitor for the Santa Clara County school district during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then a rent increase drove her out of her apartment.

Herrera is on a waitlist for affordable housing, but she hasn’t seen any progress, she said. In the meantime, Herrera said she bounces all over the city, moving to a new block every time the police threaten to tow her trailer. She’s afraid to leave for job interviews, because she worries that when she gets back, the trailer and her beloved dog will be gone.

“I don’t know what I would do,” she said. “I don’t want to be in the street.”

An RV marked for removal at Columbus Park, the city’s largest homeless encampment, in San Jose on Aug. 25, 2025.

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Florence Middleton

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CalMatters

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A sign reading “Where do we go?” is posted on an RV at Columbus Park, San Jose’s largest homeless encampment, on Aug. 25, 2025.

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Florence Middleton

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CalMatters

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'Public road is not permanent housing'

San Francisco is set to begin enforcing its new RV parking rules this fall. Like San Jose, it plans to pay people to give up their RVs. In addition, people can get a temporary reprieve from towing if they agree to work with a case manager on a housing plan. But only people who have been on the city’s radar since May 2025 are eligible.

“I’m really worried that people are going to end up slipping through the cracks of the permit program, or losing their permit and getting towed,” Binder said. “And for so many people, getting towed means ending up on the streets. That’s my biggest fear: That we’ll see people suffering and more people ending up on the street that weren’t before and don’t have to be.”

In March, Carlsbad expanded its camping ban to include sleeping in vehicles on public property — an infraction that carries a $100 penalty for a first offense, a $200 penalty for a third offense, and a $500 penalty for subsequent offenses. Since the change, the city has issued 34 vehicle camping citations and 77 oversized vehicle parking citations, and towed 12 vehicles, said Mandy Mills, the city’s director of housing and homeless services.

The city received a $3 million state grant to help people living in vehicles move indoors, both by paying for temporary housing subsidies and funding the salaries of two outreach workers to connect people with housing.

In San Mateo, sleeping in a vehicle on public streets has been illegal since the 1990s. But it wasn’t enforced. In June, City Council voted to start giving people tickets after they refused two offers of shelter.

“The public road is not permanent housing,” said City Manager Alex Khojikian.

Gonzalez’s bill was intended to help cities like San Mateo clean up their streets. The bill cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee on Friday with a last-minute amendment that limits its scope to Alameda and Los Angeles counties.

The bill would give cities in those counties more freedom to dispose of abandoned or inoperable RVs. Under current law, a city can trash abandoned RVs valued at $500 or below, but anything more valuable is sold at auction. Someone else can buy that RV and return it to the street, Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez’s bill would raise that threshold to $4,000, allowing cities to more easily junk RVs and get them off the street for good.

Wayne Gardiner, 58, right, watches as a tow truck removes the RV he has owned for more than 20 years during a sweep at Columbus Park, the city’s largest homeless encampment, in San Jose on Aug. 25, 2025. The city offered Columbus Park residents $2,000 for their RVs. “The facts of life is that things like this will happen. You have to take the deal because they’re gonna take it anyways,” he said. “I have to just let it go.”

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While Gonzalez says his legislation wouldn’t target RVs in which people are currently living, the bill doesn’t define what makes a vehicle “abandoned.” Opponents, including the California Public Defenders Association, worry that will allow cities to tow too broadly, and remove much-needed shelter from California’s homeless population.

A separate piece of legislation, Senate Bill 692, would have lowered a different threshold cities have to meet before they can tow “abandoned or inoperable” vehicles. The bill, by Oakland Democratic Sen. Jesse Arreguín, is dead for this year, but may move forward again next year, as Arreguín says he will continue to work with stakeholders on amendments.

In the meantime, in San Jose, Herrera will continue bouncing around the city’s streets with her dog.

“I don’t know what is my next step if they tell me to move, because I've been everywhere,” she said, “and I’m not getting anywhere with the homeless programs.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Spectators in L.A. this summer for the World Cup could pay up to $209,000 for a private suite for just one match, but union workers at SoFi Stadium are worried they'll miss out on the action.

Bartenders, cooks, dishwashers and servers represented by Unite Here Local 11 have staffed the events held at the stadium since it opened, from the 2022 Super Bowl and NFL games every fall to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé concerts. That includes positions in suites, where fans can pay top dollar for private rooms, food and drink.

But FIFA has brought in another entity entirely to run its luxury program for World Cup fans. The company, called On Location, is FIFA's official "hospitality partner," offering those that can afford it exclusive seating, special gifts and meals. Their packages can cost tens of thousands of dollars or more.

Luxury suites for fans attending the World Cup at SoFi Stadium cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Workers at SoFi say they're worried that FIFA's relationship with On Location means jobs that would typically go to union workers — and the wages and tips that go with them — will instead go to subcontractors without union protections. It's one reason they're threatening to strike when the World Cup comes to town.

 "We have so many wonderful workers who've been here season after season," said Kay Blake, a bartender from Inglewood who works at SoFi Stadium. "I don't see why they would partner with someone else to bring an experience that we can bring ourselves."

Workers also want to be paid a higher rate that reflects the sky-high ticket prices for the eight World Cup matches at SoFi Stadium. They're asking for double pay for major events including the tournament — an arrangement that the food service workers at Dodger Stadium have for the World Series, according to Unite Here.

"We're trying to ensure that there is no disparity between the profits of the company as opposed to our labor," Blake said. "We don't want to be exploited."

How does the World Cup affect labor negotiations?

Unite Here Local 11 represents around 2,000 workers at SoFi, and they're currently negotiating a new contract with Legends Global, the company that runs the stadium's bars and food services. Their old contract expired last year.

The union is leveraging its role in the coming World Cup to push for higher wages, especially at mega-events. Its workers also want protections from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, after the agency's head said that ICE will play a key role in security for the tournament. Unite Here filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, saying ICE's planned presence at the World Cup threatened the union's ability to collectively bargain.

But the battle over subcontracting could also lead workers to the picket line. The union says the use of subcontractors will determine who will benefit from the riches that FIFA brings to Inglewood.

"Subcontracting is supposed to be rare," Unite Here Local 11 co-president Kurt Petersen told LAist. "So in this contract, we're saying no more. It needs to end and especially needs to end at the World Cup because we want those jobs to be good jobs."

How common is subcontracting?

Petersen said the World Cup isn't the only event where jobs have been threatened. He said that union members lost out on more than 100,000 hours of work in 2025 that was instead given to subcontracted workers.

Kay Blake, the bartender, offered LAist an example: an external company paying to operate a suite or two for an event at SoFi.

"If you bring in a subcontractor, they're going to want to bring in their people," she said. "Let's say that this subcontractor usually buys one to two suites… We have a group of people called suite attendants, and so now there's one to two suites less from their workload."

Blake said that she and her co-workers are scheduled by seniority, and fewer suites could mean people work fewer hours. She also said more short-term workers at the stadium for the World Cup could dilute tips for the workers who are at SoFi year-round.

A spokesperson for Legends Global declined to comment on ongoing negotiations with Unite Here Local 11. A representative for Hollywood Park, the site of SoFi Stadium owned by Stanley Kroenke, deferred to Legends Global. FIFA also did not respond to emails requesting comment on the ongoing negotiations.

Luxury packages are the new normal

The dispute between SoFi workers and their employer comes as high ticket prices for the World Cup and 2028 Olympic Games face scrutiny and mega-event organizers emphasize luxury experiences for the very wealthy.

On Location is also the hospitality partner for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The company supplied the same service in Paris in 2024 — the first time the Olympics had such an official luxury service, according to the New York Times.

"The higher end can run well into the tens of thousands of euros: bespoke multiday all-inclusive packages that might include stays in five-star hotels, meals cooked by Michelin-starred chefs, seamless car service between venues and the best seats at the most in-demand events," a Times reporter described in the summer of 2024.

LAist reached out to On Location via email, requesting an interview on the services they provide and their workforce. The company didn't respond.

Isaac Martinez, a cook at SoFi Stadium who lives in Inglewood, said he's still waiting to learn what his schedule will be for the World Cup and he's worried about his hours.

Martinez told LAist that since World Cup prices are so high, he and his co-workers should get a slice of the pie.

"The people that are able to afford those tickets and those suites, they're not people like us," Martinez said through an interpreter. "They're not the people that are gonna make the food or make the experience."

The World Cup kicks off in Los Angeles on June 12 with the first U.S. men's match against Paraguay. If there's no resolution to negotiations, attendees could arrive to a picket line.

State regulators voted Thursday to stop Southern California Gas Co. from charging customers to help pay for planning miles of pipelines that would bring hydrogen gas to the L.A. Basin.

The company says the project would reduce the region’s reliance on methane gas.

Southern California Gas estimates it would cost about $266 million to study and plan the project — called Angeles Link — and asked the state Public Utilities Commission to allow it to recover those costs through customer rates. The company had proposed a monthly increase of $0.35 on the average residential customer bill over the course of three years.

The commission unanimously rejected the request, saying the company had not proved any direct benefit to customers. The decision effectively halts the project for now, and comes amid a stall in federal funding for hydrogen projects under the Trump administration.

Local environmental groups involved in the community advisory process had also grown frustrated by negotiations that they said, in a letter to state regulators, “does not prioritize genuine community engagement.”

As global pollution levels continue to climb, the commission’s decision also highlights the growing challenge of transitioning to a cleaner energy supply amid rising utility bills and open questions about the safety and true environmental cost of largely untested technology.

Why hydrogen?

Hydrogen is a colorless gas that is considered "clean" because it doesn’t involve carbon, which — when burned to create energy — becomes carbon dioxide, a major planet-heating gas.

But it takes energy to produce hydrogen, and most hydrogen these days is created by burning fossil fuels. “Green” hydrogen is created by using clean energy sources like solar and wind to split water into oxygen and hydrogen.

SoCal Gas said the Angeles Link project would prioritize green hydrogen.

Most experts see green hydrogen as an important clean-burning fuel for hard-to-electrify industries, such as long-haul trucking and gas-fired power generation. The city of Los Angeles, for example, wants to retrofit its Scattergood Power Plant near El Segundo to burn hydrogen instead of methane gas to generate electricity.

There are many open questions about how safe the highly-combustible gas is for proposed uses and how much water it will require to make. At the same time, extracting and burning fossil fuels for electricity and fuel also takes water — a growing problem as climate change drives longer and hotter droughts.

Experts say, if done right, hydrogen can reduce that water intake and not have a major impact on water supplies.

Also, burning hydrogen could actually worsen local, lung-damaging nitrogen-oxide air pollution, at least with the technology as it currently stands, according to energy researchers.

Reactions to the decision

SoCal Gas will now have to turn to shareholders or other sources of funding if the company wants to proceed. The company did not directly answer LAist’s questions about whether it would.

“We continue to believe that hydrogen—including clean renewable hydrogen—can help advance California’s energy and climate goals while supporting the long‑term affordability, security and reliability of energy service for customers,” SoCal Gas spokesperson Brian Haas wrote in an email to LAist.

Environmental groups celebrated the vote, while emphasizing they see green hydrogen playing a role in the state’s future.

“Residential customers should not subsidize speculative infrastructure for large industrial users,” said Michael Colvin, director of the California Energy Program at Environmental Defense Fund, in a statement.

“We look forward to working with regulators, utilities and large customers to build a credible, cost-effective strategy to cut climate pollution from sectors that are hardest to electrify,” the statement read.

Global events like the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics are sure to draw thousands of new visitors wanting to get to know Los Angeles.

L.A. has a lot to offer, including its vast and varied portfolio of public art. It’s even been referred to as the mural capital of the world. So if you want to explore some of the city’s art, here are a few murals you won’t want to miss.

Sports 

“LA Rising” at the Miyako Hotel in Little Tokyo celebrates the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, depicting him in his two roles — hitter and pitcher.
- Where to find it: 328 First St., Los Angeles

“Blue Heaven on Earth” is a love letter to the Dodgers, depicting both Shohei Ohtani and the late Fernando Venezuela.
- Where to find it: 1647 Blake Ave., Los Angeles

A mural honoring Winter Olympics Gold Medalist Alysa Liu in Gardena.

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Jay L Clendenin

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California native and Olympian Alysa Liu captured the world’s attention with her figure skating in the Winter Olympics. This mural in Gardena celebrates her win.
- Where to find it: 15532 Crenshaw Blvd., Gardena

A mural of L.A. Lakers legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna can be found outside Hardcore Fitness L.A.

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“City of Angels!” pays tribute to Lakers legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gigi.
- Where to find it: 400 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles

Music

Whitney Houston, Rihanna, Aaliyah, Amy Winehouse and Selena are memorialized on this Hollywood mural.
- Where to find it: 7677 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles 

“Jazz on the field” is an ode to Wrigley Field and the Dunbar Hotel in South L.A. and depicts jazz icons Louis Armstrong and Etta James, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.
- Where to find it: 43rd St. and Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When Kendrick Lamar featured Tam’s Burgers in his “Not Like Us” music video, the burger spot in Compton commissioned a mural highlighting the rapper’s unforgettable single.
- Where to find it: 1201 Rosecrans Ave, Compton

Historic to LA

A section of the Great Wall of Los Angeles mural, designed by muralist Judy Baca, that showcases pivotal moments in Los Angeles History.

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Ashley Balderrama

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“The Great Wall of Los Angeles” is one of the largest murals in the world, and it’s supposed to get bigger. The half-mile art piece depicts California’s rich history.
- Where to find it: Along the L.A. River in the San Fernando Valley, on Coldwater Canyon Avenue between Burbank Boulevard and Oxnard Street. 

“The Blessing of the Animals” at La Placita Olvera depicts the Catholic tradition of blessing one’s animals.
- Where to find it: 115 Paseo De La Plaza, Los Angeles

“El Grito” depicts a scene that sparked Mexican independence from Spanish rule.
- Where to find it: Placita de Dolores at 831 N. Alameda St., Los Angeles

When you take a bite of the lomo saltado burrito from Merka Saltao, a fast-casual Peruvian restaurant in Culver City, one of the first things you'll notice is the sauce.

The wok-fried chunks of steak, dressed in a soy-and-oyster sauce reduction spiked with vinegar, saturate the rice inside the tortilla, highlighting the sweet heat of ají amarillo mixed with the velvety texture of pinto beans.

It's a beautiful confluence of flavors. It is also, depending on who you ask, either a creative act of evolution or a betrayal of Peruvian culinary heritage.

Standing on business

The lomo saltado burrito at Merka Saltao wasn't exactly a calculated move. Lifelong friends Alonso Franco and Ignacio Barrios — who met in high school in Lima — came to Los Angeles to bring Peruvian food to the masses, first through a ghost kitchen concept they ran from 2021 to 2023. The burrito happened almost by accident: a member of their kitchen team brought in a tortilla one day, someone suggested wrapping the lomo saltado in it, they ate it, and within three days, it was on the menu.

Merka Saltao co-founders Ignacio Barrios, left, and Alonso Franco, right, inside their Culver City restaurant. The two lifelong friends from Lima opened the fast-casual brick-and-mortar location for their Peruvian concept in August 2025.

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The data from the ghost kitchen made the case for keeping it there. Franco and Barrios had launched with around 140 dishes — lomo saltado, ceviche, chicken dishes, the works. But the numbers kept pointing to the same thing: wherever lomo saltado appeared on the menu, in whatever form, burrito, bowl, salad, it was the winner.

(Ceviche, for all its cultural cachet, is raw fish with raw onion — a harder sell for a weekday lunch. Lomo saltado, Franco noted, is steak and fries — basically a hamburger.)

The backlash

The two friends made the leap to brick-and-mortar in August 2025, opening Merka Saltao in downtown Culver City. It's one of the more competitive dining corridors in L.A., the kind of block that can support a $16 wellness bowl and a craft beer bar in the same stretch, populated by Amazon employees on lunch breaks, families on weekend outings, and food-literate regulars who will absolutely have opinions about what goes in a burrito.

Those opinions arrived faster than Franco expected. Within the first week of opening, an influencer came in and posted about the restaurant — but instead of showing the full menu, the bowls, the chicha morada, the flexibility of the concept, they showed the burrito. Just the burrito.

Franco working the wok at Merka Saltao. The high-heat wok technique at the heart of lomo saltado traces its roots to Chinese immigrants in Peru

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Christopher Mortenson

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The comments turned quickly. "No! Peruvians don't eat burritos. ¿Qué car—o es eso?" — roughly, "what the hell is this?" — wrote one commenter. Another said "Burritos? We don't eat burritos in 🇵🇪”. Franco describes sitting at his computer reading the pile-on, feeling something between anger and devastation. "There was a moment where I probably even cried," he said, "thinking, I've made a mistake." But then he looked at the numbers. 30,000 had seen the post…. And half the comments were in his defense.

He took the conversation to Reddit, posting to r/FoodLosAngeles asking the community directly: am I wrong for this? The response was overwhelming — hundreds of comments, almost entirely in his favor, and a surge of new customers walking through the door shortly after.

Fusion by default

This is Los Angeles, where many of the dishes that define the Southern California diet were born precisely from cultures colliding. Roy Choi built an empire on Korean tacos. Al pastor traces its technique to Lebanese immigrants who brought the vertical spit. The California roll, invented by Japanese chefs in Los Angeles in the 1960s, introduced an entire country to sushi. None of these dishes destroyed the traditions they borrowed from. If anything, they expanded their audience. And the lomo saltado burrito isn't exactly a novel concept in Southern California to begin with — everyone from Pablitos Tacos in North Hollywood to Le Hut in Santa Ana, run by 2025 James Beard Award-nominated chef Daniel Castillo, has featured their own version. Even Disney's California Adventure got in on it, serving a lomo saltado burrito out of the Studio Catering Co. food truck as recently as last year.

The lomo saltado bowl and burrito at Merka Saltao in Culver City — two versions of the same dish that sparked an unlikely online debate about Peruvian culinary identity.

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Franco would also point out that lomo saltado itself — the dish the purists are so eager to protect — is a product of Chinese immigrants bringing the wok and soy sauce to Peru roughly 300 years ago. "Peruvian is by default fusion," he told me. "So we have all the right to wrap it up in a burrito." What the online critics were really doing, whether they knew it or not, was defending a dish that was itself once considered inauthentic — and doing so in the name of authenticity.

Where things stand

Since the backlash, Franco says business has been mostly steady — breaking even, which for a concept that requires high volume at a low price point, he considers a good sign. The controversy changed things in ways he didn't expect: people started coming in specifically because of the story, not just the food. He began putting himself front and center in the brand, regularly making videos on social media about what it's like to run the business, occasionally poking fun at himself and the whole debate. When we visited during the weekday lunch rush, there was a steady line of people waiting to order, many stopping to talk with Franco directly.

In a way, he's answered the authenticity question not with an argument but with a presence — showing up, telling the story, letting the food speak. "Honoring my food, if that requires pairing lomo saltado with a salad or wrapping it in a tortilla, I have no problem," he said. "I'm not being less authentic. We are evolving in Peru anytime. I have to be authentic on the individual flavor and then be flexible to reach more people to discover our flavors."

The burrito, it turns out, was never the point. It was just the door.