On Dec. 8, a new Chipotle restaurant will open at the corner of 32 and Saint Paul streets. For those who may be unaware of this Mecca of Mexican fare, Chipotle is a "fast casual" restaurant that serves, in its own words, "gourmet burritos and tacos." What sets a gourmet burrito apart from a normal one, you might ask? Most important, it would seem, is the quality of the ingredients. But also, it's about the sheer quantity of these ingredients that are packed into a single 13-inch shell.
According to http://www.chipotlefan.com, a Chipotle burrito with Barbacoa beef, cilantro rice, black beans, fajita vegetables, salsa, cheese, sour cream, guacamole, lettuce, pepper vinaigrette and a side of chips weighs in at a whopping 2,287 calories -- with 1,076 calories from fat. Speaking of the fat, you'll be consuming about 120 grams of it, 30 of them saturated. You'll also get an incredible 5,903 grams of sodium. Add a 20-ounce Coke (if your stomach lining can expand to fit it) and the calorie count on your mega-burrito breaks the 2,500 mark.
Of course, you can order a healthier meal (without chips and soda) that will be under 1,000 calories, but I doubt we Hopkins students plan to skimp on these extras. Fortunately, most of us still have fairly active metabolisms. For those who don't, avoid Chipotle at all cost.
Chipotle expends a lot of effort positioning itself as a healthy alternative to other fast-food choices, and certainly its ingredients are of a higher quality than those of Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, or its former parent company, McDonald's. However, the dramatic numbers quoted above say something remarkable about what's happening to Charles Village: It's becoming a lot like the rest of our super-sized, preprocessed America.
The opening of Chipotle represents a significant step in the development of Charles Village into more of a college town. This process began with the Barnes and Noble, designed as the anchor for new commercial development in the neighborhood. Now, with Chipotle, we have our first true chain restaurant, replete with remarkably unhealthy, super-caloric offerings. Soon we'll also have a Cold Stone Creamery and a full-size Starbucks (yes, in addition to the smaller one in the bookstore, half a block away!).
We need fewer of these mass-produced places around here and more local joints like Carma's Caf8e, a sidewalk caf8e on 32nd Street. where the food is homemade and the proprietor herself looks after the customers as she would her own children.
While the new additions to Charles Village will spur more economic activity in the community, the lion's share of these benefits will go to stores like Barnes and Noble and Chipotle, rather than local owners. We'll lose out on the unique, shabby-but-loveable culture of Charles Village.
There are a few things that neighborhood places can do, however, to remain viable in the face of these new threats. One of the most important is for more local stores to sign on to the J-Cash system, which allows students to pay for purchases using their ID cards rather than cash. Stores that use J-Cash in this area receive a far greater share of the student market than those that don't.
Local stores should also position themselves as uniquely belonging to Charles Village. That can mean appealing directly to students by actively supporting Hopkins athletics with banners and signs, as Eddie's Market and Rocky Run do. It can also mean playing up the down-home gestalt of places like Carma's and Sam's Bagels. Appealing to localist sentiments will help these venues continue to thrive despite the intrusion of chain stores.
The introduction of a store like Chipotle does have certain advantages. Such stores will bring more business to Charles Village, and local merchants will get secondary benefits from influx of outsiders who wouldn't have visited the neighborhood otherwise. They will also drive up the overall level of quality of offerings in the area as these local merchants attempt to "keep up" with their new, highly polished competitors.
However, we stand to lose a lot culturally if we let Charles Village turn into another cookie-cutter commercial district. I sincerely hope that our local merchants work actively to turn these threats into an opportunity, without losing our local flavor.
-- Joshua Robinson is a senior International Studies major from Potomac, Md.
