A FINE DINING SPOT THAT SELLS INCREDIBLE BREAKFAST BURRITOS

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Coastal fog is often still peeling away from the sidewalk when the first round of Saturday morning customers arrive at Baran’s 2239 in Hermosa Beach. They linger inside the strip mall parking lot that faces out to Pacific Coast Highway, wearing flip-flops and hoodies. It’s an incongruously early sight for the Michelin Bib Gourmand-awarded South Bay dinner spot, lauded by the international dining guide for its bistro ambiance, approachable wine list, and “filet of beef with a sumptuous black garlic-Sichuan sauce.” For years the steady, low-key restaurant had operated strictly in that lane, serving the South Bay cities with charm and evening elegance.

Then, one day, they decided to make a breakfast burrito.“We started during COVID,” says co-owner Jason Baran, who cooked up the first iteration of the restaurant’s breakfast burrito alongside chef Tyler Gugliotta. “We were just trying to figure out how to make some income.”

Baran had founded his namesake restaurant in March 2016 with brother Jonathan Baran, and for years it felt like Baran’s 2239 was precisely what it should be: a strip mall surprise that, thanks the chef Gugliotta, always went out of its way to beat expectations. The pandemic threatened to take all of that away. So, like nearly every other restaurant, the guys switched things up overnight, iterating on a new breakfast burrito (along with some early sandwiches and daytime fare) that they could sell fast and easy to fans who were still willing to come out for pickups. The burrito was an almost instant hit. “It just blew up,” says Baran.

Three years after that first trial run, Baran’s 2239 is serving more than 1,100 breakfast burritos every weekend, Friday through Sunday, plus specials and one-off burritos as they pop up (usually on Fridays).

Each burrito gets four ounces of Vital Farms egg, two ounces of cheese, two ounces of cooked bacon, and precisely 13 tater tots.

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