4/20 nibbles? Gobbleritos are on the menu at Mad Mex

By jimadmin On Apr 19, 2021

You heard about Christmas in July.

How about April Thanksgiving?

Mad Mex, the regional restaurant with 12 locations in the Pittsburgh area, will be selling its signature gobbleritos on Tuesday.

The gobblerito is one of the largest burritos made in Mad Mex, the flagship of the Big Burrito Restaurant Group. It’s stuffed into a burrito for Thanksgiving dinner.

The recipe features home-fried turkey, creamy mashed potatoes with black beans, bread filling, and butter corn, wrapped in a flour tortilla and covered with sauce. A cup of cranberry sauce rounds off the dish, which is an autumn tradition in these parts.

It started “years and years ago” when one of the chefs at Big Burrito came out to a diner after a night on the town and ordered a hot turkey sandwich.

Chef Matt Glick was enjoying the food and wondering how it would taste if made as a burrito. The rest is part of the region’s culinary history.

Big Burrito’s chef Bill Fuller said the restaurant started selling on April 20, an informal holiday among pot smokers, a nod to the increased appetites that can come with marijuana consumption.

“We thought it was pretty fun,” said Fuller.

They moved it to Tuesday closest to April 20th because the weekends had a hard time keeping up with the demand for gobbleritos and a rush for dinner. This year, Gobblerito Day falls on April 20th.

In 2019, Mad Mex sold 6,800 gobbleritos across its 12 locations on Gobblerito Day, Fuller said. He said the goal on Tuesday was to sell 6,975.

Amid the stress of last year’s coronavirus pandemic, gobbleritos were on the menu from mid-March to mid-May to offer convenience foods to customers, Fuller said.

“Everyone was so scared and unhappy,” Mad Mex said at the time, and it was something Mad Mex could do to get business going and make people happy.

People should pre-order their gobbleritos before 6 p.m. Tuesday to ensure they get their order, Fuller said.

“We want to have enough all day. We don’t want to run away, ”he said.

Information on ordering can be found here.

Tom Davidson is a contributor to Tribune Review. You can contact Tom at 724-226-4715, tdavidson@triblive.com, or on Twitter.