James Andrews

Before my trip to see MvA I decided I wanted lunch, and after seeing a few twitter posts from the Boloco CEO – John Pepper, it sounded like a good idea. Now I am not new to Boloco. The Givvy office was strategically placed in Framingham so that all 3 cofounders were of relative equal distance to the office. It just so happened that there was a Boloco restaurant conveniently located near the office, and it was often an easy place to get lunch.

Today I visited the store near The Boston Common. I walk in, at first it takes me a second to figure out which direction I have to walk to place my order. The store is laid out in such a way to maximize seating capacity for the location which like most places in the inner city is relatively small. A little signage would probably alleviated my moment confusion, but I’m a big boy, so no big deal. The line wasn’t very big and there were plenty of seats open when I walked in, I get up to the cashier an order a “build my own”. Now I do this mostly because I am a picky eater. I don’t generally eat a lot of vegetables and I limit what food I put cheese on. I start telling the cashier what I want, and when I say “that’s it” she goes oh that’s a classic, and instead of just leaving the thing in the system as a BYO, she goes back changes it to a classic and then removes everything I don’t want on it. Which in my mind seems like a HUGE waste of her time, but whatever I wasn’t going to argue with her about it as long as I got what I wanted. I watched carefully as my burrito was made. This is what I LOVE about most burrito restaurants is they make it in front of you, so you can see when they screw up, and Boloco has nice open view, so you just have to keep track of the number of burritos in front of you. One aspect I really like about Boloco is they ask you for your name at the counter. Why? Well, when you get to the pick up point the person says your name, and you don’t have to keep track of a number. Also, “Is that for her or to go James?”, “Don you need this James?”. In my mind it’s just nice to be a name to the employee and not a piece of paper with a number.

In the end I got the burrito I ordered. I still think it would have been easier for the cashier to just take my order as I gave it, but whatever water under the bridge. The Boston Common location is nice, it’s easy to find. They’ve got recycling set up so you can separate the recyclables from the non-recyclables. The signage was a little weird, I was trying to figure out what the item on the far right of the sign was (the tin foil wrapper). Wouldn’t hurt to have the word under what the items are (even though the other 2 were easily identifiable). I got a Boloco card, and was told I was only going to get it if I registered online (which I agreed to do). Not sure what that was about, but whichever.

The food is good, and service was good overall. I feel the chicken could use a little more flavoring, but I am sure the lack of vegetables has a lot to do with my perception. As long as they don’t spice it up like “Chipotle Grill’s” chicken, which tastes too much like texmex BBQ than a Latin flavored Burrito I’ll be happy. The price was $5.24 (really? you need to bring it down to the 24 and not just give it the 25? I never understood that). Which is $.25 more than what I was paying in Framingham. You also get considerably more burrito at other places for the same price or less, but in all honesty burritos from other places are usually more food than I can handle, so for me it’s no big deal, others might disagree. I’ll give it 3 out of 5 burritos. While I wouldn’t go out of my way to get food there, I also wouldn’t snuff it as a food option. Pretty much what I expected.

On a different note. Their website is not iPhone friendly as it uses Flash for the entire thing, which in my opinion as a professional web developer is bad. Unfortunately there is no alternative. It also places sounds as you navigate which can be annoying in a professional work setting, especially since there is no way to turn it off. I rate the website pretty poorly. Hope John has the marketing team fix it because it’d be nice to be able to a map to a local store if I wanted one while I was AFK.