Reno–Sparks · Northern Nevada
About Kevin Foxcroft
Kevin Foxcroft is based in the Reno–Sparks area of Northern Nevada. He travels for work most weeks, which is how this whole thing started, and writes Full Send Burritos as a practical field guide for anyone else who finds themselves in an unfamiliar city with ninety minutes and a rental car.
Who's writing this
I'm Kevin. I work in the field — hard hat, hi-vis, early mornings — and the work moves around. Home is Reno–Sparks, so most trips start on I-80 heading west over the Sierra, and the rest start at an airport. Somewhere in there I figured out that the best twenty minutes of a work day is usually the twenty minutes I spend eating a burrito somewhere I've never been.
I don't have a food background. I'm not from the cultures whose food I'm eating and writing about. I'm a guest at these counters, and that shapes how I write: I describe what I ate, I use the restaurant's own words for it, and I leave the history and the bigger claims to the people and sources who can actually make them.
This exists because “best burritos near me” is useless when you're on a clock. I want you to know exactly what to order and be able to go.
Why a Nevada guy has a California top 5
Fair question, and the honest answer is geography plus a job. Living in Reno–Sparks means the Bay Area is a manageable drive and Sacramento is on the way to everything. Four of my top five sit within a couple hours of each other in Northern California; the fifth is out on Route 66 in Kingman, Arizona, because that's the halfway point of a drive I make.
So the map you'll see on this site is a map of where work sends me, not a ranking of the American burrito. Northern Nevada has its own places I'm still working through, and I'd rather write those up properly than rush them onto a list to look thorough.
the coverage map is shaped by the job. saying so is the point.
The rules I hold myself to
- I pay for the food. Every meal, every time. If something is ever comped or invited, a badge sits next to the verdict, not in a footnote.
- I don't invent anything. No made-up prices, quotes, visit dates, or dishes. If I haven't been, the page says I haven't been.
- The restaurant's words win. Names, spellings, accents, and how a kitchen describes its own food come from the kitchen.
- I don't rule on authenticity. Not my call to make and never has been.
- The jokes point at me. Travel, rental cars, my own bad planning. Never at anyone's language, neighborhood, or tradition.
- Directions before sharing. The restaurant's own link always sits above anything that promotes me.
The long version, including how scoring works and how to get something corrected, lives on the methodology page.
Send me a recommendation
This is the part I actually want. If your family runs a place, if you work behind a counter, or if you just know the spot I'm obviously missing — tell me. Tips from people who cook for a living outrank everything else in my inbox, and I'll say who sent me when I write it up.
Restaurant owners: if something on this site about your business is wrong, the correction path is fast and I don't argue about facts.
The contact form is being set up. In the meantime, corrections and recommendations can go through the site's social links.
The day job
Since you're going to ask: I'm an engineering technician based in Reno–Sparks, Nevada, and I've worked at NCE (Nichols Consulting Engineers) since 2016. Before that I was doing survey and construction work for NDOT. Most of what I do is pavement condition assessment — distress surveys, coring, ground-penetrating radar, falling weight deflectometer, the unglamorous business of working out how much life a road has left in it.
That's the job that puts me on the road, which is the only reason this site exists. If you want the professional version rather than the burrito version, it lives at kevinfoxcroft.com.
roads by day. burritos at lunch.