This is a correction as much as a recommendation. If you have been told to go to Papalote for the salsa — and for twenty years that was among the most repeated pieces of food advice in San Francisco — the address you have been given is probably the one on 24th Street in the Mission, and that shop closed this summer. The kitchen on Fulton Street is still open, and so is the truck downtown.
The address most people have is out of date and the two that remain are in different parts of the city. Ask Karpo which one is actually open and nearest you today.
What closed and what did not
The 24th Street shop in the Mission — the one with the reputation, the one on every old list — is no longer trading as of mid-2026. Listings and recommendations that point there are stale.
The Fulton Street kitchen in NoPa is still operating, and it is the one to go to if you want the full menu in a room rather than out of a window.
There is also a truck that works the downtown lunch trade, which is convenient if you are working in the financial district and useless if you are not.
This distinction matters more than usual because the Mission location is the one people walked to. Fulton Street is a different neighbourhood on a different set of transit lines, and it is not a substitution you make by accident.
It is also worth checking any listing you are working from rather than trusting a map pin. Closures of this kind take months to propagate through review sites, and a pin that still shows opening hours is not evidence that a door will be open when you get there.
The salsa is the whole reputation
What built the name was not the burrito construction but the roasted tomato salsa — thick, smoky, more like a cooked sauce than a fresh chopped one, and unusual enough that people started asking to buy it by the jar.
They now do exactly that. Retail jars are sold alongside the food, in the original roasted tomato as well as chipotle and habanero versions.
That is the useful thing to know if you are travelling across the city: you can leave with the part that made the place famous, which is not true of most restaurants.
The bottled version is not quite the same experience as the salsa served with food, which is worth saying plainly. Jarred product is stabilised for a shelf life and the fresh one is not, so a jar is a very good souvenir and a slightly muted version of what you ate.
How the burrito differs
This is a rice-in, larger-format Mission burrito rather than the stripped-back kind, which puts it in direct comparison with a chain product in a way the no-rice counters are not.
The difference shows up in the salsa and in the char on the meat rather than in the architecture. If you take the salsa away it becomes a much more ordinary object.
Vegetarian options are treated seriously here rather than as a subtraction, which is worth knowing if you are ordering for a group with mixed requirements.
Portion sizes here run large in the standard Mission idiom, which means the same warning applies as everywhere else on this list: one between two, with something else on the side, is frequently a better order than one each. The leftovers do not reheat particularly well once the rice has set.
NoPa, if you are going to Fulton Street
The Fulton Street stretch sits at the northern edge of the panhandle, an easy walk from Golden Gate Park and a short one from the Divisadero corridor.
That makes the trip combinable in a way the Mission version never was — a burrito and then the park, or a burrito before something on Divisadero in the evening.
It is a bus rather than a train part of the city. Getting there without a car is perfectly possible but slower than the Mission, which had a station two minutes from the door.
The panhandle location also changes the best time to go. A burrito on Fulton Street in the middle of the afternoon and a walk into the park afterwards is a genuinely good use of a clear day, and that is not something anyone could have said about the Mission shop, which was a queue and then a bus home.
A note on old recommendations
San Francisco's food advice ages badly, and this closure is a good illustration: a twenty-year reputation attached to a specific street corner, still being repeated months after the corner emptied.
The general lesson is to check an address before travelling for it rather than after, particularly for small independent kitchens in neighbourhoods under redevelopment pressure.
In this case the food survived the address, which is the good outcome. It just moved across town, and nobody updated the recommendations.
There is a version of this that applies to your own habits too. Most people carry a mental list of five or six places they recommend to visitors, assembled over years and rarely audited, and a reasonable share of any such list is out of date at any given moment.
Practical notes
The 24th Street shop in the Mission closed in mid-2026. Old listings still show it.
The Fulton Street kitchen in NoPa is open and has the full menu.
A truck serves the downtown lunch trade on weekdays.
The roasted tomato salsa is the reason to come, and it is sold in jars to take away.
Chipotle and habanero versions are also available in retail jars.
This is a rice-in Mission burrito, unlike the no-rice counters further south.
NoPa is a bus part of the city — slower to reach than the Mission was.
Tags: #chipotlenearme #papalote #nopa #sanfrancisco #sf #burrito #salsa #sfeats #fultonstreet #bayarea #missiondistrict #sffood #hiddengems
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Ask Karpo first
The address most people quote is closed, so the useful question is which one is open and how to get there. Ask Karpo which location is nearest and what else is worth combining with the trip.
