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The Chimi That Ate TucsonBy Leo BanksHERE'S THE SCENE at Micha's, arguably the home of Tucson's monster chimichanga: A fellow with confident eyes and a wide stride plants his Levi's into a booth, shoves the menu aside and tells the waitress, "Don't need it, hon. Get me two chicken chimis. On the speed."
Twenty minutes later, the poor fellow is leaning back, gripping his girth and sheepishly asking for a girlie-box to take his half-eaten chimi home. "May I have the rest to go?" he asks. Happens all the time, says Micha's co-owner Richard Mariscal. "Lots of people can't finish them," he says. "As for eating two, I don't think I've ever seen a regular customer finish two of our chimis. Just today, I think I had five tables ask for boxes to take their chimis home. Five tables." The Micha's folks really lay it on. We're talking about a 16-inch tortilla that shrinks down to about 12 and a quarter in the deep fryer. For the math-impaired, that's more than a foot of solid crunch and nosh. But even that's nothing compared with the chimi that Richard and his brother Gilbert built back in 1984, in celebration of the re-modeling of their restaurant. They used a rectangular tortilla that measured 18 feet across. They assembled a gang of strong men to help roll it in unison on a screen, then jam it full of toothpicks to keep the beast from unraveling. Next they had to lift it and put it down in a stainless steel trough. "We had to be careful," Richard remembers. "It was like a paramedic putting an injured man onto a gurney." Cameras from local TV stations whirred. Reporters scribbled in their grease-stained notepads. Cooking the thing required 300 gallons of vegetable oil and permission from the health department. Eating it took an army. And when they were done, this same army didn't need a bugler and they couldn't march, anyway. What is it about chimichangas that inspire such excess? Why are they a cult food? No one can say for sure, but one thing is certain: People take their chimichangas seriously. Aficionados would much prefer paying more money in order to avoid being served the smaller ones with fewer ingredients. So bring on that foot-long.
"When it comes to size, we claim the chimichanga bragging
rights for Tucson," says Richard.
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The waitress has seen all this before. She parks her red fingernails
on her hips and says, "Now hold on, Bub. I'll bring you one
now, and if you think you're man enough to eat another, I'll serve
it to you, sure enough. But let's gobble the first one right quick,
then we'll see."