El Charrito draws masses with a simple formula – fresh food, fast service, outstanding tortillas.

There’s a myth about El Charrito, the joint on Market Street in Salinas where the line for juicy chile verde burrito or a chicken bowl loaded with veggies and beans frequently snakes through the store, out the door and down the sidewalk. And that myth centers on the soft, warm flour tortillas they use to make more than a thousand burritos a day.

The myth is this: that if you time it correctly, you can buy a package of fresh, homemade tortillas to take home. The bag will still be warm and your family will adore you.

The adoration part is probably correct. It’s everything else that’s wrong.

See, the thing is this: El Charrito doesn’t actually stock tortillas for sale. You might be able to walk in and buy a bag, true, but that’s only if they have extras made fresh that day – leftovers that didn’t get wrapped and sold as burritos. This had led to actual arguments, says Kenya Moncada, whose mother, Irene, is one of the three co-founders of El Charrito.

“It’s our number-one complaint, that we only package the surplus. If we’re busy that day, we won’t have a lot of extra,” she says. “And customers have fought over them. We’ve had women in here, with two of them both having their hands on the last tortilla pack.”

When Irene Moncada, her brother Carlos and their mother, Teresa, started El Charrito, there wasn’t anything like it in town – a Mexican deli with a great meat counter, some staples and a hot counter selling prepared foods. At one point, the family opened six or seven El Charritos all over town to fill what Moncada called “a huge gap in the market.” But others followed suit, the market contracted and the family decided to concentrate on its Market Street store – and popular hot food section.

The store shifted focus once again. Kenya’s brother Alex Mendez, who now works in Los Angeles in finance, came in and revamped the store’s computer sales system, helped develop an app for online ordering and worked with architects a remodel. (The bowls were also his idea.) Kenya, who formerly planned events for Wells Fargo in the Bay Area, does marketing (the compostable packaging and paper straws are her idea).

And since all of the recipes exist in her grandmother’s head, Kenya is also trying to learn the recipes.

“We have employees who have been here for 20 or 30 years and so they know all the recipes by heart,” she says. “We hope to open another deli and we need the recipes on hand. I’m trying to get them down.”