Chipotle dishing up brown rice

I’ve always appreciated the narrow focus of Chipotle’s menu; it doesn’t do much, but it does it well. Last year, the virtuous Tex-Mex chain made FeedMe very happy by adding soft corn tortillas to the lineup, and a few days ago, at the Chipotle in Huntington Station, I noticed that in addition to the regular cilantro-lime white rice, there was brown rice, too.

It turns out that on Oct. 3, brown rice rolled out into Chipotles in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. The plan is to introduce it nationally, but the metro area got it first because of expressed interest.

This isn’t the ponderous, stubby brown rice of 70s health-food recipes, but an extra-long-grain rice that, once it was in my burrito bowl, I could not have distinguished it, taste-wise, from white.

And speaking of Chipotle, its website has a beautiful animation, accompanied by a Willie Nelson cover of Coldplay’s “The Scientist,” about a farmer who abandons factory farming in favor of small-scale agriculture. It’s basically an ad for a national food chain, but it choked me up a bit.

The lineup at Chipotle now includes brown rice.