A young couple walked down the shaded side of Forbes Avenue last Wednesday afternoon with plans to pull their red four-door out of its metered spot, drive north and go swimming. They'd drawn it up that way, at least, until 4:18 that day, when they met some short-haired vagrant on a street corner (OK, me), and two minutes later, they were passengers in my car, strangers on a spontaneous journey toward the faraway horizon, all in raging pursuit of a chain fast-food restaurant that's said to serve some enormous burritos.

		Map: Journey from Pittsburgh to Kent, Ohio

Twenty minutes passed before we burst free from the great heat of Oakland rush-hour traffic and bore down on our destination -- Chipotle Mexican Grill, in Kent, Ohio, some 101 miles away. A four-hour round trip. Either a new low for humanity or a new high for lime cilantro rice and shredded, braised beef.

The drive to Kent, site of the Chipotle closest to Pittsburgh, actually took a bit longer than we hoped. Plenty of time to patch together the backstory of this misshapen adventure, and do the other necessary things, such as introduce ourselves.

I'd been assigned several days earlier to write a story on Chipotle, opening its first Pittsburgh location in Robinson tomorrow. But hey, impatience got the best of us.

Chipotle actually started in Denver in 1993, when the whole casual fast-food genus still remained an undeveloped concept. But now, at the opposite end of this corporate growth, Chipotle has some 530 locations to go along with its irreverent brand personality, created mostly through clever, grass-roots marketing. And all the while, it's gathered a reputation for inspiring some of the most obsessive, degenerative behavior you'll ever associate with high-calorie food.

So that, in a roundabout way, explained my appearance near the Pitt campus that Wednesday afternoon. Call it a human experiment, designed to flip a business story into a travel story, or perhaps a travel story into a transparent excuse to expense dinner on the company card. I held a simple, homemade sign -- "HUNGRY FOR CHIPOTLE?" -- and pointed it at the swarm of Oakland passersby, charting the time necessary to find somebody devoted enough to nod yes, listen to the ensuing pitch about crossing the state border, and again, nod yes.

Five minutes.

That's all it took.

The sign and its suspicious bearer appeared in Oakland at 4:13 p.m. Then, the street lights turned red, the two pool-bound Pitt students crossed toward me, and -- serendipity! -- we were off, the boyfriend ticking off the touchstone Chipotle moments of his life, the girlfriend sitting in the backseat trying to convince her mother by cell phone that she wouldn't soon end up dazed and abandoned on some rural byway. (Hey, I did have a business card.)

This expedition straight into Ohio strip mall territory only reaffirmed the other fanatical Chipotle stories. Three girls at the University of Rochester made an impromptu Chipotle pilgrimage to Cleveland in 2003. Hundreds of customer-created haikus have funneled onto one page of the Chipotle Web site. ("Sitting hungrily / Wrapped rapture awaits me / I eat Chipotle.") Matt Silverman, from George Washington University, created chipotlefan.com, a Web site stocked with message boards, nutrition calculators and a system for finding your burrito "soulmate," that yet-unknown inamorata who orders her burrito with the exact same specifications as you do.

Before heading to Oakland, hellbent on adding one more anecdote to the list, I spoke with Joe Stupp, who managed the first Chipotle location back when there were plans for no more. Now, Mr. Stupp has some marketing-customer service hybrid job, but his official title -- "Manager, Duct Tape and Plungers" -- reflects the goofy nonsense to which he's subjected daily.

After the interview, Mr. Stupp passed along several e-mails with examples:

No. 1: "When we didn't have any restaurants in NYC yet," Mr. Stupp wrote, "we paid for [one gentleman's] train ticket to come down to visit us in D.C., since he is such a big fan. Note, he wants to take pictures of himself in Hong Kong to get more free burritos."

Later, No. 2: "We also had a number of kids in California who for some reason thought if they got the Chipotle pepper logo tattooed on their bodies, this would give them free burritos for life. We persuaded them to not do this of course, but some still write us from time to time wondering if the rumor is true."

So, two more devotees for the list: Aaron Villarreal, 22, and girlfriend Jordan Woodside, 20. Both Pitt students. Both members of a facebook.com group, "Chipotle Lovers @ Pitt." He's from Dayton, Ohio; a biology major, thinking of med school, at least when he's not thinking of burritos. He'd eaten at Panera 30 minutes before we met.

She's from Kittanning. She'd never eaten at Chipotle until she traveled to his hometown, and long story short, that's how Dayton became a great place to visit the ol' boyfriend.

We discussed all this on Interstate 76, ripping toward Kent. All of us agreed, too, that a four-hour round trip for dinner really has a tendency to pique the appetite.

Chipotle owes its appeal to its unique approach. The basic formula never changes, because the formula itself aspires to simplicity, forbidding limited-time offers and special menu items and any of the clutter that dilutes One Thing Done Well. Chipotle merely synthesizes a few basic elements: a menu with only burritos, fajitas burritos, tacos and burritos stripped of the tortilla. A visible assembly-line of ingredients. A minimalist decor, themed by plywood and corrugated barn metal. Oh, and a smiling employee who hands you 1 1/2-pounds of food wrapped in a tortilla the size of a parachute.

"It's sort of reached the point where the burritos couldn't get any bigger," Chipotle founder and Chief Executive Officer Steve Ells said.

Chipotle first reformed American culinary standards -- always a domain of excess -- by introducing obscene excess, a development folks in this country seemed to welcome. A burrito dressed with the full lineup packs 1,515 calories and 68 fat grams. You can basically undo a half-marathon run in 10 minutes. "They beep when they back up," quips one Chipotle billboard.

Such largesse began, oddly enough, with a small idea. Mr. Ells opened his 850-square-foot store in Denver, modeling it after a California taqueria. Then he opened another store. Then four more. Then in 1998 McDonald's became the company's majority investor, offering Mr. Ells the perfect twofer: autonomy and money. Only this July did McDonald's agree to the disposition of its Chipotle stock.

That separation meant, once again, that Chipotle could pursue its personal style without apologizing for the prepackaged corporate vastness behind it. At Chipotle headquarters, after all, most wear jeans to work. Some employees bring their dogs. Mr. Stupp said that decisions are made to hire new marketers "after we go out drinking with them." And within the last half-decade, Mr. Ells has tried to emphasize organic food and free-range meat.

"This thinking came five or six years ago," he explained. "I was experimenting with a new carnitas recipe, trying to make it better, and I noticed the thing that prevented it from tasting better was not the recipe, but the main component -- the pork." So he visited Niman Ranch, in Oakland, Calif., decided to purchase pork from the family farm and raised burrito prices $1.

And sales rose.

"What that told me," Mr. Ells said, "is people really care about taste."

Even the people who are fully sentient members of society. But we'd lost claim to that title some 100 miles back. We zipped onto the commercial streets of Kent, eyes desperate to spot that coruscating temple of barbacoa meat. We turned right. A Starbucks! A laundromat! ...

Chipotle!

A Navajo-red building. A patio with tables. A line of some 30 people snaking out the front door.

We rushed from the car (6:38 p.m.). Aaron kept repeating the same words, "I'm so happy, I'm so happy," his mind a deranged mush. He spoke about his planned order with eyes half-closed, the way some wiser man might describe a Bach movement.

6:52 -- We placed our orders.

6:55 -- We received our food.

6:56 -- We found a table outside.

And how to even describe the first bite? A supernova? Some figurative step toward Eden? The summit of bodily sensation? We saw rockets and star bursts and, maybe, were this an "Austin Powers" scene, some subliminal flash of the Washington Monument. The first bite had just the right touch of every ingredient -- the citrus zing of the rice, the cumin and adobo that soaked into the beef, the corn, the poblano peppers, the grated white cheddar. Our mouths worked like wood-chippers, a persistent mmmm.

Only when we finished did the delirium recede. We stared at the anticlimactic return trip, which returned us to Oakland, in the end, at 9:15. On the ride home, we talked about the fine fortune of Chipotle's new location, which will negate the need for such outlandish day-consuming journeys, and of course allow the mass of local Chipotle fanatics time for other pursuits, such as writing burrito haikus.