The Wonders of North Hollywood’s La Fiesta Super Mall

One of the things I love best about Los Angeles is the presence of tiny pockets of amazing food in unlikely places. Mercado La Paloma, in an unlovely part of South LA on 37th and Grand, for example, hosts Chichén Itzá, Mo-Chica, a more-than-passable Persian counter and a Oaxacan sandwich joint with a surprisingly good horchata con tuna (fruit, not fish).

Another such nexus of great food is the gritty, worn corner of Sherman Way and Bellaire Avenue in North Hollywood: the northeast corner hides Blackjack Market behind a worse-than-average Carl’s Jr., where you can buy some of the best chorny khleb (Russian-style spongy “black” rye bread) in the city, along with European butter at some of the best prices in the Valley. The southwest corner hosts Swan Thai, the first (as you travel off the freeway) in the line of excellent Thai restaurants as you head west from the freeway, and Las Quenas Peruvian Restaurant, home of an octopus ceviche and leche quemada that still pull me to this gritty intersection three years after having sold my house nearby.

The northwest corner hosts an El Super supermarket (not nearly as good as Vallarta), Las Américas Bakery (decent bolillos) and the La Fiesta Super Mall, a random hodgepodge of stalls selling all manner of cheap schlock, from individually plastic-wrapped tennis shoes to itchy wool zarapes. When I moved away from the Valley in 2007, the depressing food court in the back of La Fiesta Super Mall contained an unspeakably poor Chinese takeout stand featuring cornstarch-and-sugar-sauced protein and sad job-lot vegetables, a Japanese teriyaki stand that was the only such place I’ve ever seen that could make me yearn for Yoshinoya, a thoroughly mediocre Mexican rice-and-beans combo-plate place where the industrial cheese melted over everything, and two closed stalls. Ten or twelve rickety old aluminium tables stood guard between the food and the merchandise, from the Korean electronics store to the tattoo parlour.

This image, then, was in my head when I cocked my eyebrows in astonishment at Bill of Street Gourmet LA last night when he suggested we go there for dinner. I frankly thought he’d taken leave of his culinary senses, but I should have known better; he does not eat mediocre food. We met up with Brian of @EATours for one of the most surprising dinners I’ve had in a long time.

Gone are the mediocre stalls of yesteryear. The old mediocre Mexican combo-plate place has turned into a small outpost of Metro Balderas (you know, of the weekend carnitas of Jonathan Goldian bliss); the Japanese place has morphed into a burger place. One of the closed stalls has now turned into La Perla del Pacífico, a restaurant specialising in the food of the Pacific coast of Colombia. Not the antioqueña food of La Maria, this is the food of the lands west of Cali and Medellín.

We started with shakes made of borojó, a South American fruit that (after I looked it up) resembles a green globe with brown continents. I know that’s a bizarre description, but go look on Google Images and you’ll see that I’m not making it up. The flavour is slightly tangy, like a mix of mangosteen and banana. It is supposedly an aphrodisiac; if so, I’m immune to it. The shake, which had the consistence of a Borojó Julius, was delicious but half the portion would have been sufficient.

With the shakes we ordered Pacific-style Colombian ceviche de camarones. The broth was very tomatoey with a great deal of frenched red onion and small bay shrimp. The shrimp were well-cooked (they were cooked with heat before being marinated) but the dressing was not piquant enough and overwhelmingly like having shrimp in a glass of Clamato with some onions. It wasn’t bad—far from it—but I found myself longing for the ceviche de pulpo across the street, with lime juice and ají blended into a leche de tigre that hits like caffeine.

A plate of patacones (think tostones) with hogao showed up. I’m a sucker for the texture of these flat disks of plantain: crispy around the edges, chewy in the middle. A little hit of salt and they’d be perfect. As it was, the hogao (a long-simmered mixture of onions, peppers, cumin, tomatoes and garlic that Bill rightly called “the sofrito of Colombia”) made them go down very, very easily.

Empanadas de carne were surprising. I was expecting something along the lines of the Argentine dish (practically the national dish) of beef mince in a wheat-flour wrap, deep-fried. These empanadas were corn masa-based, but coarse, with long-stewed, slightly stringy beef cooked inside. The shell was slightly tough to crack open (think of a deep-fried sope that wraps around things), but in the mouth they weren’t tough at all; they crumbled into an intensely corn-y front flavor that complemented stewed beef well.

Encocao de piangua, or ark clams in coconut sauce, was not the most attractive-looking dish but the taste was excellent; tender clams that tasted like mussels, cooked in a thick coconut sauce that had a heavy hit of citrus and quite a bit of garlic in it, served with rice, salad and a couple more patacones.

Sancocho de pescado was the biggest hit of the evening, a coconutty soup that reminded me of a very, very mild yellow Thai curry. Big pieces of perfectly fresh, moist, plump whitefish (black cod?) along with potatoes, yuca, plantains and a thin coconutty sauce with tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic. Add dendê oil and you’ve got the northeast Brazilian dish moqueca baiana, as Brian pointed out. It comes with rice, avocado, limes and salad, which you can use to doctor the dish to your own desires.

These folks can cook, and they can cook well. The food was mostly outstanding and a nice change from Mexican, Mexican, Salvadorean, Mexican, Mexican. It’s worth mentioning that according to the proprietor, Valentine’s Day there will be several dishes for $1. Head in there and see what they have on offer; even if it’s small plates, as Brian pointed out, they’re a dollar each, how could you possibly go wrong?

As we were sitting waiting for the food to arrive, I noticed that the Chinese food place had the original neon sign advertising Chinese food, paper banners advertising Thai food, and a small carved decoration on the wall spelling out “Lao”. Intrigued, I walked over and looked over the laminated menus: pad Thai, beef broccoli, fried rice. Blech. I was about to give it up as a bad job when a sign above caught my eye: “Bamboo Shoot Salad”.

There’s only one place in Los Angeles that makes bamboo shoot salad. Could it be? What else is up there?

Papaya salad with salted, raw blue crab. Nam kao tod. Sour sausage. Nem on sticks. Shrimp balls on sticks. This all looks VERY familiar. Lexan containers of dried shrimp, of roasted peanuts, of brown palm sugar.

Sweet mother of mercy, I’ve found Song Fung Kong!

Those of you who remember the weekend food stalls at Wat Thai L.A. on Coldwater Canyon and Roscoe will remember that there were dueling papaya salad stalls next to each other, essentially dead centre along the north line of booths. One sold only papaya salad; it fetched up in a booth in New King Seafood right next door to La Fiesta, closer to Coldwater Canyon. The other one always had two lines, one for grilled meats on sticks and one for papaya salad and bamboo shoot salad. The lines were epic and the rules were well-known: you could order meat sticks from the papaya salad line, but not vice versa. The papaya salad was superior at the double-line place, which is why it had longer lines.

This latter, Song Fung Kong (named after a very popular Laotian song), is the booth now in the back of La Fiesta Super Mall, next to La Perla del Pacífico. I talked to the proprietress and she confirmed that she was the boothholder at the Wat. It’s amazing to me that right in a row you have unbelievable papaya salad, the only Pacific Coast Colombian food in the United States and the carnitas of Metro Balderas. A far, far cry from crappy cornstarchy glop and melted cheese. I was, of course, giddy with excitement; my favourite papaya salad in the country has come home to roost!

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Bill for getting me into the place to find it. Go and try all of these places; the atmosphere is ghetto but the food is real.

Bear in mind that the mall closes at 8:00 p.m. If you are still eating at that time, you can exit the west doors and walk around the building when you’re done, but service stops at 8:00 p.m.

La Fiesta Super Mall
12727 Sherman Way
North Hollywood, CA 91605

Bill’s review from 2008 of La Perla del Pacífico

Los Chilangos: Pambazos and Huaraches and Alambre, Oh My!

You know, to look at the menus of soi-disant “Mexican” restaurants around here, you’d think the entire nation of Mexico subsisted on tired, overcooked meat, rice, beans and tortillas. You would think that not a single vegetable besides peppers and onions (for the so-authentic fajitas, of course) was grown in the entire country.

Well, it just isn’t so. Mexicans subsist PRIMARILY on vegetables. Mexican madres make their niños eat their vegetables the same was American mothers do. The vegetables might be a little bit different, but they’re there.

And so every now and then, when I feel the need for vegetables cooked Mexican-style, I head down to El Rincón Chilango on 17th Street in Santa Ana and get myself a mushroom quesadilla or maybe a huarache (a large, sandal-shaped tortilla-like object) topped with nopales (cactus paddles). I usually get a strange look (why is the white guy ordering this stuff? does he actually know what huitlacoche is?).

Today, though, I didn’t. My Spanish-language order of a squash-blossom quesadilla and a huitlacoche (“Mexican truffle”, i.e., the black mushrooms that grow on certain ears of corn) sope must have done the job convincing the waiter that I really do love Mexico City-style antojitos, because after I finished eating, I got a flyer about a new place, run by a family member, with a similar menu.

When I got home tonight, my wife expressed a desire for Mexican food, and since I wasn’t averse to trying a new place, off we went to northwest Anaheim.

¡Puro chilango!

Los Chilangos (literally, “the guys from Mexico City”) has been open about two months, according to José, the owner. It’s in one of those depressing-looking L-shaped mini-malls, this time on Lincoln Ave. a couple of blocks west of Euclid, in a shopping centre with a Subway, a very shiny barbershop and a Chinese place. Six tables line the wall and the kitchen takes up the other half of the restaurant.  Mexican percussion instruments up on the wall provide the décor, it’s brightly lit, and it is spotlessly clean.

The menu is, like its sister restaurant, a litany of all the antojitos Mexico City loves: huaraches (large, sandal-shaped platforms made out of masa, the dough from which tortillas are made), sopes (shallow bowls made out of masa), quesadillas (in this case, like long, folded-over tacos that have been filled with cheese and your ingredients of choice and fried crisp), tlacoyos (smaller versions of the huarache, with the ingredients stuffed inside), pambazos (bread rolls dipped in chile sauce and griddled) and the heart-stopping alambre (carne asada, ham, bacon, onions and red pepper griddled together and topped with melted mozzarella cheese, which gets served with a large stack of hand-made tortillas).

We ordered a quesadilla with squash blossoms (for comparison’s sake), a pambazo with potato and chorizo and a huarache al pastor with nopales (cactus paddles).

The quesadilla was quite good, but a little heavy on the lettuce and sour cream. It was served with a thin green salsa which went nicely with the fairly delicate flavour of the squash blossoms. The quesillo (string cheese) inside was nicely tangy and had appealingly-long strings, like really good mozzarella on pizza. I did like my lunch quesadilla at El Rincón Chilango better, but only because there were more squash blossoms in my lunch than in my dinner. I do love squash blossoms…

The pambazo, however, was much, much better than El Rincón Chilango’s. Surprisingly light, like a chile-head’s twisted idea of French toast, with a nice spread of beans, potato and chorizo. As much as I like El Rincón Chilango, their potato-and-chorizo pambazo tastes mostly like potato and not enough like chorizo.

It takes talent to cook nopales, because they ooze like okra, and you run the risk of serving a pile of green snot to your guests. Los Chilangos did a great job on the nopales, and they really added a necessary note to the chile-marinated pork in the huarache.

Los Chilangos, like El Rincón Chilango, sells menudo (spicy tripe soup), posole (pork and hominy soup) and barbacoa de borrego (pit-roasted lamb) Friday through Sunday. I haven’t been to try it, but I’m thinking about it, because while all the posole in the world tries to live up to my wife’s family’s recipe, there’s precious little bad posole in the world… and I love barbacoa and the consomé with garbanzos that usually comes with it.

Service is genuinely friendly. I think perhaps Jose was the only person working in the whole place, but he came over to chat with us and with the table that came in after us. He got my wife an English menu, answered questions, and played with our daughter, who took immediately to him and spent the time he was back in the kitchen looking for him.

While Los Chilangos isn’t as big or as popular (yet) as as its sister in Santa Ana, Los Chilangos is a worthy addition to our city. Next time you’re looking for vegetables in a Mexican restaurant, hop off the 5 at Lincoln and head a bit west, and enjoy.

Los Chilangos
1830 W. Lincoln Ave.
Anaheim, CA 92801
(714) 999-5515

El Rincón Chilango
1133 W. 17th St.
Santa Ana, CA 92706
(714) 836-5096

Gin and Limonata: Contravening the Eighth Amendment

I’m typing this slightly drunk, and it’s my Protestant family’s fault.

Let me explain.

Growing up, there was a lot of emphasis on two cardinal rules of behaviour: (1) waste not, want not, and (2) you must own up to your mistakes. These were not negotiable items, to the point where when my grandmother moved out of her house into an assisted-living facility, we discovered foil with a price of 38¢, tins of asparagus with datestamps in the 1960s and jars of homemade jam older than I was. And if you made a mistake and did not own up to it, heaven forfend, you got the pursed lips and the official family icy stare that Parisian waiters would give their favourite corkscrews to master.

What does this have to do with this post?

Well, it would be easy for me not to write a post about something that failed, and leave you with the impression that I am some kind of wunder-cook. I thought about it, but somehow my grandmother managed to purse her lips and lift her eyebrows at me from beyond the grave.

Gin and limonata: the drink of Beelzebub

It started as a great idea. One of my favourite alcoholic drinks is gin and bitter lemon, but the problem is that I’ve only ever found actual bitter lemon once in this country and it was something grand like $3 a bottle. (I bought it anyway.)

Tonight, as I was browsing the wine sale at Cost Plus in the Village at Orange, I noticed they had six-packs of San Pellegrino limonata on sale as well. I love the bitter sodas from San Pellegrino, and so the spark of an idea came to me: why not make gin and limonata? It won’t have the tang of tonic, but it’s bitter and lemon-flavoured, so it can’t be bad, right?

Wrong. Very, very, very wrong.

It is unbelievably bad. It is colossally bad. It somehow manages to be horrendously astringent and gingivitingly sweet at once. I took a sip of this innocent-looking beverage and I hadn’t even closed my mouth before my gorge rose.

“GACK,” I said.

As I held the glass over the sink, with my pouring hand at the ready, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just pour this out. The expression “you have made your bed and now you must lie in it” sprang unbidden to mind.

So I set it down and stared at it. The ice melted obligingly.

I stared at the concoction some more. I steeled my nerves. I took a tiny sip.

“HHHHHHHHHHHHURRRRRRRRR,” I said and set it back down with a look of revulsion.

Then I took a deep breath, and as I stamped repeatedly on my left foot with my right foot, I drained the glass.

“GLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!”

Then I went to go sit down for a minute to try and convince my larynx to retreat from my hard palate…

…and when I stood up to go make this post, I discovered the reason it’s not recommended that you drain a large glass of gin and anything at one draught.

So I’m somewhat drunk, and this post is somewhat rambly, and I have borne the pain so that you don’t have to: gin and limonata is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.

In the meantime, if anyone knows where to get proper bitter lemon, because even at $3 a bottle it’s practically unavailable, please let me know in a comment.

Frisée aux lardons

Frisée aux lardons is a traditional French bistro dish, made with slab bacon. Since slab bacon can be a bit hard to find, the recipe below uses thick-sliced regular American bacon that you can buy in any supermarket. If you can’t find curly frisée, you can substitute shredded Belgian endive or radicchio.

2 heads frisée
4 slices thick-cut bacon
1/2 shallot
1 Tbsp. Dijon mustard
2 Tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1/2 tsp. dried thyme or 1/2 Tbsp. fresh
1 egg
1/4 cup white vinegar
Salt and pepper

1. Cut the bases off the frisée, wash and spin dry, then shred with your fingers into a salad bowl.
2. Cut the bacon into pieces about 1/2 inch wide and put in a cold pan.
3. Bring a pot of water, a big pinch of salt and the white vinegar to a bare simmer.
4. Turn the bacon pan on to medium-low heat and cook the bacon, stirring occasionally, until the fat is rendered out and the bacon is cooked but not completely crunchy. Remove the bacon to a paper towel and reserve the fat.
5. Whisk together the mustard, thyme, shallot, cider vinegar, a pinch of salt and some pepper, then whisk in the bacon fat.
6. Toss the frisée with the dressing, then toss with the bacon.
7. One by one, crack the eggs into a ladle and plunge the ladle straight down into the water. Hold it there until the white sets, then tip the ladle.
8. Plate the salads.
9. Poach the egg 4 minutes for runny yolk (traditional) or 7 minutes for firm yolk, then gently place on top of the plated salads with a slotted spoon.

Do Not Get Between Me and My Caffeine

Okay, look.

I get that some people are out looking for that perfect romantic interest. For some people it is a continual pursuit and the defining trait of their personalities (in other words, some people are horndogs).

But, you see, I don’t function without caffeine. It is the oil that keeps my engine running. I am totally, utterly addicted to it.

So, since I had a gift card to a ubiquitous chain of coffeeshops, I stopped in on the way to work, only to have some guy in front of me spend minute after minute chatting up the cute girl behind the counter, which progressed to his showing her his dance moves, all while a line of increasingly upset, twitchy corporate types forms behind him.  Naturally, he was going to hear about it.

“Hey, Casanova, get the phone number or get the hell out.”

“Hey, mind your own business, I’m talking to the ‘bear-ista’!”

“I don’t care. There’s 20 people behind you in line. And if you were any good at picking up baristas you’d have closed the deal by now.”

“What’s your problem, dude?”

“What are you, deaf AND stupid? I just told you what my problem is. I want my damn coffee and you’re doing the damn Pants-Off Dance-Off in front of me. Get your coffee and COME. BACK. LATER.”

[snickering and agreement from the people behind me in line]

Fortunately, God’s Gift to Chain Coffeeshop Baristas was saved from the fate he so richly deserved, because the manager, sensing a disturbance in the Force, opened the other register and started helping the long line of undercaffeinated worker bees.

Consider yourself lucky, Anonymous Doofus, that you live in laid-back Orange County. If you’d tried that in New York, you’d have been stabbed in the back and left to die next to the atrocious shrink-wrapped CDs and dusty boxes of replacement glass carafes, and nobody would have seen a thing.

Mariscos Puerto Esperanza: The chile relleno of your dreams

I tend to view mariscos restaurants with a jaded eye — the Valley, where I used to live, is absolutely chock-a-block with them, and all the food usually tastes slightly muddy — the same three sauces (a la veracruzana, al mojo de ajo, a diabla) on the same four proteins (red snapper, shrimp, octopus and squid).

So it was with guarded (at best) optimism that I followed Chowhounds georgempavlov’s and Street Gourmet LA’s suggestion to head out to Mariscos Puerto Esperanza, just down the road from my house.

We walked in—the place was dead. There was one other couple in there, and one guy who came in while we were eating. Not encouraging — no, sirree, not encouraging at all. Yet the hostess was gracious, and service was quick, and you can see the food being made so there’s no question of the staff just sitting around. When we sat down we were given chips (thick and non-greasy) and salsa (excellent) and mugs of lobster stock with salsa cruda in it — rich and delicious. When was the last time you got an amuse-bouche in a Mexican restaurant (and we’re not talking about chips and salsa here)?

I ordered langostinos zarandeados ($14.95) — a version of the classic Nayarit dish of grilled fish with chile and roasted tomato sauce, only with rock lobsters instead of fish (the restaurant also serves robalo [whole bass] zarandeado). It came with green rice and grilled vegetables and, upon request (though untraditional with seafood) beans in their pot likker.

My wife ordered a lunch special ($7.95) of chicken — which turned out to be two chicken breast halves, grilled, with a simple salsa cruda (“pico de gallo” to English speakers, which means something quite different to Mexicans), plus two enchiladas with chicken, green rice and beans. Hers came with a salad of lettuce and jicama with vinaigrette and grated cotija cheese.

Let me tell you something — as boring as that lunch special sounds, and as unsuited for a seafood restaurant, it was STUNNINGLY well-done. The chicken was slightly smoky but still moist inside, with the salsa providing just the right hit of tomato and chile and lime. The enchiladas were absolutely fantastic. No cheesey melty orangey Las Palmas-type sauce on these — no, these were done RIGHT. Tortillas dipped in a smoky guajillo salsa, filled with more chicken, with an avocado salsa and crema mexicana drizzled on top, and a sprinkling of cotija cheese. AMAZING. The only thing that would have made them better would have been if they had been handmade tortillas (they’re not). And even the salad — the humble salad — was so good I thought about ordering a bowl of it for myself.

That would, however, have meant that I had less room to attack the gigantic platter of grilled rock lobsters — langostinos in Spanish — with a smoky, dark, slightly orange-flavoured (I think) sauce. Six — yes, that’s right, $14.95 gets you SIX of these things — split in half, grilled until the legs char (don’t worry, there’s no meat in the legs of a langostino) and drizzled with this sauce. I made a royal mess of my shirt because I wanted desperately to suck the heads of these things. SO. GOOD. It’s also worth mentioning that the vegetables were also grilled — and better than your usual variety. Grilled broccoli, red bell pepper, green beans, zucchini and carrots, very tasty and healthy.

We refused dessert — we really were both very full, despite sharing our lunches with Die Ubergeeklette, who approved of the entire operation and downed everything we gave her — and headed out.

The bill was not painful at all — two very large meals, a bottle of Pacifico and a can of Diet Coke came to $31.

I haven’t been this excited about a Mexican place in a very long time. While I do love Babita (that veal cheek, my GOD) and La Huasteca (white mole and pipian rojo, mmmm), this is more exciting because it’s not trying to be ‘alta cocina’, it’s in an anonymous minimall in a very non-trendy corner of Orange County, and of course there’s the whole 5-minutes-down-the-road thing.

This place should have lines out the door and chest-butting matches for parking spots. Go and enjoy some very simply-cooked, excellent Mexican seafood, because there are not many places that do it this well. You can’t eat like this in a Newport Beach den of seafood for less than $60 a head — but you can eat well at Mariscos Puerto Esperanza for well less than half that.

Perhaps you’ll run into me — I try to sneak over there for lunch.

Mariscos Puerto Esperanza
1724 N. Tustin St.
Orange, CA 92856
(714) 998-3599

The delicious monster arrives!

No, the title isn’t a reference to my fellow foodblogger Elmo Monster.  It’s a reference to the absolutely enormous Monstera deliciosa in my backyard, which has finally, after two and a half years, sent up its first flower stalk.

You’ve probably seen these plants, which are related to philodendrons, all over Orange County—they are a very common garden plant and are often planted in corners due to their size and tendency to climb (ours is in some kind of perverted shack-up with the lemon tree and the sago palm that share its space):

Monstera deliciosa leaf

Now what you might not know is that the flower is edible.  It’s called deliciosa for a reason, after all.  And after a few years getting used to the soil, the plant will send up flower stalks like the one below:

Monstera deliciosa fruit on the stalk

A great deal of patience is required, because the stalk can take up to a year to finish growing in size — and until it’s done growing in size, the fruit is poisonous.  You’ll know the fruit is ready for harvest when the green, hexagonal “scales” start to lift away from each other and you can smell the fruit.  Cut the fruit off at its base and bring it indoors.  As the fruit ripens, that green hexagonal armour protecting the actual fruit will start to pop off, revealing slightly firm kernels of fruit beneath.  Cut the fruit away from the base and eat it raw — it tastes like a cross between a banana and a mango, but has the texture of pineapple.

DO NOT TRY TO FORCE THE SCALES OFF!  If you do, you might be able to cut off the fruit, but the oxalic acid still present in the fruit will give you some impressive health problems.  When the oxalic acid dissipates, the scale will pop off of its own accord.  You may be eating six tiny kernels at a time for a month, but they’ll be delicious and safe to eat.

Monstera deliciosa fruit is more common in Florida, where it’s more humid, and the fruit is sometimes sold in speciality markets as “ceriman”.  (Since that reminds me too much of the clinical name for ear wax, I call it Monstera deliciosa.)  Restaurants that serve it normally don’t cook it — I had it most recently at a hotel in Orlando where it was available to sprinkle on a yoghurt and granola parfait—scrumptious!

If you have space outside and four years or so to wait, it is well worth trying to grow the delicious monster, not only for the beautiful foliage but because you can absolutely weird out your co-workers or your mother-in-law by bringing in a thing that looks like an armour-plated green turd and eating it bit by bit.

LIVE* from a data centre in Costa Mesa, it’s Das Ubergeek!

Introducing the OC Weekly’s food blog, Stick A Fork In It, now with added Ubergeek.

Check it out!

* not actually live

Blackmarket Bakery, You Put De Lime In De Coconut…

Every week my daughter and I go to the Irvine farmers’ market. Every week we stop at Peet’s and I get coffee and she gets chocolate milk, and some weeks I let her have the pastry of her choice but don’t get one myself.

Why?

Because they don’t have lime-coconut croissants fromthe booth run by Irvine’s Blackmarket Bakery, that’s why.

The trouble is, neither does Blackmarket Bakery. They stopped making the jewels of thick, tropical, tart, sweet filling tucked inside flaky, tender pastry a couple of years ago.

They have lots of other pastries, including a quite good almond croissant and an interesting lavender scone, not to mention a sinful cinnamon roll made of brioche and cream cheese-lemon icing and addictive orange shortbread. But they stopped making the lime-coconut croissant and a little piece of my gustatory identity died with it.

And so this is an impassioned call to Rachel and the folks at Blackmarket Bakery: citrus season is just around the corner. Limes are, you’ll pardon the expression, busting out all over. Please, please bring back the lime-coconut croissants. Two years later, and I still pine for them.

Please?

Pepito’s for Breakfast: Chilaquiles and Café de la Olla

Coffee is the staff of life.

Coffee is a requirement for me.  Lucid decisions do not happen without it.

And I live in Orange County, which is a crossroads for those who require caffeination: a huge population of Vietnamese-Americans, who drink iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk that is the perfect proposition for a hot day,  a huge population of Middle Easterners, who drink coffee so strong you could anchor bridges in it, and a huge population of Mexican-Americans, who drink the fragrant, spicy café de la olla.

Café de la olla (literally, “coffee from the pot”) is coffee that’s been brewed with spices like cinnamon or cloves.  It’s a bit strange to describe, because the coffee smells very strongly of the spices, but when you drink the coffee, you don’t taste them as strongly as you smell them.  It’s a bit like the incense during an Ethiopian coffee service.

My first experience with café de la olla, oddly enough, was Christmas at my (extremely non-Mexican) aunt’s house in New Jersey.  She brewed coffee with some cinnamon for the traditional brunch and I was hooked.

The problem with café de la olla, though, is that it can be hard to find, or rather finding it is usually serendipitous.  Unlike Vietnamese coffee, which you can find by going into a Vietnamese food shop and ordering coffee, café de la olla lurks behind the boring description “coffee”.  If you order it you might get café de la olla or you might get Folgers.  You never know — it isn’t a standard offering.

The only places I know in OC that actually advertise café de la olla are the Taco Mesa/Taco Rosa chain.  And while I don’t remember having it at Taco Rosa, I have had it many times at Taco Mesa.  It’s not bad, but it’s not revelatory.

I much prefer the café de la olla is served with breakfast at Pepito’s in the city of Orange.  I stumbled upon it by accident once.  I’d ordered red chilaquiles and decided I wanted some coffee too, and what do you know, it was really good café de la olla.  Fragrant, strong, not bitter.  It’s served from normal food-service coffee pots, but you can smell it as soon as they pour it, it is a beautiful thing on a cold morning.

It’d be the perfect coffee if they had real dairy instead of that disgusting non-dairy creamer (seriously, guys, how hard is it to get some of those UHT tub-lets of real half-and-half?).  I make do by buying a little container of milk from the doughnut shop in the same plaza.

So stop by, get some of their good chilaquiles (chips simmered in green or red salsa with a little cotija cheese, a fried egg, and some beans) and a big cup of their delicious coffee, sit outside on the patio, and read the paper.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need more coffee.

Pepito’s Restaurant
840 The City Drive South
Orange, CA 92868
(714) 663-9301