Stanton, one of the Lost Cities of Orange County, a place so theoretically unremarkable that most lovers of food couldn’t name a single restaurant in it.

Yet Stanton has a growing Korean population, a branch of the venerable Thai Nakorn, upscale dining in the form of Park Avenue and its wonderful Googie bar with the proper martinis, the other branch of the Vegas roadtrip staple known as the Mad Greek…

…and Fonda La Meche, a surprising—no, a serendipitous—find in the archetypal depressing minimall in this forgotten city.

A bit of Mexico City in the grit of Stanton.

My friend Chad and I had been driving west on Katella, hunting for someplace that looked good, when a bright sign and the word “fonda” popped out of the darkness at me. A short discussion ensued—well, what if it’s just another combo-plate place, well then we’ll just go elsewhere, let’s hope it’s good because I’m hungry—and we turned around and pulled in to the parking lot.

A fonda is a specific thing in Mexico, and a rare export to the United States. It’s sort of the Mexican equivalent of a Midwestern cafe called “Pop’s Place”, a place with cheap food, a step up from homestyle cooking.

Outside were signs with words unfamiliar to the mavens of the El Torito-Acapulco-Chevy’s crowd: pechuga tuza, huasteco, aporreadillo, mole de olla. Excellent sign.

The place was busy. Even better. We walked in, sat down, chatted with the lady of the house (who hails from a northeastern suburb of Mexico City called Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, which is so impossible to pronounce that even its denizens just call it Neza) and ordered.

Pambazo de papa y chorizo, a typical Mexico City-style snack, is a soft bolillo roll dipped in red chile sauce, filled with potato and spicy sausage filling, then grilled and pressed, like the wayward, illegitimate child of a French dip and a panino. While there are better pambazos in town, the chile sauce used for the dip was very good, smoky and earthy, with a deep chile burn that started toward the back of the mouth, and the bread was surprisingly soft and fluffy.

Pambazo with potato and sausage, and a mushroom quesadilla

Quesadilla de hongos was a homemade corn tortilla pressed around mozzarella cheese and sautéed sliced mushrooms. As a rule, I don’t care for white button mushrooms (champignons de Paris to my fellow francophones) because they generally taste more of water than of mushroom, and so I asked if there was any huitlacoche. No huitlacoche, came the reply, but try the mushrooms, they’re very good—and they were. Sliced just thickly enough to lend a meaty presence to the snack, well-seasoned, and most importantly, not logged with water or oil.

Just about every beef-eating cuisine in the world has tumbled at one point or another to the fact that the meat of the cow lends itself masterfully to being dried. Drying beef concentrates the flavour and preserves the food. Eating cecina, which is simply air-dried beef cured with nothing but salt and sometimes powdered chiles, satisfies some primal caveman instinct, and I’m a sucker for it in any form.

Huasteco, the chosen cecina dish, was the closest thing that came to a combination plate: an entire roasted nopal (cactus paddle), topped with a long section of cecina (dried beef), then with slices of avocado. A salad took up part of the plate, plus a serving of rice and a pile of refried beans with blocks of queso fresco on top. The cecina was outstanding, slightly salty, tough and yet tender (if that sounds like an oxymoron, you just haven’t had cooked cecina). The nopal was very good, with a texture like roasted chile.

Huasteco: dried beef, cactus and avocado

Mole de olla has absolutely nothing to do with the Oaxacan or Pueblan sauces with dozens of ingredients; this is Mexican beef stew in a pot (una olla). This was an outstanding dish: tender beef chuck, large pieces of potato, a piece of elote (corn on the cob) and large pieces of zucchini swimming in a rich bouillon flecked with chile. This is the soup you want on a cold, rainy night; this is the soup you’ll crave when you’re under the weather.

Mole de olla—just look at the chile!

Chiles rellenos de picadillo were two green California chiles roasted, de-seeded and stuffed with a mince of beef, corn, peas, carrots, olives, tomatoes and a raisin or two, then dipped in egg batter, deep-fried and laid in a pool of yellow gravy made from tomatoes and Knorr seasoning. While these were quite tasty, the gravy overwhelmed the taste of the filling. This could be fixed by using less Knorr seasoning in the gravy, or by amping up the flavour in the picadillo and using spicier chiles for stuffing.

Chiles stuffed with spiced ground beef

Enchiladas de mole (what should probably have been called enmoladas) were homemade tortillas dipped in a serviceable black mole and stuffed with chicken, then topped with shredded lettuce, cheese and crema mexicana. My first reaction was that the mole was not strong enough, but this turned out to be a boon, since it let the tortilla and chicken shine through.

Enmoladas, hiding under a haystack of lettuce, cream and cheese

The refried beans served with the huasteco on the first visit were of a surpassing excellence, thick, with just a little bit of snap, and helped along a lot by a generous hand with seasoning. They were served with blocks of queso fresco on top, a soft cheese along the lines of Greek manouri, but saltier and tangier. The beans on the second visit were still above average, but not as wonderful as the first visit’s.

The tortillas, however, are a star at this place. Handmade from fresh masa, these are nearly twice as thick as supermarket tortillas, but a few shades lighter and orders of magnitude better in taste. They managed to be soft—they folded perfectly despite their unusual girth—but still toothsome. They’re sold in dozens (a dozen is $3.50, an astonishing price compared to the plastic bags at any Mexican market, but still worth it) should the need for a heartier corn masa-based wrap manifest itself.

Amazingly good tortillas

Fonda La Meche offers a list of made-to-order aguas frescas with fresh fruit: while lemon and melon were quite good (the melon will be amazing in summer), the best was mango, with tiny pieces of mango clogging the straw like wayward tapioca balls.

Aguas frescas made to order: lemon and mango

Still on my list to try: the aporreadillo, which is an unholy-looking mash of cecina, eggs, chile and onions; caldo tlalpeño, a spicy chicken soup; enchiladas toluqueñas, stuffed with cheese, potatoes and chorizo; and pechuga tuza, a Mexican dead ringer for chicken parmigiana, only with chile sauce instead of tomato sauce and served atop French fries. They serve menudo and Hidalgo-style lamb barbacoa on weekends, and several licuadoras aztecas (literally, Aztec blenders) went out while were eating: volcanic stone grinding bowls called molcajetes, filled with grilled cactus paddle, chicken, steak, sausage and queso fresco.

Service is extremely friendly, bilingual (though the signs on the walls are resolutely Spanish-only, warning people to keep their children from trashing the place, that subsequent orders from tables will go into the ticket queue in the order received, not to forget anything and not to bring in outside food or drink). Pay at the counter when you’re done.

Prices, while not exactly the rock-bottom prices of fondas in Mexico, are commensurate with the amount and quality of the food. Main courses are mostly in the $7-$10 range; pambazos and tortas are $4-$6; quesadillas with those amazing tortillas are $5 for three. Fonda La Meche serves breakfast, too, eggs and chilaquiles in various permutations.

Fonda La Meche is exactly what it should be: a place to get just-like-Mami’s cooking. It isn’t fancy, it doesn’t cater to people who look like me, and the cooking is honest and straightforward. It’s a great find and I look forward to many more casual, friendly meals there.

Fonda La Meche
7483 Katella Ave. (corner of Western)
Stanton, CA 90680
(714) 484-0105

Open Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., Saturday 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and Sunday 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Though the takeout menus advertise Tuesday breakfast and lunch hours, signs in the fonda state that they are closed on Tuesdays.

In the intervening three years, they have spruced up the plaza considerably; previously it was hard to tell what was in there. A lick of paint and some improved signage, though oddly Merhaba has no mention on the plaza’s tall list of merchants.

They’ve also cleaned up the inside a lot, which does help with the first impression. What does not help, though, is the TV on absolutely full-blast. A table of men were watching it and kept turning the volume up and up and up. We nearly left just because of that. Toward the end of the meal, they started cleaning the kitchen and an eye-watering smell of cleaning solvent wafted out into the restaurant, so bad that one of the men called out something and apparently asked her to stop cleaning so they (and we) could eat.

The service was exactly how I remember it: you have to call out or ring the bell for service. While I don’t necessarily mind doing it, it’d be nice at least to be greeted by someone other than other customers (who were, it must be said, very friendly).

The food, which was perfectly serviceable in 2007, leaves a lot to be desired. We ordered beef wat (which has a Tigrinya name here, since Merhaba is an Eritrean, not Ethiopian, restaurant) and a vegetarian sampler. I’m not sure if we were treated differently because we’re not African or if the food is normally this way, but apart from the beef there was absolutely no flavour—NO flavour whatsoever—to the food.

I liked their injera, thicker than Tana’s and therefore spongier, but I found it ironic, given degustateur’s comment about the injera at Tana, that it was served slightly cold (definitely not room temperature, especially since it’s 70 degrees out today).

The beef was actually very good; quite tender. I would have preferred a bigger kick of spice (it was a little closer to alecha than wat) but the fact remains that it was smoky and rich without being oily. The portion was very large for $11.00; good value.

The yellow lentils, however, were execrable. They had clearly been cooked in a little butter or oil and a lot of tomato sauce, cooked until they were soft. No discernible spice notes, no texture, no nothing but lentils in tomato sauce. A huge portion—portion sizes are much larger here than at Tana—but not good at all.

Salad was fine; iceberg lettuce and decent tomatoes tossed in bottled Italian dressing, but nobody goes to an East African restaurant for the green salad.

The mixed vegetables were absolutely atrocious and frankly they should have left a big empty space on the injera rather than serve them. They were obviously cooked from frozen (with a stalk of celery thrown in to fool us): water-logged, bland, overcooked and flavourless crinkle-cut carrots, broccoli, green beans and green and red bell peppers. They had been cooked (or frozen) so long that the broccoli was grey.

Spinach was also clearly from frozen, which I could understand if they had only done something—anything—with it. It was completely unseasoned, not even salted. When I sprinkled salt and pepper on it, it tasted exactly like boiled spinach from the packet in the freezer aisle. No hit of spice, no ginger-kissed niter kebbeh, no anything but spinach and water. Certainly no homemade cheese as the menu suggested.

The last dish was stewed cabbage. There was one carrot in a very large portion of cabbage; this at least had some niter kebbeh taste in it, but the cabbage was cooked absolutely to death. It, too, needed salt. Cabbage is never going to be an interesting dish, but good grief, it was slimy.

I went in wanting to order kitfo, but frankly after this we just wanted to leave.

I’m going to assume that degustateur has a vastly different experience as a regular than I had, but it’s very, very unlikely that I would bother returning. Truth be told, if Tana didn’t exist in Anaheim, I’d save my Ethiopian cravings for trips to Fairfax Avenue rather than go to Merhaba. While I’ll concede that the meat was masterfully done, I don’t have much use for an East African restaurant that can’t cook the vegetables so central to the cuisine.

Merhaba East African Restaurant
2801 W. Ball Rd. #5
Anaheim, CA 92804
(714) 826-8859

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Check it out!

* not actually live