Grubstreet (good name for this story?) LA posts the following news bit today:

Interested in eating insect tacos? If you live in the right Oaxacan-influenced neighborhood, you can buy chapulines by the bag and hope you fare better than Eric Greenspan in preparing the little hoppers. Or you can come eat edible insect tacos for five dollars at Machine Project next Friday, during its “Bug Eat Bug” event.

Read more: Bug-Filled Tacos Crawl Over to Echo Park

I actually first read about Cemitas y Clayudas Pal Cabron from the Teenage Gluster blog. At the time, I was actually more enthralled at the wall paintings than the food. I just found them so amusing, but then I finally re-grouped and read Teenage Gluster’s description of the food and it definitely sounded very appealing. Knowing that Pal Cabron, for short, was owned by sister and brother, Bricia and Fernando Lopez, whose family also owns Guelguetza, I wanted to check it out even more. About a month after that post, I got invited via Gluster to a Cemitas Party hosted by the restaurant. How could I say no to that?

Walking in, the first place I looked was up and there they were, 11 women painted on the wall. From modest to quite naughty, each of the women represents 1 of 11 cemitas, while a 12th cemita isn’t. By the way, if you’re not familiar with what a cemita is, it’s a Mexican sandwich that is different from a torta in that the bread is a sesame-seeded egg roll. Traditional ingredients include sliced avocado, white cheese, onions, a Chipotle sauce and some type of meat and that’s pretty much what you’d see on a Pal Cabron Cemita.

At this gathering, all the cemitas were out for sampling as well as a Clayuda. Thankfully, the cemitas were cut into smaller sections, which made easy to try quite a few of them, if not all. So I present to you the Cemitas Sandwich Menu presented with their female counterparts, starting with La Tetanic, a Breaded Chicken Cemita.

La Muy Muy: Breaded Beef or Pork Cemita

La Gordis: Pork Head Cheese Sandwich

La Mas Cabrona: Breaded Beef and Pork Head Cheese Cemita

La Cachonda: Leg of Cattle Seared in Vinegar Cemita

La Bronca: Spicy Shredded Pork Cemita

La Pipris Nais: Ham Cemita

La Chirris: Chorizo Cemita

La de Barbacha: Seasoned Lamb Cemita

La Brava: Marinated Pork Cemita

La Tuya: Make Your Own Combination. The one shown below has no meat.

La Chupitos: Roasted Pork Cemita (the only cemita that doesn’t have female counterpart). I think it’s because it’s considered too much of a manly sandwich?

We also had a taste of one of their Clayudas. The ingredients included aciento (chicarron spread), black beans, queso fresco, Oaxaca cheese, cabbage, tazajo (beef) and cecina enchilada (pork).

One of the things I really enjoyed about the cemitas was the bread. Crusty on the outside, but soft in the inside and all baked on site. Freshly baked bread is the way to go when it comes to any type of sandwich. Of all the cemitas I tried, it was definitely all about the pork for me. The Spicy Shredded Cemita had wonderful heat to it while the Chorizo Cemita made my tastebuds sing. I also liked the slight fattiness of the Roasted Pork Cemita. Along with the cemitas, I enjoyed a Michelada for the first time.

The Michelada is a drink made with beer, tabasco, lemon and worcestershire sauce and is rimmed with a Oaxacan imported chile salt, which has a very interesting ingredient. Simply, the chile salt includes ground agave worms. Putting my lips to any part of a worm was something I would never usually consider, but for this drink, it didn’t bother me a bit.

Also on hand were their Horchatas, a rice drink with cactus syrup, cantaloupe and nuts.

Overall, I really enjoyed both the food and the quirkiness of wall art of this restaurant and if it was only closer to me, I’d definitely be visiting it more often. To end, here is some more wall art seen around the restaurant.

Even the bathrooms are a fun visit.

Finally, I thought these handprints by Bricia and Fernando were sweet.

Click here to see all 113 photos!

Cemitas y Clayudas Pal Cabron
2560 E. Gage Avenue
Huntington Park, CA 90255
(323) 277-9899

Please join my dining group, Pleasure Palate, for our very own Cemitas Party. Click here for more info! Or if you’d like to read more about my tasty travels around town, click here!

Watch out, Tomás, Ricardo and Enrique! Japanese taco scientists in Little Tokyo have recently developed a chicken taco with a taste so luxurious it could only be compared to one thing….

Industry analysts expect our hometown taco engineers to counter with a deluxe carne asada featuring factory-installed hydraulics and Virgin of Guadalupe paneling.

La Chicken
228 E. 1st St.
Los Angeles
www.lachicken.com

Local culinary superman J. Gold recently checked out Eagle Rock’s Cacao and filed the following report:

Here is the topic for today’s discussion: Why isn’t duck carnitas on every Mexican menu in town? Because if you think about it, the dish is almost inevitable — duck meat simmered in fat until it nearly collapses, perfumed flesh arranged atop crisply fried sopes, a shotgun marriage of traditional and European cooking techniques of the sort that have been going on in Mexico since the conquest. If life were fair, you would be able to get duck carnitas from every respectable taco truck on the Eastside.

Carnitas, of course, is made from pork shoulder boiled slowly in its own lard until it is difficult to discern the medium from the product being cooked, and the magnetic pull of the giant copper kettles traditionally used to prepare the dish sometimes seems sufficient to pull the whole of the Earth toward Michoacan. Duck confit, its equivalent from Southwest France, involves salted duck legs cooked in their own fat for many hours until they, too, achieve concentrated flavor and extreme succulence.

Read the rest at the LA WEEKLY

Photo by Express Monorail

El Paladar Oaxaqueno
Barry Ave and Santa Monica Blvd
Nightly after 8pm

El Paladar Oaxaqueno is the only taco truck on the Westside that has an al pastor spit so if it’s meat tacos your looking for stick to the pork. If a couple tacos isn’t enough do yourself a favor and order the Tlayuda, a crisp flour tortilla stuffed with your meat of choice, black beans, avocado and salsa. Read the rest of the review at DailyTaco.org.

We reviewed this truck back when it was still a wagon in 2006.

The King of Baja Fish Tacos

You quickly get dressed in whatever you have on hand and make your way to the nearest Colima location. You order Cocktail de Camarones (Shrimp Cocktail), or, for the more adventurous, a dark and rich Levántate Lázaro (Seafood Cocktail), or Tostada de Jaiva (Tostada with Crab), or any other seafood tostadas mixtas. They also have great seafood caldos (soups) and pescados (fish). Plus you can order original Coca Cola, hecho en Mexico.

(Coctel de Camaron – Shrimp Cocktail)

(Tostada De Jaiba)

(Oysters – 6 for $6 / 12 for $12)

Then, you sit outside this small hut and enjoy the local flavor of the neighborhood. Straight ahead you see Griffith Park Observatory and the Hollywood sign; and yet, you feel suspended in time and place. You can buy a huge avocado on the street corner. You can even bring other food from neighboring places, like Guatemalteca Bakery- nobody cares!

Suddenly, your cocktail arrives and you proceed to prepare it by adding ketchup, tapatio, lemon, salt, and you can add more avocado at your pleasure. The cocktail comes with tostadas or crackers. Both of these have a salty taste and go delightful with the rest of the food.

As you take your first sip of delicious cocktail juice, the freshness and flavor cure your hang over; and as you are finished with it, you feel extremely satisfied. The day has just begun….I wish for there to be many more days like this!

Be ready with cash- $10-12 will go a long way. The portions are generous and the food makes it worth supporting this local joint @ 4002 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90004

LINKS:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/marisco-colima-los-angeles-2

El Parian ~ 1528 W Pico Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90015

If you are what you eat, then soy cabron . I try to get my hands on a bowl of birria every weekend and El Parian is Grand Central Station on the golden goat soup route. It has a down-home vibe, comfortable, and family-heavy and has been here for decades. Sporadic polka and a tempo of surgically precise bone-cleaving form the soundtrack during mornings here, while firecracker waitresses wink and smile, dropping lemonade off at your table.

El Parian’s menu is sparse but expert, with few offerings besides goat, a revered asada plate, and weekend menudo. Killer tacos await those who choose to vary, but birria is what they do best here (the store-bought chips are not). In half or full orders, a large bowl of dark orange peppery brew comes mostly displaced by large, glimmering chunks of kid. A traditional birria side plate of cilantro, cebolla, lime, and radish accompanies your bowl, along with a few tortillas.

I love playing with my food. Dumping all accoutrement into the bowl and attempting to make my own tacos with the wet mixture, the filled tortilla then gets a dip in the drink. Every bite sprays goat broth all over my hands and mouth, and lots of the contents plop back in the bowl.

The birria here is a deeply flavored broth that screams roast meat with a surplus of soul. The slightly rusty taste of goat flesh permeates throughout, with the sharp sting of the limon, sweetness of the chopped white onions, and herbal kick of the cilantro offering interesting opposition and teamwork. The oily peppered broth has a smooth feel that gets trapped in the crags of the meat to ooze out in every sublime bite, the silky feel often aided by a strip of fat wrapped over the meat. While some cubes of the birria are pure edible flesh with the consistency of good short ribs, others come still attached to spinal cords and tendons, possibly daunting for squeamish city-slickers.  Country boys play bone collector and try to figure out where each shard would go back into the goat.

I might never understand why such a populous nation as China seems to have so many pecker problems that they cut the horns off of endangered rhinos and the fins off of sharks, claiming it inspires “sexual strength.” Don’t they got plenty goat “back East?” Birria has a rep for being a carnivore’s version of Viagra, an urban myth I can only surmise is accurate. Consuming birria for me is invigorating, sticking long to the ribs and fortifying the body, a feeling of hearty satiety that almost lasts until the next weekend.

I first found out about the city of Lennox from my friend, Bill aka Street Gourmet LA. Click here to read his original post about it. Simply, the stretch of Inglewood, between Century Boulevard and 111th Street, is a residential neighborhood that has been zoned for businesses, which means that homes have been converted to restaurants and other Latino-owned businesses. As soon as the words “restaurant” was mentioned, my ears perked up and after some arm pulling (actually, it wasn’t that difficult to convince him), I brought together a few adventurous eaters from Pleasure Palate to do a 4 restaurant dining crawl led by Bill in Lennox or Lennoxico, as he affectionately refers to the city. Bill already posted his write-up on the experience, so I’m definitely behind the 8-ball, but such is the life of a food blogger. Technically, our first stop was at Don Rogelio, which is a Tex-Mex restaurant where we placed the order for food that we were going to share family-style.

As the Don Rogelio cooks were preparing our dishes, we walked over to Lennox Pollo to check it out and even pick up a bird or two. With its blue roof and orange walls showcasing chickens cooking over flames, Lennox Pollo was definitely not hard to miss.

Walking in, the small dining room area was about as big as the kitchen itself and just as hot. I have to give real props to the kitchen staff for being able handle their cooking duties in that heat. I would have melted away. As we waited for our chicken, all our eyes were on them. From skewering the chickens, putting them into the fiery oven, taking the cooked ones out and then cutting them to put in plastic containers for people’s orders and repeating, they got the job done efficiently and with purpose.

The end result was a juicy chicken that came with salsa and tortillas. You could get one for $6.99 or for $3.00 more, you could get two. Our hungry crew went for the twosome and luckily, Don Rogelio kindly let us devour our chicken along with the 6 other dishes we ordered from them.

Of those 6 dishes, two of them didn’t do much for me. The Carnitas Mole had a “Southwest”-inspired mole sauce that had a grainy texture and a sour tangy flavor that I didn’t like.


I may have liked the Stewed Tongue with Ranchera Sauce more if I didn’t know what it was. Organ meats or tongue meat, in this case, have never been that appealing to me. I did taste a sliver, but although everyone else commented on how tender the tongue meat was and how good the sauce was, I couldn’t get past my mental block.

Of the remaining dishes, I couldn’t get enough of their housemade guacamole sauce. Made of avocados, tomatoes, green onions, lime and Texas seasonings, it was one of the best guacamoles I’ve ever had.

Their Chile Verde, which was diced pork simmered in tomatillo and Texas seasonings, was also one of my favorites of the meal. The pork was tender and moist and the tomatillo sauce was on the mark.

I thought the Barbacoa was also quite good. Just like the pork in the Chile Verde, the beef was tender and while the sauce wasn’t that complex, it had a sweetness to it that was tasty. Overall, I found the food at Don Rogelio’s to be solidly good and it would merit a return visit.

Two restaurants down and the next one we walked over to was Mariscos Chente, a Sinaloan seafood restaurant. At the time of our visit, Chef Sergio was at the helm. He has since moved over to their Westside location in Mar Vista. I’ve heard rumors that the current chef at the Lennox location is not on par with Chef Sergio, so you may still want to make the trek to where Chef Sergio is currently manning the kitchen.

Except for one fish dish, it was all about the shrimp with the first one being the Aguachile Shrimp which was raw shrimp with a lime-jalapeno salsa, onion, cucumber and salt. This was my first experience with raw shrimp and I loved how the spicy jalapeno sauce paired well with the sweetness of the shrimp.

Next to arrive was the Camarones Culiche. This time it was a cooked shrimp with a creamy poblano sauce. Even cooked, the shrimp still retained its sweetness and balanced well with the sauce which had a definite bite to it.

My favorite shrimp dish was the Camarones a la Pimienta which was shrimp with a butter and pepper sauce. How can you go wrong with a sauce made with butter? With the addition of the chili and black pepper, I enjoyed the zings of flavor that hit my taste buds with every bite.

Our sole fish dish of this meal was the Chicarron Pescado. This dish was fried fish skin cooked in soy sauce. There was actually still quite a bit of fish attached to the skin. The skin was delightfully crispy, but overall, I found the Chicarron Pescado a little too salty for my taste. Maybe, a little less soy sauce?

Last, but not least was the Camarones Checo, shrimp cooked with garlic, ketchup, lemon and Mexican salsa. The ketchup was a surprise, but not an unwelcome one. It added a hint of sweetness to the tart and pungent flavors of the lemon and garlic.

Mariscos Chente definitely awed my entire group with how good their seafood was and I told myself that this was one restaurant, I definitely needed to make a return trip to, sooner rather than later. A few months after this visit, the story of the delicious seafood at Mariscos Chente broke out all over the blogger sphere after Bill’s write-up on his blog; however, it was nice to know that we got a preview of what was to come. Most of us were stuffed and actually didn’t plan on making another restaurant stop, but soon found ourselves at Angelica’s.

At Angelica’s, we kept it a lot more simple and just sampled really small portions of 3 items. One of those items was a Chorizo Pambazo Sandwich, but we had such a small section that I can’t really remember what it tasted like. We also had a Mole Verde Beef (beef with green mole) and Trocitos de Res (chopped beef in red sauce). I really liked the Mole Verde Beef. The only other time I had a mole verde sauce was at Guelaguetza, but the version at Angelica’s was thicker and in my opinion, was better. I can’t really explain why other than that it had a more intense flavor. I didn’t think the Trocitos de Res was anything special. In fact, the red sauce seemed really bland.

Overall, this was quite a dining marathon and definitely introduced me to a part of town one may not expect to find good food. It just goes to show that if you take the time to do some exploring, you may discover one or two tremendous food finds. Either that or have a friend like Bill, who can do the exploring for you.

To see all the pics, go to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/la_addict/sets/72157618284648942/

Lennox Pollo
10822 Inglewood Avenue
Lennox CA 90304, USA

Don Rogelio’s
10618 Inglewood Avenue
Lennox, CA 90304
(310) 677-1510

Mariscos Chente
10020 Inglewood Avenue
Inglewood, CA 90304
(310) 672-0226‎

Angelica’s Restaurant
10533 S. Inglewood Ave
Lennox, CA 90304
(310) 412-7861

Courtesy of Mike Zahir

Courtesy of Mike Zahir

Ever wonder about those chickens you see grillin’ on the street when you are driving around?  Not only are they delicious but they are also pretty cheap… 2 whole chickens freshly grilled, tortillas, beans, rice, salsa for about 20 bucks.  You can find them mostly on the east and down to the south.  Exact locations are irrelevant since they move around quite a bit.  When you are driving around checking out the taco trucks, don’t forget these guys!