Wanted: Real Mexicans in LA

I've been taking a new route to work that winds me around MacArthur Park. For those of you not from LA, McArthur Park overlooks downtown and was built around a small man-made lake that at one time was a drinking water reservoir. When my mom was growing up, MacArthur Park was where kids went on Sundays with their families to rent a paddle boat and eat an ice cream cone. Now the park is basically owned by gangs and drug dealers and the families you see there are the ones that can't afford to get out of the neighborhood.

But the neighborhood is also home to some of the best Mexican and Salvadoran food around. I now regularly drive by dozens of little places I want to try. I'm not sure which places are good and which are merely going to give me e-coli. For a good sweetbreads taco or a chicharron pupusa, I'll probably risk the e-coli.

Still, it seems prudent to ask around a bit first. So today I asked the parking lot attendant that I talk to every day. He's young, probably in his early 20s, and judging by the Spanish I've heard him speaking into his cell phone, he's Chicano. He asked me which street I take home, and then without missing a beat he said, "They got King Taco on that street?" I shook my head. King Taco is a chain and I was disappointed. The tacos actually are decent, and by East Coast standards they would be the king of tacos, but this is LA. I can get every third person's mother here to make me tacos. I don't need the predictable carne asada of King Taco.

So the parking lot attendant goes, "What about Tacos Mexico? They got Tacos Mexico?"

"Yes," I said, and tried to again hide my disappointment. Another chain. Granted, another legit chain. They do a pork stomach taco. You can always tell a legit Mexican spot by its offal. Beef tripe is standard, even available at the white people places east of Fairfax these days. But pork stomach, buche, is still firmly the terrain of the brown folk. It's more tender than beef tripe. Chewy, yes, but it breaks down differently when slow cooked the right way, and I didn't blow ten years of being a vegetarian so that I could eat tasteless slabs of skinless boneless chicken breast.

The parking lot attendant must have heard me sigh. He tried again. "How about Baja Fresh? You like Baja Fresh? Try the nacho burrito with chicken. It's the bomb."

At that point, I lost it. What is the world coming to when the Mexicans of Los Angeles flock to yuppie chains for lard-free beans and heated cheeze wiz? I was as polite as I could pretend to be. "Does your mother know you eat at Baja Fresh?"

Luckily, he didn't have time to answer. Another car had pulled up and he had to turn away to sell a parking ticket. I drove off, got stuck in some kind of police road block around Rampart, took a detour through streets no white girl should ever travel, and went home where I cooked up a couple of bean tostadas for myself, topped with crema and a roasted tomatillo salsa.