Those seeking a squarer meal should order nopales con carne, cooked shreds of prickly pear cactus tossed together with cubes of pork and plated up with the usual rice, beans and tortillas. Cultivated from many areas of Mexico, nopales are a standard of the country’s cuisine, but also an ingredient not often found on California [...]

Coast-to-coast Mexican at La Concha

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
They’re perhaps the rarest moments in Long Beach planning, improbable instants when all of Anaheim Street moves along in time, traffic signals completely synchronized into a gateway of green lights stretching straight through to the LA River. Drift too eagerly through the free-flowing traffic though, and you’ll speed [...]

Supreme among Yucatán Grill’s entire Caribbean canon is its jerk chicken. The menu distinguishes its spicy dishes with an asterisk-like chili, but the jerk chicken runs the entire capsaicin scale, earning an almost unequalled score of four chilies. The huge heart-shaped breast’s heat doesn’t hit at first, but it wears you down halfway through, stinging [...]

Yucatán Grill keeps on

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
Even with more than a decade of dishes behind it, Yucatán Grill remains stuffed, turning over tables with a speed usually reserved only for the most youthful restaurants. It never takes long to be squeezed into a booth, but while you wait—steadily sucking in the nearby sea air—you can’t [...]

The specialty of the house is the birria, which is prepared in a way that seems to break with the basic component of the dish—it is not made of goat. But Lola goes out of her way to point out that the recipe actually adheres to a family tradition. “Abuelita wasn’t fond of goat,” she [...]

Beyond the familiar fare, it’s the overlooked options that are best at El Toro Bravo, like barbacoa (barbeque beef) and birria (stewed goat). There’s also cueritos (fried pork rinds) and buche (pork stomach) to round out the pig-oriented options. But whatever you choose, know that the tacos are huge, pushing the usual one-handed, two-bite meal [...]

Tacos carved to order at El Toro Bravo

PHOTO by RICK POON
There’s a steady pounding pouring out of El Toro Bravo, an uncertain sound like the dull thud of a drum in the distance. You can hear it from the parking lot, but you can’t see it—pull up to the place at any regular hour and [...]

For 30 years, Isaac’s has been hidden away on Fries Avenue, set up in a colorless building barely painted a blank beige. But that’s okay because at Isaac’s, simplicity matters. The easiest way to start is with the red burrito, which contains a pile of shredded beef drenched in a mildly spicy stew of red [...]

A burrito for one is a burrito for all at Isaac’s Café

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
In a place like Wilmington, you learn to transform your surroundings. Close your eyes and cranes grow into trees, ships become mountains. Stacks of cargo containers warp into rusted monuments of industry. In a place like Wilmington, you learn how the [...]

Burrito Factory’s bean burrito
It takes cojones to name a restaurant Burrito Factory. This is Southern California, after all, not some Mexican-food-free land like Nebraska. We know our burritos like we know our traffic and smog. But although Burrito Factory isn’t as industrial as it sounds (no conveyor belts, no gargantuan burrito machines), the restaurant more [...]