Los Angeles Is the Epicenter of a New Mexican Culinary Era

Eighteen miles east, at Baja seafood-focused Loreto in Frogtown along the Los Angeles River, chef Paco Moran stands behind a chef’s counter, plating sekami tuna with puya chili aioli, finished with chives and served with plantain chips for dipping. The dish is part of a multi-course Mexican “omakase” menu for guests seated at the bar in front of him.

“I like to claim that our restaurant is more of a second-generation restaurant. The first generation, I would give it to Ray Garcia, Wes Avila, and Gilberto at Holbox,” says Moran, whose family is from El Salvador and whose path mirrors Garcia’s, having worked in Euro-centric kitchens like The Peninsula Beverly Hills and FIG. Moran spent more than a decade working under Joaquim Splichal at the Patina Group and feels that chefs like Garcia and Gilberto Cetina made it possible for restaurants like Loreto to thrive. “I’m very grateful and thankful for them, because they opened up the pathway for someone like myself.”

Garcia credits his time at the helm of FIG, where he had the freedom to experiment, develop his own style, bring his personality into his cooking, and begin creating the kinds of dishes he would eventually serve at Broken Spanish.

“Broken Spanish, and restaurants like it, opened up the door for people to express themselves in a way that hadn't been seen before,” says Garcia, who points out that all of the Michelin-worthy restaurants in Los Angeles at the time he opened Broken Spanish were French, Italian, or Japanese.

“There wasn’t going to be a one-star seafood place at Mercado La Paloma. It wasn't going to be Kato with Michelin stars, doing Taiwanese food. It was just French, Italian, Japanese. That's all. So now I think, with Broken Spanish, it sort of opened the door for people to feel like they could have that same curiosity that I had and they weren’t the first in the firing line. They had proof of concept behind it,” says Garcia of the restaurant landscape at the time. “When I grew up in Los Angeles, it was Spago, Patina, and Lucques. They were fantastic restaurants, believe me, but that's all that there was. And now it's almost like we're in a world where more is possible.”

Garcia may have paved the way for a new age of restaurants in Los Angeles, but he also speaks freely about the type of food he cooks, Mexican cuisine that doesn’t fit within any borders.

“‘Authentically inauthentic’ is something that we embraced at Broken Spanish. It nailed the concept, because there is this idea of authenticity, both from a cuisine standpoint and a personal standpoint. Even the name Broken Spanish comes from it: I'm Mexican American.”

While chefs like Garcia and Moran grew up cooking in Los Angeles, Mexico City native chef Alan Sanz is celebrating three years in the city at Los Feliz bar-centric Mirate. Sanz trained in Buenos Aires, worked with Francis Mallmann, and cooked at Boragó in Santiago, Chile, before moving to Los Angeles. He feels that he and other chefs arriving from Mexico City in recent years are bringing something entirely different to the city.

Eight miles south in South Central Los Angeles’s historic Mercado La Paloma, chef Gilberto Cetina serves Baja California seafood tasting menus at the multi-award-winning, Michelin-starred Holbox, adjacent to his father’s acclaimed Chicken Itza. Cetina has been crowned one of North America’s 50 Best.

Within the same market, Mexico City street food newcomer Komal, from chef Fátima Juárez, has earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand designation for its commitment to nixtamalizing Mexican heirloom corn. The results are striking. Large, fresh corn tortillas are piled with pork chorizo, seared beef, mashed potatoes, cactus, and molcajete sauce.

Sanz admits that for a long time he wasn’t compelled to come to Los Angeles to develop his culinary career. “It was easier just to go to France or to Spain or Denmark,” he says. But he feels that in recent years there has been an influx of chefs from Mexico City to Los Angeles. “At some point, we understood that nobody was doing it. Nobody was actually bringing the authentic things.” Now, with places like Enrique Olvera’s Damian, Komal, and his own Mirate, that has changed.

“Like chef Fátima from Komal. She’s from Mexico City, right? And she’s killing it. She’s actually nixtamalizing the corn, as we do in Mexico. Her small menu is pure Mexico City, straightforward steak, molotes, and plantains with mole. It’s something that, for me, being from there, I see her menu and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, this is what is supposed to be Mexican cuisine.’”