MEXICAN DISHES OFFERED WITHOUT DISGUISES

Bathtub Margaritaville, that’s Orange County. Our Mexican restaurants seem to be compensating for their huge margaritas by serving food meant to slow down the absorption of tequila into the bloodstream. A noble purpose, perhaps, but not only is the range of Mexican snacks under those slabs of melted cheese awfully narrow but the result is also damnably heavy stuff. And of course it’s neither authentically Mexican nor hiply Californian.

We may not have any Nouvelle Mexican places yet, but the remarkable Olamendi’s in Capistrano Beach has grown into a tiny, three-link chain by serving traditional specialties not found on our usual Mexican menu and, incidentally, not concentrating on the bathtub margarita syndrome. Its food is still substantial stuff, but lively and varied, and you don’t have to scrape aside half an inch of cheese to see what you’re eating.

The original restaurant is a barn-like old building where the whitewashed walls are positively crammed with Mexican genre paintings and the occasional photo of a celebrity customer (the menu also nods to local celebrities with a dish called “Nixon’s Favorite”-- pollo Veracruzana, in case you were wondering--and a combo plate named for champion diver Greg Louganis). It’s a little funky, especially the garden patio, and it stays busy without accepting reservations; I’ve been there when they even ran out of beans. The other branches do take reservations, and the newest, in Laguna Beach, is considerably more genteel, with Mission Style architecture and a chattier, less schematic menu than the original. Laguna also has the pretty custom of pouring jamaica, a sort of organic Mexican Kool-Aid made from hibiscus blossoms, instead of plain water.

Since the chain is family-owned and largely family-staffed (you see the same cheekbones at every Olamendi’s), the food is pretty uniform at all the branches. The impressive thing is the range of sauces. The menu lists fully four moles, only one of which is mole poblano (well, in Aztec “molli” just meant any stew in a rich sauce), and I can recall a salsa verde, a pumpkinseed sauce, a walnut sauce, at least three tomato sauces and a surprising number of thin, rather clear sauces on dishes like shrimp enchiladas and enchiladas de huevos rancheros. Ordinarily, clear liquid on the plate is an ominous sight in a Mexican restaurant; it probably means that the chile relleno is sweating and that we’re looking at a dull, watery, awful dish. I don’t know how they do it, but at Olamendi’s even these clear liquids have a good flavor.

At any rate, my favorite among the tomato sauces comes on dishes like fish or chicken Veracruzana: a garlicky, slightly hot, brick-orange sauce of pureed fresh tomato. It, or something a lot like it, also shows up on stew of very tender pork in salsa roja (the connective tissue turning into gelatin in your mouth), but flavored with oregano. My least favorite sauce, somewhat to my surprise, is the most exotic. Chiles en nogada is a fried chile topped with a thick sauce of ground meat, walnuts and the odd raisin that is rather sweet and maybe too rich, as well as too plentiful, to eat.

Not everything has a sauce, though. The carnitas are great (big eaters can try to do justice to the El Gordo special, a whole pound of this rich, soft braised/fried pork), and there is a remarkable dish of zucchini (calabacitas estilo Ricardo) topped with browned shredded beef in a very thin coating of melted cheese.

Olamendi’s has a surprising number of pork dishes, starting with pork mole Oaxaquena in a thick, rich sauce, dark red and bittersweet from ground chilies but without a hint of the chocolate, clove and cinnamon flavoring of the unrelated chicken in mole poblano. The best thing on the menu might be the pork with salsa verde with the same wonderful pork as in the pork in salsa roja, only in a gently tart, gently hot and definitely oniony green sauce.

The basics are all taken care of: garlicky rice, strongly bean-flavored beans, fried shredded beef in dishes like taquitos, a good and eggy, though somewhat sloppy, coating on the chiles rellenos, and a very full-flavored table salsa. Olamendi’s is short on desserts--just a flan, the usual harried-looking Mexican custard with a little more caramel flavor than usual. Sometimes there’s a sort of pineapple turnover called raqueles.

Incidentally, despite what I’ve said about bathtub margaritas, you can get a decent one here, and if you truly want a slab of cheese, queso fundido consists essentially of a whole plate of melted cheese. You eat it with tortillas and as much as you choose from a bowl of (generally mild) jalapenos and onions pickled on the premises. Portions of everything are large, and Olamendi’s is rather a bargain with appetizers running $2.50 to $3.95 and entrees $7.95-$8.25 ($9 for chiles en nogada, $13 for the El Gordo).

OLAMENDI’S 34660 Coast Highway, Capistrano Beach (714) 661-1005 Open for lunch and dinner daily. Master Card and Visa accepted. CRISTINA OLAMENDI’S 34235 Doheny Park Road, Capistrano Beach (714) 496-5298 Open for dinner daily. MasterCard and Visa accepted. CASA OLAMENDI’S 1100 S. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach (714) 497-4148 Open for lunch and dinner daily. MasterCard and Visa accepted.