RESTAURANT REVIEW : La Paz Now Calls Warner Center Home, but Mexican Seafood Is Still Its Specialty

In 1981, Oscar Iturralde opened the first La Paz restaurant. Those who found it knew it served the best Mexican seafood west of East L.A., but it wasn’t an easy place to find. A regular customer of the old La Paz restaurant reports: “It was tucked into a mini-mall in Canoga Park, absolutely the least likely place for a good restaurant to be. You couldn’t see the sign from the street--essentially, you had to be told the restaurant was there.

“Inside, it was just crammed with antiques and old toys. Even the bathroom was full of pottery and old radios. They’d torn out the cottage cheese ceiling and exposed all the pipes and vents, which gave it a crazy, fun post-modern industrial feeling. Toys and tricycles hung from the rafters. There was no room to turn around. And the waiters would squeeze through carrying enormous platters of whole fried fish, and huge bowls of bouillabai s se with all these crab legs sticking out of them.”

Secrets, however, have a way of getting out, and La Paz was not destined to remain forever in cramped obscurity. Today, Oscar’s restaurant has a new wide-open, corner location in Woodland Hills’ Warner Center mini-mall; a sign broadcasts its presence to Victory Boulevard traffic.

Design and decor credits go to the S.E. Rykoff & Co., one of the largest restaurant supply outfits in the United States. The new kitchen is a cook’s streamlined, stainless steel dream. The dining room is outfitted with a green-and-gray color scheme, industrial carpeting, shiny polyester linens, and yards of overhead shelves where Oscar’s old telephones and stamp machines, irons and toy trucks are arranged with museum-like precision.

Cleansed of its former eccentricity, La Paz is now roomy, efficient, slightly institutional in flavor--a veritable prototype for a casual family Mexican restaurant and possibly (dare we predict?) future La Pazes throughout the Southland.

From the menu we see that La Paz is still, well, a little unusual. There are the standard Mexican combinations of tacos, enchiladas, and chile rellenos, and there are some well-known Yucatecan specialties like cochinita pibil and carne asada . But there are also frog legs, conch, tongue, barbecued goat and octopus--octopus cocktails, octopus tacos, octopus burritos, octopus enchiladas, octopus ranchero style.

With such a range, it’s hard to know where to start, a dilemma ameliorated by the arrival of warm chips and condiments: a mild tomatillo and a red chile salsa, and carrots pickled with jalapenos and garlic. We eventually decide to take our octopus in combination with abalone and shrimp.

“Appetizers, Oscar-style” is a huge plate of good chopped seafood dressed with olive oil, onions, tomatoes and cilantro. The purplish, tentacled flesh is not the slightest bit rubbery, but very fresh and delectably creamy. In fact, the kitchen cooks all the seafood lightly and deftly--freshness and texture are never issues. Neither is the portion size, which ranges from generous to overwhelming. But, as demonstrated by the halibut ceviche, which lacked salt, garlic and pepper or any other spice, blandness is an issue-- THE issue, in fact.

A lack of spicy heat is desirable, given the number of children who eat here and the fact that indigenous Yucatecan food isn’t that hot anyway. (Fire-eaters can pick out the jalapenos in the pickled carrots.) But a basic lack of good seasoning occurs all too frequently and unpredictably in the cooking at La Paz. Dinner side dishes-- albondiga (meatball) soup, beans, rice and salsas--vary in quality and flavor from night to night, from utterly bland to addictively delicious. Salads are the exception; made with iceberg lettuce and a dreary dressing, they are consistently terrible.

We were happiest with the simple seafood tacos, which are so juicy and full of shrimp, octopus or fish and bandera that they fall apart after a few bites; these tacos, at least, can be salted and salsaed to individual specifications. The barbecued goat and cochinita pibil, dense and flavorful meat mashes, come with a “make your own taco kit” of bandera, guacamole (which is wonderful, providing you catch the place on a night when the avocadoes are ripe) and tortillas.

But no salsa or salting saved the whole fish dishes. From afar, the hefty rock cod appeared to be lavish, gorgeous feast fare; up close, it was daunting, a whole dashboard of food. Unfortunately it was tasteless, and to eat more than a few bites of the two pounds plus on the platter was real work.

It’s also work to eat the Caldo de Siete Mares, but the kind of work shellfish lovers love the best. This voodoo stew is well-stocked with octopus, abalone, clams, oysters, shrimp, fish, and those famous crab legs for which a bib, shell-cracking tools and hand towels are provided.

For those diners who have had a hard day at work and are too tired to fight a dead crab for its meat, the kitchen will do the honors . . . but then you miss the legs-waving presentation! Another dish which caused excitement at our table was the Maine lobster special, a huge red creature whose meat has been scooped out, sauced, repacked and sealed with a huge cape of bright yellow cheese. The flavors of cream and cheese and garlic all came shining through, but the taste of lobster got lost in the sauce.

The dessert menu is limited to cheesecake and flan; the former was not available the three times we were there and the flan is reprehensible: squares of sweet curdled, tough egg. The kitchen has a moral obligation to improve on this one dessert, if only to not prejudice all their child customers forever against the silky, jiggly, sweet wonder that good flan can be. In the meantime, diners may want to close their meals with capuccino, which is big, foamy and delicious.

It’s tempting to construct a romantic, cautionary tale about La Paz: great, quirky hole-in-the-wall sells out, goes mainstream, loses its touch. But our source, the old La Paz regular, admits that the food’s about the same today as it was back in the old home place; it’s just that before, serendipity--the joy of discovering a good Mexican bouillabaisse or shrimp taco in a peculiar Canoga Park mini-mall restaurant--added the missing spice.

La Paz, 21040 Victory Blvd., Woodland Hills, (818) 883-4761 Open for lunch and dinner seven days. Beer and wine. Dinner for two, food only, $25-$60. All major credit cards accepted.