RESTAURANTS / MAX JACOBSON : Behind the Plain Exterior Is a Family That Cooks Great Mexican Seafood

When 1st Street is finished being Little Saigon, it turns into Little Sonora-Durango-Jalisco-Chihuahua. There are more Mexican restaurants on 1st in Santa Ana than you could shake a chopstick at.

Perhaps there is even an embarrassment of riches. The seafood restaurant called Colima, at the corner of Fairview Street, ought to be busy but nobody seems able to find it in the crowd. The other night the only other people in the place were a lonely looking couple sitting silently on opposite sides of a giant fried fish.

I couldn’t help but notice them, and maybe this is another problem for Colima. The place is so bright, due to highly reflective chandeliers stuck in every corner of the room, that you may wish you had sunglasses. Perhaps the owners, who hail from the city of Colima in Mexico, are homesick for sun-soaked Colima.

Maybe you could call that atmosphere, if you have a generous spirit. Basically, though, Colima is your elemental storefront restaurant, perhaps a little roomier than most but with no embellishments. We are talking plain. Not even one bullfight poster.

But who cares? These people can really cook; the whole family, it seems, can cook. Lupe Valencia, the mother, makes wonderful corn tortillas by hand, and also some of the appetizers and several of the desserts. Her sons, who wait the tables, also prepare the seafood.

Wonderful tortillas make for wonderful tortilla chips and you get a basket of hot, fresh ones the minute you are seated. The chips come with an equally irresistible salsa, the dark, smoky kind, and pico de gallo, a condiment of finely minced onion, tomato, chiles and cilantro. Eat all you want, as the commercial says. They’ll make more.

Don’t make the mistake of starting with nachos unless you come with a large group. “Nachitos,” said the waiter, which literally means “little nachos.” But he put down a monstrous platter of them, a mountain of corn chips with beans and two kinds of Mexican cheese, topped with sour cream and green chili.

I admired his sly sense of humor, but I was barely able to eat a corner of the dish. Six people, conservatively, would have a hard time with it.

There are several caldos (soups), such as siete mares (seven seas), a briny broth with a combination of seafoods (shrimp, snapper, and octopus), and a couple of seafood cocteles based on shrimp, oyster or abalone. These dishes are perfectly fine but not what the restaurant does best.

What you want to come here for is fish, which the restaurant buys fresh several times a week.

Snapper offers the largest number of cooking options: a la plancha (grilled), empanizado (breaded), al mojo (fried with garlic), a la diabla (smothered in chili sauce), a la Veracruzana (with tomato sauce) and ranchera (baked with a spicy sauce containing tomatoes and onions). I had the snapper empanizado, and it was nearly perfect, firm-fleshed with crusty breading.

The restaurant also has fresh mojarra (perch) and vagre (catfish), but for some reason never cooks them any way but by deep-frying. You can have them sauced al mojo, a la diabla, or ranchera, but that only makes for different toppings. When fish are fresh, I’d say frying is the last way they should be cooked. Why couldn’t they be grilled?

But I must admit that as fried fish they are terrific. The catfish is huge, bigger than the vaunted catfish at Laguna Beach’s Five Feet restaurant (and about one-third the price), and as sweet-fleshed as can be. We had ours a la diabla, and it came standing up straight on the dish, looking crisp and ready for action. There were three of us, and when the smoke cleared away, plenty of the fish remained.

The perch is not as big or sweet, but it fries up so crunchy you can actually eat the smaller bones, which is exactly what they do in Mexico. This fish makes for great tacos with mama Lupe’s handmade tortillas. Smear them with salsa and you have a world-class treat, to be washed down with a Bohemia or a Dos Equis, perhaps, or another of the imported beers the restaurant carries.

There are also some shrimp and lobster dishes, grilled and given the same sauces as the fried fish.

Should you hanker for non-seafood items, there is no shortage of them on this menu. Tacos are made from tongue as well as chicken. There is a fine chile verde made with chunked pork. The chiles rellenos, pan-fried breaded chiles stuffed with cheese and topped with sour cream sauce, are the richest I’ve ever had.

All main dishes come with good beans, dry but tasty rice and a bizarre salad made from shredded carrot and chunks of pineapple. (How’d that get in there?)

For dessert, you could have a dense, semi-sweet flan, but the one that knocked me out was the Mexican eggnog called rompope . Mama Lupe uses 100-proof rum, egg yolk, heavy cream and spices to make one of the most devastating eggnogs anywhere. It is served in a four-ounce glass and I’ll bet you can’t finish half. I couldn’t. In fact, there is usually far too much to eat at Colima.

Colima is inexpensive. Appetizers are $1.50 to $3.95. Seafood cocktails are $6 to $8.75. Filets (snapper) are $8.50. Vagre (catfish) is $9.50. Mojarra (perch) is $8.95. Shrimp dishes are $8.95. Lobster is $16.50.

* COLIMA

130 N. Fairview St., Santa Ana.

(714) 836-1254.

Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner, 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Cash only.