La Mansion’s New Owners Go the Extra Mile With Their Mexican Menu

La Fonda Roberto’s in downtown Chula Vista still serves the best chile en nogada in the county, although a close second preens under a jewel-like coronet of pomegranate seeds a few miles east at La Mansion, an established Mexican restaurant that changed hands--and changed for the better--earlier this year.

You can take a Sisyphean nose-to-the-grindstone approach and search through the menus of all the major Mexican restaurants in town looking for this dish, but your reward will be nothing more than a well-worn nose. The preparation of chile en nogada , after all, requires a tad more effort than it does to defrost a commercial tortilla, roll it around tinned, shredded beef from Argentina and hide the resulting travesty under a pint of canned “ranchero” sauce.

La Mansion expands by a notable percentage the group of local Mexican restaurants willing to trouble themselves with more than the simplest and most familiar offerings. The chile en nogada --a bizarre but brilliant dish in which a mild chile pepper is stuffed with spiced meat and dried fruit, slathered with stiff walnut sauce and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds--merely tops a roster that includes tacos al pastor , shrimp in tequila sauce, queso al chipotle , cochinita pibil and bisteque albanil .

The restaurant itself has the relaxed pace and unassuming demeanor of restaurants in Mexico. The tone is set partly by the tiny tortilla kitchen located at the front window of this shopping center eatery, where women work continuously through the dinner hour, rolling and baking the flat, tender breads. In the plainly decorated dining room, proprietor Luis Flores pauses repeatedly at the tables of first-time guests to explain the menu, highlight specialties and encourage the adoption of a laid-back attitude.

On weekends, Flores makes a point of recommending the tacos al pastor , an appetizer that seems like nothing quite so much as a Mexican version of Greek gyros. The meat, having reposed for a day or two in a bath of spices and chopped chilies, pineapple and onion, turns on a vertical spit in the tortilla kitchen until it can be shred almost by a glance, at which point slivers are tucked into tiny corn tortillas along with shredded onion, chopped cilantro, smooth guacamole and a mild, subtly delicious salsa.

On the whole, the tacos would seem the best starter, but other out-of-the-ordinary choices include queso al chipotle , or melted Jack cheese topped with chipotle peppers, and a dressier version that adds sauteed mushrooms to the dish. Both are meant to be rolled in tortillas.

Molletes are considered everyday fare south of the border, but turn up infrequently on menus here; La Mansion offers a special version that garnishes the bean and cheese-topped hard rolls with crumbled chorizo sausage. The same rolls form the bases of the meal-sized tortas , or sandwiches stuffed with such things as carnitas , carne asada , chorizo and eggs, breaded steak and even, quite prosaically, ham and cheese.

Most meals include the choice of a simple salad or a not-so-simple soup. Excellent chicken broth made by simmering real chickens (a fact that wouldn’t be worth mentioning if more restaurants troubled to actually cook the birds, rather than spooning out powdered stock base) gives a fresh, gentle flavor to both the simple tortilla soup and the more complicated caldo tlalpeno , which is filled out with shredded chicken breast, garbanzos and a bit of minced onion and cilantro.

Flores once managed an El Torito restaurant, and his current menu does include the usual tacos, burritos, enchiladas and tostadas, mostly topped with sour cream and shredded lettuce and cheese. But once past that page, the menu loses its standardized look and the plates specify their own, appropriate garnishes rather than the all-purpose rice and beans found elsewhere. Beans, when served, sometimes take the form of particularly flavorful and not too mushy frijoles refritos , and at others arrive in cups filled with rich cooking liquid. Beans, however, maintain a less ubiquitous presence than the dry, well-seasoned rice.

The tripe soup called menudo and Jalisco-style pozole (chicken broth simmered with hominy and chicken breast and served with a garnish of onions, radish and lime) are offered Friday through Sunday, the part of the week traditionally reserved for these extremely hearty brews. The menu also offers Mexico City-style empanadas, in which the ground beef filling is encased in corn masa dough rather than pastry, and a long list of steaks that includes the usual carne asada as well as a serape indio , a very thin steak dressed with chorizo and melted cheese. The steak selection ends with a sirloin in albanil (“mason”) sauce, a fairly complicated green sauce that gives an unusual and slightly piquant boost to the meat.

The carnitas do not match those at Tijuana’s Carnitas Uruapan, but the chunks of crusty, long-cooked pork do hide tender hearts and the presentation is pleasingly complete; properly, these should be rolled in fresh tortillas along with shredded onions, cilantro and a little salsa. La Mansion offers guacamole as well, just to be on the safe side, and a judicious amount adds character to the carnitas .

A listing for chicken in mole sauce is followed by one for the less-common pollo en pipian verde , or chicken stewed in a green, somewhat spicy sauce flavored with ground nuts and pumpkin seeds.

The handsome shrimp selection shifts to an altogether different Mexican idiom, one in which the inspiration almost seems French. The list includes a garlic-heavy saute and a calmer dish of shrimp bedded on a spinach-cheese mixture, but the camarones of choice would be the bacon-wrapped beauties doused with a sweet, rather elegant sauce of butter and tequila.

The flan belongs to the “ queso “ school, which indicates a texture so rich as to seem cheese-like; the caramel sauce somehow counteracts the almost cloying richness.

The one item that most guests seem to order is the house margarita, a handmade affair of fresh lime juice and good-quality liquors shaken at table until both drink and server are slightly frothy. The shakers provide enough for two long glasses, and while literally every guest in one section of the room ordered a shaker on a recent evening, no one asked for a second.

LA MANSION

Terra Nova Plaza, East H Street at Interstate 805, Chula Vista

422-6155

Lunch and dinner daily.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including a margarita each, tax and tip, $30 to $50.