Black Bean Heaven

For a long time, everybody’s favorite Guatemalan place was El Tikalito down on Pico, where the pepian was fine and the beer sometimes flowed like ice water. The place was decorated like somebody’s rec room: checked oilcloth on the tables and bowling trophies scattered all around; a TV blasting Argentinian soap operas at the back; kids sprawled around doing homework. The host usually would pull up a chair and talk about Guatemala in the old days, and have a beer himself. His wife was the cook, I think, and she made the best Guatemalan stews and salsas around. El Tikalito had originally been their restaurant in Guatemala.

On weekend nights, the restaurant hooked up a microphone to a tiny speaker system. Men would lurch out of their seats and croon a ballad or two, then return to the task of amassing empty beer bottles, thickets of which would stay on the tables until closing. There would be loud futbol talk, and sometimes a half-hearted brawl by the end of the evening, which concluded more often than not with the combatants in a beery embrace, and more songs. The spicy black-clam cocktail was superb.

And urban renewal being what it is, El Tikalito was razed a few years ago, along with an entire block of Guatemalan businesses, to make way for . . . well, so far, for a really big empty lot. Such are the priorities.

El Tikalito re-emerged a year or so ago, taking over a bare-bones restaurant space on Vermont that had recently been home to Chaos--a mid-Wilshire Cuban-Chinese joint that had been well-known for its fragrant, greasy Cuban fried rice and for the crispest tostones in Los Angeles, also for the anarchic piquancy of its apostrophe-less name. I was happy to see Tikalito around again, but pretty sad that it had to come at the expense of the only perfect fried plantains I knew.

Anyway, the El Tikalito people did their best to cheer the place up, with hand-woven Guatemalan tchotchkes on the walls and crisp, new Budweiser posters, a tattered road map of Guatemala and advertisements for Guatemalan Cabro beer: “From the Land of Eternal Spring.” (Cabro, rich and sort of malty, is really good beer.) A handwritten wall sign announces weekend marimba concerts, another the availability of beef-foot soup. The jukebox is loud as an Iron Maiden concert. It’s still a friendly, family-run sort of place, but the old man has been nowhere in sight.

The restaurant has a good, basic Guatemalan menu, with all the basic dishes you expect and some Mexican stuff for the kids. To start, there are free chip things, less like nachos than like the “Eulalia’s Chips” at Border Grill, loaded with tasty black beans and crumbles of aged Guatemalan cheese. For a buck apiece, you can get tostadas , crunchy fried tortillas smeared with the same black beans and cheese, or with a sort of bland tomato sauce, or with the house guacamole, which has been diluted to the pale green color of new peas with gobs of mixed-in mayonnaise. If you order sweet plantains, you get great, fried slabs of the fruit, served with the black beans--you’re never far from a scoop of black beans around here--and a wash of thick, salty Guatemalan sour cream. The horchata drink here, a little chalky, tastes not unlike the milk left at the bottom of the bowl after you finish a serving of Apple Jacks. Corn tamales are sweet and fine.

The most famous dish of Guatemalan cooking is pepian , chunks of stewed meat and potatoes served in a spicy broth thickened with tomatoes and ground, toasted pumpkin seeds, and Tikalito’s version is pretty good; nutty-tasting, chile-hot and slightly bitter. Hilacha is the Guatemalan equivalent of ropa vieja , threads of beef in a thick, toasted-chile sauce that tastes like what angels must put on their enchiladas in heaven; crisply fried chiles rellenos are stuffed with tiny, stewed cubes of beef in a tart tomato sauce flavored heavily with capers; revolcado is a beef-innard stew--kidney, tongue, heart, stuff like that--in a strong, delicious broth that tastes like the essence of liver. And salpicon , a sort of cold, roast-beef hash, marinated in orange juice and chopped into small pieces with onion, tomato and fresh mint, is extremely good here, one of the best healthy dishes in town.

A couple of Cabros, a plate of salpicon and rice, thundering marimbas . . . what more could you want?

El Tikalito, 834 S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles. (No phone.) Open daily, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Beer and wine. Cash only. Street parking. Dinner for two, food only, $11-$15.