Mexico in L.A. : It’s Chile Inside

Not far from downtown Montebello, 20 minutes drive from Los Angeles and a mile or so east of the giant ice-cream cone that rises over a T-shirt shop, the gleaming Mexican restaurant El Porton rises out of a supermarket parking lot like an oversize, Mission-style Denny’s, a giant coffee shop bedecked with banners that advertise lunchtime buffets and cheap breakfast specials. Inside, it’s Denny’s again--well, maybe a particularly magnificent Coco’s--with a soaring ceiling and comfy coffee-shop booths. Mornings, the air is rich with the smells of coffee and cinnamon.

It’s about the last place you’d expect to find a first-rate Mexican restaurant, and although I’ve been hearing about El Porton for years, I’ve driven straight by, figuring that nothing this prefab looking could be any good.

But on the tables, where you’d usually find the maple syrup, there are ramekins of tart tomatillo salsa, juicy-fresh tomato salsa and a seriously smoky salsa made from chipotle chiles. The neatly dressed customers, none of whom would look out of place at a family chicken-dinner place in Indiana, are all speaking Spanish. And that’s not oatmeal everybody’s eating for breakfast, it’s . . . menudo . Or crisp, hot churros fried to order, dusted with cinnamon sugar, and served with steaming mugs of spiced Mexican chocolate. Or eggs scrambled with chorizo sausage and tomatillo sauce. Or tacos stuffed with creamed chiles and potatoes. Or watery chilaquiles . Or a cup of atol , which is how hot, liquid vanilla pudding would taste if vanilla pudding tasted better that it does.

If you don’t count food stalls or taco trucks, there are basically two styles of “authentic” Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles: cozy joints that feature a version of Mexican home cooking, and more expensive places that serve a Mexicanized version of Continental cuisine. Professional Mexican chefs with the training and the chops for more ambitious Mexican restaurant cooking are more likely to be working at a place like La Toque or Michael’s instead.

Montebello’s El Porton, a project of Mexico’s largest food-service company--they own Mexico’s ubiquitous VIPs chain of coffee shops, among other things--might be the first Southland Mexican restaurant to professionalize its food without compromising a whit for the North American palate, the first to be run as if it were in an upper-middle-class Mexico City suburb instead of somewhere just outside L.A. Of course, this doesn’t mean that all the food is necessarily good.

The menu is relatively small, but inclusive. To start, there are tacos, most of them a buck-fifty a pop, filled with rajas --not the melting, long-cooked kind you find at Border Grill and La Super Rica but crunchy strips of dark-green poblano chile briefly tossed with cream; with slightly slimy mushrooms sauteed with tons of garlic and herbs; with a pallidly spiced version of the Yucatecan pork specialty called cochinita pibil ; with fine, smoky strips of grilled, citrus marinated pork loin; with leathery sheets of carne asada . Queso fundido is the usual salty puddle of molten Mexican cheese, ready to be daubed with salsa and folded into a tortilla. Fideo is soft noodles served in a garlicky tomato broth, soothing nursery food though not all it could be. Chiles rellenos are made with fine poblano chiles, but generally arrive limp and soggy in an acidic tomato sauce. You’ve probably had better sopes , meat-filled masa boats, too.

Perhaps the epitome of El Porton’s clean, professional Mexican cooking is the restaurant’s remarkable white pozole , a clear, balanced pork consomme brimming with carefully cooked chunks of pork and tender kernels of hominy, mild as a kitten’s kiss yet delicious enough to eat even without piling in the traditional condiments of chopped raw onion, radish and lettuce. Each spoonful is different enough from the last to drive sensation-seekers straight toward the bottom of the bowl.

There is a sort of mixed-grill plate that includes blackened crumbles of good chorizo sausage, grilled pork loin, and carne asada , which is authentically tough and thin enough to read through, along with a big heap of rajas . Better than the carne asada was a special of the Northern Mexican dish cecina , which is an extremely broad, thin steak that has been air-dried and salt-cured until it attains the sour pungency of well-aged beef, then grilled briefly so that it retains its juice--a spectacular piece of meat.

Skip over the vast selection of Mexican dessert puddings and finish with a plate of the churros .

A sister restaurant opened in Westwood this week. It may be too early to tell, but if a preliminary meal was any indication, it seems that the two El Portons are related in name alone: where the Montebello branch caters to the unalloyed Eastside taste, Westwood’s attempts to anticipate a Westside palate less used to strong, clean flavors and chile heat--with mediocre results. For now, any recommendations are for the Montebello location only.

El Porton, 1105 W. Whittier Blvd., Montebello, (213) 888-8879. Open daily, 8 a.m. to midnight. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Full bar. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $12-$18.