On Broadway

As you wander down toward Broadway from the citadel of Bunker Hill, racket incrementally gathers and becomes livelier, sheer facades give way to storefronts, people waiting at bus stops become outnumbered by happier-looking people shopping for bridal gowns or a sturdy pair of shoes. By the time you get down past the Grand Central Market, you are in the midst of Broadway, surrounded by loud accordion music that blasts from record stores, the smell of 10,000 tacos frying, jostling pedestrians 10 abreast. This is the one small stretch of Los Angeles where someone on foot might feel the street energy of a great city.

Brand new but already something of an ultimate Broadway experience is El Gallo Giro, the new Mexican place on the corner of Third, which compresses the chaos of a giant food complex into a storefront-size microcosm: walls of blasting music and smoking copper cauldrons, half a dozen surging queues, framed paintings of cockfighters, sweet oceans of agua fresca and steaming hillocks of meat.

And the food is pretty terrific. El Gallo Giro is a transistorized version of a tremendous complex in Huntington Park that extends for nearly a block.

One doesn’t sit at tables here, one ekes out shoulder room at the high, narrow counter that runs around the outer perimeter of the room, and eats standing up. One gazes out the plate-glass windows onto Broadway. One invariably pokes one’s elbows into one’s neighbor’s salsa verde . One is in and out in about 15 minutes, even during the heaviest crush at lunch.

The normal reaction upon entering El Gallo Giro for the first time is this: panic mixed with awe . . . which may be the only sensible reaction when you are faced with a crowd, a foreign language, five food stations and a pounding marimba-orchestra version of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

The secret is to position yourself in front of the counter that serves the sort of food you’re interested in, bark out an order, and somehow worm your way to the nearest cash register to pick it up. If you want a beverage, say, a milky banana drink, the process is reversed: Pay first or you will be sent to the back of a very long line. He who hesitates is lost. The countermen at El Gallo Giro are as relentless as those in Manhattan delis, especially if you try to order a quesadilla when you’re in the taco line.

Order a quesadilla in the proper line, though, and you’ll get a thick corn turnover, more like a rustic empanada really, deep-fried to order and oozing with melted cheese, served under a blanket of salsa and tart crema Mexicana . You can also get the quesadilla split, and stuffed with a ladleful of pungent sauteed mushrooms, or longaniza sausage cooked with potatoes, or a dollop of the smoky beef- chipotle glop tinga that tastes like a sophisticated version of Brunswick stew, only better and without the squirrel.

Also at that station there are sopes , thick, deep-fried saucers of cornmeal topped the same way, chewy and delicious and absolutely impossible to eat with a flimsy plastic fork and knife; and gorditas , thick, deep-fried discuses of cornmeal stuffed with spicy, stewed pigskin; and flautas , fat “taquitos” filled with a chicken-tinged potato mixture that is flavored with sort of a Mexican curry: very fine.

The tamales can be fluffy but sawdusty--don’t bother, unless you’re chasing a sweet tamale with a glass of thick, chocolaty champurrado at breakfast. Tacos are fine, of the overpacked and pricey school, but are more or less the same fare you’ll find at any Broadway taqueria . The hominy stew pozole is bland and uninteresting, the birria fatty and mild.

But El Gallo Giro tortas have more than a little in common with great Philly cheese-steaks, mostly in that the ingredients are a little disgusting when considered individually--sliced jalapenos, fried beans, a shmear of avocado, a sweet, soft roll, a slab of rubbery panela cheese--but are quite delicious when slapped into a sandwich with meat: a paper-thin sheet of batter-fried steak milanesa , roast chicken, greasy nubs of carnitas , or slices of rich roast pork. Though the torta can seem dry and disappointing at first, the three or four middle bites, where all the ingredients coincide, are superb. Share the ends of your sandwich if you must, but save the middle for yourself.

El Gallo Giro: 260 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, (213) 626-6926. Open Sunday-Thursday, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. Also 7148 Pacific Blvd., Huntington Park, (213) 585-4492, and 1442 S. Bristol, Santa Ana, (714) 549-2011. Cash only. No alcohol. Difficult parking. Takeout. Lunch for two, food only, $5-$10.