Holy <i> Mole</i>

A true Oaxacan mole is a beautiful thing, a rich, musky stew that is thick as gruel and black as night--almost grainy with spice, with a pungency as super-concentrated as any on earth. The flavor of good mole is bitter and complex, with overtones of chocolate and every toasted seed that ever graced a spice jar, the many-layered heat of several dried and fresh chiles freshly pulverized in a mortar.

A proper mole involves several hours of cooking and several dozen ingredients--even some of the best local Mexican cooks cheat by doctoring a mix--and mole is as easy to ruin as, say, hollandaise sauce. Mole is the recipe in Mexican cookbooks that we’ve all put off making. And decent mole is all but impossible to find in local restaurants--regional Mexican food in the Southland tends more toward Jalisco-style birria and Pacific Coast seafood soups.

Tlapazola Grill is a new project from some chefs who used to cook at high-end rooms such as Rockenwagner and 72 Market Street, an everychef’s dream of a small place with a short menu and an appreciative clientele. And here it is, a classic, pitch-black Oaxacan mole with all the right burnt resonances, impossibly fragrant, bittersweet and thorny as an essay by Octavio Paz, picking up the pallid stewiness

Tlapazola’s mole has a lingering sweetness that seems to exist as an afterimage on the tongue, the way that you can sometimes see something green floating in the air if you’ve been staring at a red shape for too long.

Of course, this is the last place you might expect to find an authentic Oaxacan restaurant, here in the lower reaches of Santa Monica, next to the hamburger stands and the English darts bars, the auto body shops and Mexican restaurants of the school of glutinous orange cheese. Tlapazola Grill is housed in what used to be a New Age coffee shop called the Galaxy Cafe, famous mostly for the deconstructed reptile on its roof. Inside, essentially unchanged from its Galaxy days, the place is all Space Age curves and bluish glows, quilted diner aluminum and sleek granite-print Formica. Ocean Park below-the-line film types lounge in the scattering of Jetsonian booths up front; large Mexican families tend to populate the tables at the rear. Tlapazola attracts probably the most ethnically mixed crowd on the Westside.

And though it’s hard to believe, people do order things here that are not mole . To start, there are nice chicken flautas served with guacamole and cream; also bowls of a thick, vaguely sweetish lentil soup cooked with tiny chunks of plantain.

The spicy-hot beef stew tinga , like a central-Mexican version of a Cuban ropa vieja , is stewed past tenderness with onions and smoky chipotle chiles until it is stringy and interestingly chewy again; crisp-skinned grilled trout, served whole and boneless, is peppery and delicious, garnished with a fresh chop of tomatoes and herbs. Enchiladas and fancy fish dishes have been uninteresting; a red mole , coloradito , was insipid compared to the black. But lamb barbacoa is strong-tasting and tender, the essence of the meat, tasty wrapped into little tacos with minced onion and a splash of the restaurant’s powerful brick-red salsa; carne asada is thicker and less powerfully marinated than most versions of the Mexican grilled steak.

Dessert, as in most Mexican restaurants, is pretty much limited to flan, but it’s a good flan here, flavored with Mexican chocolate like the mole , for a nice kind of full-circle effect.

Tlapazola Grill

2920 Lincoln Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 392-7292. Open Tuesday-Thursday, 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday, 10:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Cash only. Lot parking. Takeout. Beer and wine. Dinner for two, food only, $11-$15.