Goin’ Back to Cali
As the Chinese restaurant revolves around the stir-fry and the old-line French place around its heavy sauces, so to many people, South American restaurant meals are almost synonymous with humongous platters of beef. In most of the Argentine, Chilean and Bolivian places in California, the basic unit of currency is the giant mixed grill, the parillada , a megaton of charred protein that often comes unadorned by so much as a sprig of parsley or a French fry, an epic adventure written in meat.
Among the hillocks of grilled spinal cord, the mountains of blood sausage, the garlic-reeking Alps of short ribs to be found in Los Angeles, none is quite as majestic as the picada combination plate served at the restaurant Cali Viejo in Van Nuys.
Cali Viejo is a smart, dim-lit red-leather-booth place just down from the shuttered General Motors plant--”For Lease: Up To 2,100,000 Square Feet Available”--and cater-corner from a giant karaoke center that abuts a Latin super-store. The restaurant specializes in the cooking of the warm Andean valley around the Colombian city of Cali--Cali pops up every so often in the newspaper in a context totally unrelated to food--and a little souvenir stall in back sells Cali-emblazoned soccer pennants, leather boxes and a few Colombian canned goods. A television in the restaurant blasts Spanish-language news to the carnivores, except when there are merengue music videos that look like something MTV might have shown in 1982. The restaurant serves no beer, so everybody pounds down milkshakes made from exotic Colombian fruits.
Big tamales are steamed in banana leaves here, stuffed with potatoes and pork, spiced in a manner that might remind you of the world’s best tamale pie; flank steak is braised in a tomato-onion Creole sauce for the tough sobrebarriga . There is a ground-beef dish that is something like a highly spiced Colombian salpicon , almost as dry and fine as powder; extremely good pork chops are fried in a spicy crust. Bandejas are the traditional combination plates of the Colombian mountain regions, massive amounts of rice served with fried eggs, under-seasoned beans, plantains and a small steak.
But we’ve come for the picada . Come hungry: The picada -- mira, ve! . . . picada, it says on the unbashful menu--is an oval ceramic platter heaped with grilled lengths of thumb-width Colombian chorizo , peppery nubs of grilled beef, pungent blood sausage (if they’re not out of it), crisp chunks of spare rib, the peculiar though typical Colombian chicharrones that are more or less grids of crisply fried pork-fat anchored to sweet, ultra-chewy pigskin.
Garnishing the meat are green plantains that have been pounded down to approximately the size and thickness of a 3x5 card and fried to a shattering crunch, also lengths of slightly riper fried plantain, a few slices of tomato and chunks of fried cassava good enough to make you remember why yuca fries were so popular a few years ago. The hot salsa served on the side, aji , made from fresh chiles and chopped scallions, has an odd astringency that cuts through the garlicky richness of the meat. There are a couple of arepas , hockey-pucks of barely cooked cornmeal encased in a sort of a cooked-corn leather, often dead-cold in the center, that are pretty much inedible--though oddly enough the fresh cheese arepas served as an appetizer here are crisp and delicious. And though the picada is ostensibly served for one, the $10 platter will probably serve three, perhaps augmented by an order of the wonderful corn-crusted empanadas or possibly a batter-fried plantain stuffed with cheese. The picada is a formidable plate of food.
* Cali Viejo
7363 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys, (818) 994-2930. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. No alcohol. Lot parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $12-$18.
