Machaquismo
Mexican cuisine is one of the most regional on earth, ranging from the musky stews of Oaxaca to the bright tropical flavors of the Yucatan, from the spare cowboy cookery of Sonora state to the complex seafood dishes of Veracruz. But you could drive up and down the boulevards east and south of downtown Los Angeles, stop at any of a thousand restaurants and taco stands, and chances are, if you check out the menu at a place advertising food in the style of Puebla or Guanajuato, you’ll find the same 12 dishes you find everywhere else.
Los Angeles County may have a Mexican population larger than Guadalajara’s, but the Mexican restaurants here are roughly at the point French restaurants were 20 years ago, when all you could get was cassoulet and duck a l’orange .
On restaurant signs, “Michoacan” has come to mean carnitas ; “Colima,” seafood cocktails; “Jalisco,” the goat-meat stew birria . “Estilo D.F.,” Mexico City-style, usually signifies a stand serving grilled-meat tacos, which every other taco stand also serves; “Tijuana” points to tacos too.
And the legend “Sinaloa,” referring to the vast western coastal state that includes Mazatlan, is ubiquitous but usually signifies nothing more than the region of the owner’s birth. From time to time, Sinaloan recipes show up in cookbooks, but until I stumbled onto El Sitio last month, I couldn’t have told you what Sinaloan cooking, a terrific blend of jungle abundance and desert flavors, might be.
El Sitio is a stone-authentic Sinaloa-style place a few blocks from the center of Huntington Park, a low, bare restaurant with oilcloth on the tables, a few hand-painted napkin dispensers, and a yawning open area where women watch soccer, fry meat and scrape down hundreds of ears of white corn for the next day’s tamales.
At noon, the regulars play cards, smoke unfiltered cigarettes and eat giant shrimp cocktails. Families show up mornings for chilaquiles and the picturesquely named huevos divorciados (divorced eggs), which come with two colors of salsa. A meal at El Sitio can feel almost like hanging out in a friend’s mom’s kitchen.
There are the usual tacos here, though some are filled with stuff like potatoes and cheese, or better, with chilorio , a delicious preparation of pounded pork fried with lots of cumin that I’ve never seen outside the pages of a cookbook--it’s like a Sinaloan version of the Yucatecan cochinito pibil. Vampiros involve white cheese melted on corn tortillas and sprinkled with bits of chopped carne asada, like a beefed-up quesadilla .
Gorditas are more like what you might think of as sopes , little masa saucers fried to a delicate crunchiness, smeared with beans, topped with crisply fried strands of dried beef as well as lettuce, and extraordinary beet-red pickled onions of a type I’d always thought were Yucatecan but may be more generically tropical Mexican. With the dish comes a cup of chile-laced beef broth, slightly tart, that you are either supposed to or not supposed to drizzle over the gorditas --I lost the train of the waitress’ Spanish, and it tasted good either way.
Asado Sinaloa is a tropical melange of grilled meat, vegetables and pickled onions, arranged in a symmetrical heap and garnished with the red onions. There is usually a meal-size soup of the day: Casuela , a kind of mellow beef broth enriched with chickpeas and lots of tender meat, could have been a textbook-perfect version of a Madrileno cocido if not for the awesome level of tepin- chile heat.
Mostly, though, people come to El Sitio for machaca . When done well, machaca , a sort of fried beef jerky, can be one of the great dishes of the Americas, an intense distillation of the flavors of the dry Mexican West, all salt and smoke and heat. It is easy to imagine something like machaca being eaten in Mexico long before Cortez.
In Los Angeles, what generally goes by the name machaca is stringy, watery stewed beef with maybe a bell pepper thrown in, a burrito filling scrambled hard with eggs. Machaca is usually not a good thing to order on your first visit to a Mexican restaurant.
But El Sitio serves what is by far the best machaca I’ve ever eaten, a red-brown heap of spicy dried beef, grilled, pounded into shreds with a stone, fried to a frizzle with bits of onion and sweet peppers, a chewy, animal essence with a specific gravity somewhere south of lead.
An order of machaca here doesn’t look like a lot, but it is difficult to imagine a richer food. You can get the machaca straight up, ready to roll into little tacos with beans and hot red chile; you can get it scrambled with eggs; you can get it simmered with water as soup. Mexican-food authority Diana Kennedy calls this caldillo de machaca a poor man’s soup, but you can’t imagine a tycoon eating any better.
* El Sitio
800 E. Florence Ave., Huntington Park, (213) 582-8442. Open daily, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Lot parking in rear. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $10-$17.
