Senor Class

Everybody gets around to Se nor Fish at one time or an other, a tiny Mexican seafood cafe located in a former burger shack a few minutes north of downtown. Around the long wooden tables in the patio you’ll find pigment-smeared artists, internists still in their scrub suits, young mothers, guys who drift over from construction jobs or from the Chevy dealership across the street, anyone with a couple of bucks for a shrimp taco. On weekend afternoons, the wait at the takeout window can sometimes approach three-quarters of an hour.

Now there’s another Senor Fish, across Mt. Washington and into downtown Eagle Rock, a pretty renovated bungalow amid a strip of auto body shops and mini-malls, down the block from a ghostly old WCTU residence and spitting distance from Occidental College. Tables line terraces, bump together in patios, fill the old living room and porch. And here’s the line, dense with undergraduates, spiked with professors, plumped out with a happy crowd as multiethnic as the neighborhood. The powerful appeal of a good, cheap shrimp taco may be hard to overestimate.

As at the first Senor Fish, you order at one window and are served at another, unless somebody decides to take the food out to your table; as at the first Senor Fish, the strongest beverage seems to be the rice drink horchata . And the cooking seems even better, cleaner than that at the original, probably because the kitchen is comparably vast.

Here are spicy fried-fish tacos like the ones they serve on the Ensenada waterfront, burritos filled with fat scallops, and plates of sauteed shrimp mojo de ajo so powerfully seasoned that you can almost feel the garlic vibrate in your teeth. The famous seafood quesadilla , widely copied, is exemplary, a large flour tortilla, filled with stretchy cheese and a garlicky panful of sauteed fish, shrimp and scallops, griddled to a browned crispness and brushed with a smoky chile salsa, the sort of trashy, irresistible mess you might throw together for an impromptu dinner at a rented beach house, knowing everybody will ask for seconds.

There are certainly weak spots in the menu. The shrimp in the rather ordinary shrimp cocktail seem flabby, overmarinated; the octopus tostada lacks the clean freshness, the bite of the same dish at the other restaurant.

But grilled trout--at less than five bucks--splayed and salted and slicked with lime, served with rice and beans, is wholly satisfying; grilled salmon, nicely rare and enough for two, comes with a garnish of blackened chiles and a squirt of mayonnaise, a paper cup of tartar sauce and another of a dark, thick, sesame-seeded sauce scented strongly with lime. The whole, deep-fried snapper, all crunch and salt and steamy, fragrant flesh, is cooked with the sort of finesse you might expect from an expensive Hong Kong-style fish house at three times the price.

You’ll even find stuff for vegetarians here: lardless beans, quesadillas , wonderful crisp-shelled tacos filled with mashed potatoes. And the vegetarian enchilada--sauced with a stinging green puree, filled with sauteed zucchini, cheese and herbs--may be the single best thing on the menu, surely worth the wait.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Where to Go

Senor Fish, 4803 Eagle Rock Blvd., Eagle Rock, (213) 257-7167. (Also 5111 N. Figueroa Blvd., Highland Park, (213) 257-2498.) Open for lunch and dinner, Tuesday-Saturday. Cash only. No alcohol. Street parking. Takeout. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $6 to $16.

What to Get

Scallop burrito, enchiladas verdes , fried whole snapper, seafood quesadilla, flan.