Ride the Wild Garlic
Even though El Chori in Bell is more refined and Versailles serves better chicken, El Colmao has always been my favorite Cuban restaurant in Los Angeles. It’s a sprawling place in the Pico-Union District with perfect dress-your-own avocado salad, a great version of the Spanish bean soup called caldo gallego and the kind of groovy landsmann vibe you find sometimes at old-line delicatessens like Canter’s or Nate n’ Al’s. A perfect, sleepy Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles often involves an avocado salad at El Colmao, a plate of fried pork and half a liter of the very bad red wine that marries so well with garlicky meat.
Now, from some members of the family that owns El Colmao, there’s Candy’s Meson, a newish Cuban restaurant in the Burbank mini-mall space once occupied by the Western-themed Cuban joint Las Carretas. With a few exceptions--El Colmao tends to be slightly defter with seafood--Candy’s Meson reproduces its ancestor’s cuisine with remarkable fidelity.
Candy’s Meson, like El Colmao, serves basic Cuban cooking, which is not to say the exquisitely crafted Latino cuisine that certain places in Miami aspire to, but massive portions of fried, garlic-drenched Cuban soul food of the sort that somebody in the Mambo Kings was sitting down to every three pages or so: platters of fried Spanish chorizo; sweet plantains caramelized black in oil; fluffy white rice and giant bowls of well-spiced, brothy black beans.
If the breaded, fried pork chop here has little of the delicacy of, say, German schnitzel or Japanese tonkatsu, it is at least as delicious, a crunchy, well-marinated chop with a strong undercurrent of lemon and garlic. Masas de puerco, carnitas-like chunks, are small, elegant essays on the sweeter essences of deep-fried pork fat.
If the T-bone steak, decidedly not prime, is a little skimpily cut and a little over-tenderized, the meat practically sings with lemon and garlic and has the developed, not unpleasant, gaminess that comes when you cook a piece of beef well past medium--nobody here will ever ask you if you want your meat rare.
Some of the food is a little too close to what you might find on a blue-plate special in the third-best cafe in a Midwestern town. Boliche, Cuban-style pot roasted beef, stringy in a homemade sort of way, bathed in a tomato sauce startling in its plainness, may have a certain nostalgic appeal but not much of a culinary one; ropa vieja, the classic Cuban dish of shredded beef stewed in a sweetish tomato sauce, is too bland. Many Cuban restaurants aspire to make wonderful paella Valenciana, the famous Spanish stew of rice and seafood, but the paella at Candy’s, as at most of its peers, can be somewhat mushy, sodden with an unsubtle fish broth, though it harbors tasty bits of not-very-overcooked seafood.
Arroz con pollo, tinted a brilliant saffron yellow, is a vastly better dish, with a slight, pleasant chewiness, more chicken than two can eat and the clean flavor of good chicken stock. And pierna de puerco, sliced fresh ham fried with intemperate amounts of garlic and smothered with sauteed onions, is superb: Nicely caramelized, on the knife’s edge between too juicy and dried out, jolted with salt, great pierna de puerco reproduces all the experiences you might look for in a plate of Virginia country ham.
Decent chicken you can get at a lot of places. My favorite Cuban dish--sometimes I think my favorite food in the world--is the beans-and-rice dish called moros y cristianos, Moors and Christians, and both El Colmao and Candy’s Meson make a tremendous version, peppered with chunks of fat pork, cooked to the appealing, slightly oily dryness of primo fried rice and flavored with bay leaf and garlic. The traditional accompaniment to moros is yuca, boiled cassava root steeped with enough garlic to fell a steer. Moros may never earn one of those little hearts from a cardiologist’s board, but it is hard to imagine a tastier mound of rice.
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WHERE TO GO
Candy’s Meson, 226 E. Alameda St., Burbank; (818) 848-1915. Open for lunch and dinner Wed.-Mon. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Beer and wine. Lot parking. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $13-$25.
WHAT TO GET
Caldo gallego; moros y cristianos; pierna de puerco.
