In the Pink at Anita’s

People I know make regular pilgrimages to Santa Fe for New Mexico cuisine--the blue corn enchiladas, hot sopaipillas and chile colorado. They’d have to do without Santa Fe’s art galleries and desert sunsets, but they could save a lot of time and money by driving down to Fullerton instead.

That’s where they’d find Anita’s, a modest pink adobe that looks a bit lost among the strip malls of north Orange County. It serves terrific New Mexico-style food. And if it comes to that, Fullerton’s own sunsets aren’t too shabby, thank you.

Anita is Anita Tellez, whom you probably aren’t going to see. She spends most of her time in Virginia, where she has eight Anita’s locations. But that’s OK, because her recipes are faithfully prepared at this, her original restaurant, by family members and a longtime staff.

As an ambience, it’s just a boxy pink room full of tables covered in sky-blue oilcloth, with strings of chiles as the principal decor. Mariachi music plays on the sound system, at a volume as understated as the spices in the dishes. New Mexico is famous for chiles, but Anita’s is not a place for those who want really hot food. The dishes are mild by comparison with what you get in some of our Mexican restaurants.

“Anita’s recipes are secret,” the menu tells us, but it’s obvious that they rely heavily on dried red chiles, carefully boiled before being added to the dishes in order to leach out their potentially bitter aftertaste.

No one should start a meal here without ordering a basket of sopaipillas--puffy, golden triangles of pastry, which are still too hot to handle when they first arrive at the table. The sopaipillas, each about three inches across, are dusted with powdered sugar and served with a squeeze bottle of honey. On my last visit, I went through two baskets.

The perfect accompaniment for them is posole, a rust-red soup full of hominy and shredded pork. This is a filling soup, mildly hot and with a powerfully smoky finish.

There’s an appetizer sampler plate (sopaipillas, bean dip, cheese-smothered nachos and crisp, dense taquitos), but if you order it, you probably won’t have room for any of Anita’s main dishes. The entree list is based on three stews, available by themselves (with rice and beans) or as enchilada fillings. There’s chile colorado (cubed beef and red chiles), a magical pork carne adovada (marinated for 24 hours in pureed red chiles) and chile verde (big, tender pieces of pork stewed in a perhaps excessively mild New Mexico green chile).

My favorite entree would be the Santa Fe enchilada, which is made with blue corn tortillas. Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, but I somehow find the blue kind taste better. It could also be--at least in this case--what they’re filled with: basic but pleasing refried beans, a fried egg and one of those stews. And it’s a mammoth portion that practically overflows a normal-sized casserole dish.

Anita’s also makes the New Mexico specialty known as the Indian or Navajo taco. It’s Navajo fry bread, a larger cousin of the sopaipilla, filled with refried beans and your usual beef taco filling.

Oddly, considering that New Mexico is a landlocked state, Anita’s makes a nearly perfect fish taco of fried catfish, wrapped in a soft flour tortilla filled with the fish, sour cream, cabbage and pico de gallo. The only real dessert here is a textbook flan topped with whipped cream and cinnamon.

I have to say a few of Anita’s dishes are not to my taste. The chile relleno has plenty of cheese filling but there’s far too much egg batter. The tamales, made for the restaurant by an outside purveyor, are heavy (actually topped with cheese) and soggy, though they are almost saved by being smothered in Anita’s delicious carne adovada.

And I have a small quarrel with the dinner salad. It has a nice dressing of sour cream and red chile powder, but the lettuce is shredded, making it something you’d want in a taco rather than in a salad bowl.

Anita’s may not be a truck stop with a view of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, but it does manage to be one of the most distinctive establishments in Orange County. So come bask in the glory of down-home New Mexico cooking . . . and be home in less than an hour.

BE THERE

Anita’s, 600 S. Harbor Blvd., Fullerton. (714) 525-0977. Open 9 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Mon-Thur; 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Fridays; 8:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturdays; 8:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Sundays. Beer and wine only. Parking in lot. All major cards. Takeout. Dinner for two, $18-$26.

What to Get: sopaipillas, Santa Fe enchilada, carne adovada, chile colorado, fish taco.