Adventures in Mexican Cooking

When I saw that El Emperador Maya’s sign had been replaced by one that reads “Babita,” I felt more than a little twinge of disappointment. I’ll miss El Emperador’s bright, aggressive seasonings and garlic-laden citrus marinades. Its refined Yucatecan dishes were a revelation to someone like me who grew up eating taco combination plates and tamale pie.

Fortunately, Babita still serves cochinita pibil and a few other beloved Yucatecan dishes. But the best reason to go there now is for chef Roberto Berrelleza’s stylish update of Mexican cooking.

At first look, his menu seems to ride the Nuevo Latino wave, in the vein of Hugo Molina or the late Mi Familia. For instance, epazote-crusted snapper comes with a mango-lime relish. Yet other items, such as the fried banana with Mexican crema drizzled with balsamic vinegar, simply update traditional Mexican dishes.

My first time at Babita, I ordered the most exotic-sounding appetizer, gueritos rellenos. It proved a mesmerizingly tasty plate of small, mild yellow chiles stuffed with finely cut salmon ceviche, sitting in a “strawberry” sauce that was faintly tart and only vaguely fruity.

A couple of bites in, I had a sort of “Babette’s Feast” epiphany: I’d eaten this very dish several years before at the long-closed La Moderna in Whittier. Its patrons were always amazed by the flair of the house specialties served alongside burrito and nacho plates.

My waitress at Babita told me her father, Robert Berrelleza, had indeed been the chef-owner of La Moderna, and that cooking had always been his passion. In the 26 or so years Berrelleza has made his living in the restaurant business, La Moderna was actually the first place where he ever cooked. His other jobs had always been front-of-the-house positions, often at high-end places such as Chez Sateau and the Brown Derby.

For my main course, I ignored the menu and tried the daily special, a very traditional chiles en nogada. This dish, invented by Puebla nuns to celebrate Mexico’s independence, is incredibly time-consuming to make. I figured that any chef willing to produce it must be fanatically dedicated.

My hunch was justified when a huge stuffed pepper arrived, luxuriously filled with a savory-sweet mix of finely minced meat, fresh and dry fruits and, if you can imagine, hand-peeled nuts. The pepper was set off by a whisper-light film of untraditional goat cheese sauce and sprinkled with very traditional pomegranate seeds.

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Another time I brought along a critical crew of El Emperador fans. We took our places in the candle-lit front dining room of the neat little house that holds the restaurant. Our major problem was narrowing down what to order.

We shared fried calamari strips with an only slightly tingly habanero dip. It was a rich dish, fine for sharing but a bit heavy for an individual appetizer, I thought. More interesting was ceviche sope witusi, a fragile cup of fried masa holding a mince of sharp, lemony marinated snapper and carrots cut as fine as angel hair.

As we passed around plates during the meal, the mixote (lamb shank, dry-marinated in a rugged paste of dried ground chiles and steamed in beer) was picked clean. No trace remained of the deep maroon chipotle-garlic and tequila sauce on the chicken with shrimp Elba.

And the New York steak and shrimp Maviri, with a brandy-pumpkin seed sauce reminiscent of the complex moles of Oaxaca, had some of us resorting to finger licking. The shrimp was perfect, cooked barely past translucent, although the steak could have used a hotter grill.

The achiote-infused pork (cochinita pibil) had been roasted to a buttery tenderness in banana leaves and was as good as we remembered it from El Emperador Maya’s days. The only complaint from our table was about camarones Topolobampo. Its scorching habanero sauce was a little too hot for everyone except, of course, the chile-head who’d ordered it.

Berrelleza shows off his personal style with homey desserts like rice pudding with a crunchy bru^leed top, a flan ringed with mango (barely coated with creme anglaise) and a wine-poached pear on ice cream.

Fortunately for us, he’s behind the stoves and no longer in the front of the house.

BE THERE

Babita, 1823 S. San Gabriel Blvd., San Gabriel, (626) 288-7265. Lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; dinner, 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday through Sunday; closed Monday. Beer and wine. Street parking. Visa and MasterCard. Dinner for two $23 to $42.

What to Get: gueritos rellenos, ceviche sope witusi, cochinita pibil, chicken with shrimp Elba, mixote, flan.