The Road to Oaxaca

I’d driven past El Texate hundreds of times without ever noticing it. It’s on a stretch of Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica that happens to be the shortest route from the freeway to Main Street and the south beaches. So there’s a lot of traffic around El Texate, but most of it has other things very much on its mind.

Location, location, location, not.

El Texate (pronounced el teh-HAH-tay) is not a Main Street sort of place. “Funky” is the word for it; there are homely Mexican tchotchkes scattered around, and the walls are partly covered with plywood rectangles painted bright red in an unconvincing imitation of brick. Besides the dining room, the place consists of a bar with two TV sets and a slightly cramped patio. It wasn’t until my third visit that I discovered the tiny parking lot a little beyond the patio.

But there’s more to El Texate than you might think. The bar is full-license, so it serves tequila as well as beer. The menu lists Porfirio and a dozen other premium tequilas.

It was the first Oaxacan restaurant to open west of downtown, and it has quite a different take on the cuisine than, say, Monte Alban in West L.A. It doesn’t much use raisins or olives or sweet spices like cinnamon, and its food is altogether less sweet.

Clayuda, a sort of pizza made from a big, leathery corn tortilla, is topped with all sorts of stuff: tomatoes, onions, cheese, black beans, an avocado and your choice of cecina (a thin slice of pork) or tasajo (beef). It gets a sweet anise-like flavor from a fresh herb called hoja santa. The flavor of hoja santa also dominates memelas (thick little tortillas topped with black bean paste) and empanadas (griddled tortilla turnovers filled with kidneys or brains and your choice of mole sauce--the kidneys have a good strong kidney flavor; a few bits may be tough and dry).

Memelas appear along with four less distinguished snacks--molotes (pastry cornets filled with mashed potatoes and chorizo), quesadillas, taquitos and chalupas--in an appetizer for four called sonbreto. Everything’s sprinkled with black beans and cheese and served on a corny sombrero-shaped plate, with good crema and guacamole in the crown. Better than either the taquitos or the chalupas are mulitas, in effect a pair of tacos constructed of two tortillas each, sandwich-style, with a thick, dark red, moderately hot sauce.

Oaxaca is famous for its moles, rich sauces of ground nuts and other ingredients. Not all of the moles on El Texate’s menu are strongly distinctive. Mole amarillo, beef in a mildly hot red-orange sauce with a hint of cumin and smoke, is disconcertingly similar to the segueso de puerco, pork in guajillo pepper sauce. But pipian, based on ground pumpkin seeds, makes a mellow sauce for chicken, and this version includes faintly sweet chunks of baby cactus.

A lot of the things El Texate does best involve chicken. The most distinctive of the moles is chicken in mole negro, a jet-black sauce of pasilla peppers and chocolate--the only mole negro I’ve had in a restaurant that didn’t strike me as excessively sweet. Pollo en mezcal is chicken cooked almost to a paste in a dark red sauce with concentrated bricky pepper flavor. And the chicken quesadilla is clearly made with flavorful, old-fashioned boiled chicken, as well as good tangy cheese.

Barbacoa de chivo is a rather decorous stewed goat, meaty but not very goaty. Salsa de chorizo is Oaxacan-style chorizo sausage (in links the size of golf balls) in a rather tomatoey red sauce, just a bit hot, that grows on you.

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Dessert is not a specialty here. The menu lists the corn pudding nicuatole, but it never seems to be available. There’s a rubbery flan and a nice, rather silly frio frito--a ball of vanilla ice cream fried in a sort of Rice Krispies crust.

On my first visit, the waiter asked what I wanted to drink and I idly said lemonade. He hesitated a moment before writing it down, possibly because lemonade isn’t on the menu, but the kitchen apparently improvised. What I got was the best limeade I can remember. The jamaica, made from a hibiscus blossoms, has a very good, berry-like flavor.

All the fruit drinks are great. In fact, until I hear that they have nicuatole, I’m going to order fruit juice for dessert, or one of the tropical fruit margaritas.

BE THERE

El Texate, 316 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica. (310) 399-1115. Open 8 a.m.-10:30 p.m. daily. Full bar. Tiny parking lot in rear, street parking. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, $20.50-$43.50.

What to Get: clayuda, sonbreto, salsa de chorizo, pollo en mezcal, mole negro, mole pipian, frito frio, margaritas.