Teresita's Restaurant

Parking: On Site
Laid Back Casual, Family Friendly All Ages

I'm eating a glorious dish of pork ribs in chile negro. It's Mexican, but I have never tasted anything like it before, not even in Mexico.

The sauce for these remarkable costillas (ribs) is dark and sweet, like mole, but not as redolent of fruit, nuts and sesame. It owes its color to dark chocolate and the long, slim, black pasilla negro chile.

Even more remarkable, I am eating this dish right here, in Los Angeles, where Mexican food is so often ordinary and disappointing.

The place is Teresita's Family Restaurant in East Los Angeles, a longtime hangout for politicos and police, as well as for people from the neighborhood who know how good the food is.

You don't go to Teresita's for obscure, regional Mexican dishes, but for familiar food prepared exceptionally well. It's homey and comfortable, like a big coffee shop. There's a painting of Don Quixote on one wall, a Mexican village scene on another. But decorations aren't important. It's the food that counts.

Teresitas does a smart thing. Rather than trying to serve everything every day, it allots one day a week to its very best dishes, such as the costillas -- the full name is costillas de puerco en chile negro. That way, the kitchen can concentrate on doing a superlative job, and there's always something different to eat. Customers divide into groupies who come when their favorite dish is on hand: Wednesday for the costillas, Tuesday for albondigas and Thursday for mole poblano.

Teresitas was little more than a taco shack when the Hernandez family opened it in 1983. Teresa Hernandez Campos did the cooking, and her kids came after school to help. Hernandez, who was born in Zacatecas, is still in the kitchen, and son Antonio runs the dining room. He's a friendly guy who walks from table to table to see how you like the food and sometimes bring samples of a dish.

Everything I have eaten here has been top-notch, even the beans and rice. In Mexican restaurants, if these are good, it's a sign that the rest of the food is likely to be superior. The beans are frijoles rancheros, boiled beans seasoned with tomato, onion, chile, vinegar and oregano. The rice is fried until toasted, then cooked with chicken broth.

Rice comes on the side with albondigas or caldo de pollo (chicken soup). In Southern California Mexican restaurants of the more authentic stripe, the custom is to stir a spoonful into the soup, then brighten it up with splashes of lime juice and salsa.

The salsas here are wonderful. There are three on the table -- a very hot roasted red chile salsa, a green chile salsa and a genuine salsa borracha (drunken sauce), tangy with beer, and irresistible with the freshly made chips. You can have caldo de pollo any day, but albondigas soup is reserved for Tuesday. And you have a choice: beef or chicken. The chicken albondigas are terrific -- lovely, light meatballs fluffed out with rice, floating in freshly made chicken broth along with carrot, potato, zucchini and chayote chunks.

Most Mexican restaurants serve chilaquiles -- fried tortilla chips in chile sauce -- but the best are at Teresitas. Some places let the tortillas stand in the sauce until mushy. Here, the sauce goes on just before serving, and the tortillas stay so crisp that you can pick them up as if they were chips with dip.

On Thursdays, the mole poblano is a not-too-sweet version based on mole paste that family members bring directly from Puebla. I went one Friday just to get espinazo con nopales (pork spine and nopal cactus in red chile sauce). It's not a common dish here, and Teresitas does an excellent job with it. The meat is tender and easy to extract from the bones -- a pleasant surprise, because the last time I had this dish in Mexico, the bones were almost impossible to manage. The chile sauce has a nice bite without being overly hot. And the restaurant insists on fresh cactus for the espinazo. (In other dishes, the kitchen will use canned nopal, if fresh ones are in short supply.)

But beware the pork chile verde. The menu says the sauce is hot, but not since a recent incendiary meal in northern Thailand have I tasted anything so painfully spicy.

The antidote is to drink something cool, and Teresitas has a standout jamaica. Berry-like and acidic, made by soaking the dried flowers of a variety of hibiscus, it is a gorgeous dark red drink sweetened with very little sugar. Flecks of ground cinnamon are apparent in horchata, a creamy, sweet drink based on ground rice. There's no limeade, although I spotted a Mexican lime tree in the parking lot. No margaritas either, but beer and wine are available.

For dessert, skip the flan. It looks like a miniature volcano with a puff of cinnamon-sprinkled whipped cream covering the top like a cloud. The presentation is fun, but the flan is made from a mix. Instead, try the arroz con leche (rice pudding), studded with raisins and spiced with cinnamon. The pudding is usually served cold, and that's fine. But one day, it came to the table fresh and warm from the stove, the sort of comfort food you would expect when Mom is working in the kitchen.

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