Chicharrón reimagined into a crisp-soft pinwheel of pork belly. Duck albondigas permeated with smokiness from chipotle and bacon. Lamb neck, its meat as yielding as pot roast, previously steamed in tamales and currently fashioned as chile-stained barbacoa set over fragrant consommé.
Broken Spanish, Ray Garcia’s modern Mexican groundbreaker, has been reborn, with some of its signatures intact. Plenty, too, feels fresh, including a shift in identity: What was once an upscale nerve center for Garcia’s ambitions has been transformed into something closer to a neighborhood restaurant. The soul of the enterprise remains, but a more relatively midscale approach feels timely and welcome.
When Garcia opened the restaurant downtown in 2015, he innovated an expression of Alta California cuisine that felt wonderfully specific to Los Angeles. His approach grafted the Mexican staples of his East L.A. childhood with techniques gleaned from years in Euro-centric fine dining. His penchant for snout-to-tail butchery — as well as his lyric low-food-chain dishes like dimpled chochoyotes in broth scented with green garlic and pasilla chiles, or lemony chiles rellenos stuffed with potato and kale — helped define the personal-narrative cooking that reshaped our powerhouse culinary culture last decade.
Broken Spanish was located across from L.A. Live, its business driven by customers flocking to what was then known as the Staples Center for events. The pandemic wiped out its built-in audience. Garcia was forced to close in August 2020.
He stayed busy with projects like Qué Bárbaro in DTLA’s Level 8 complex, inspired by South American grilling traditions, and Asterid in Walt Disney Concert Hall, which closed over the summer, and briefly the Rose Venice. While I was always happy to see Garcia’s name pop up in the mix, to me these efforts never quite met the level of individualism that had made Broken Spanish so compelling and significant.
Maybe Garcia knew it too. He’d been looking for a space to relaunch his marquee restaurant. When a promising lead fell through last year, he decided to dial back the ambition: Rather than a full-throttled fine-dining reboot, he’d move into a steep-roofed building in Culver City where previous tenants included Jason Neroni’s Best Bet pizzeria, Roy Choi’s A-Frame and, in the beginning, an IHOP. Garcia tacked the word “Comedor” onto the name, a word meaning “diner” or “cafeteria” and an implied promise that he’d keep working toward a grander Broken Spanish.
Gratifyingly, nothing about this adaptation has the air of an intermediary stop. Garcia is present, physically at the kitchen window directing his chefs every night, and also spiritually. In many dishes I taste the initial excitement and electricity I remember from Broken Spanish a decade ago.
Whether you’re reacquainting yourself with his style or experiencing it for the first time, jump in with an order of refried lentils.
They’re part of the original repertoire, a playful take on refritos involving a legume that isn’t the more traditional pinto or black bean. The lentils cook with aromatics and extra fistfuls of epazote, its feral herbaceous qualities a flavor that Garcia described to me in a phone interview as “delicious gasoline.” Serrano and onion add heat and depth during frying. Just before serving, cooks beat quesillo into the already creamy mash. When the mass nearly resembles a cheese pull, it’s done.
The result is remarkably light, almost fluffy. Is that a trace of lard? No, they’re vegetarian. It’s my memory playing tricks. I used to order the lentils at the first Broken Spanish with a side of whipped carnitas fat I’d spread first over the just-made tortillas. That’s been cut from the menu, rightly. The lentils are opulent and complete as they are — and, as an example of menu pricing, at $14 seem appropriate for the care and quality.
And speaking of tortillas: Pressed by hand from blue-corn masa, they reach the senses as delicate and earthy sweet. Keep a basket of them around for swiping through the chipotle salsa that envelops the duck albondigas, or the toasty-nutty mole almendrado coating chicken thighs, or the thrillingly gamy consommé served with the long-simmered lamb neck.
Garcia’s finest new dishes underscore his talent for complexity that bypasses showiness. Rounds of roasted purple sweet potatoes arrive mounded with a mixture of salsa macha and butter, and liberally flecked with chives. In the collision of spice, sharpness and seedy crunch, and in the sponging way potatoes soak up butter, the intensity never seems like too much. Smoked tuna, in a flauta also rolled with smoothly melting queso Chihuahua, brings to mind the smoky shredded marlin served in tacos at stands across Ensenada. Hoja santa and fennel bring a subtle licorice perfume to a weightless spin on fideo verde, finished with avocado slices and a snow flurry of Parmesan.
The few ideas that came up short — nondescript chicken enchiladas with feta and tomatillo salsa, a baked vegetable tamal that leaned cakey, a filet of rainbow trout dressed a little too austerely with salsa verde — didn’t light up with the same exclamation marks that punctuate everything else landing on the table.
Nothing a shot of mezcal with the pucker of sour apple can’t blot out. The restaurant has quietly amassed an astounding selection of agave and related spirits, in part, Garcia told me, because Broken Spanish was able to acquire the huge inventory of now-closed Petty Cash Taqueria (which also was part of the Sprout LA restaurant group. The small bar displays only a fraction of their stock, and the list of mezcals in particular is already overwhelming.
You need only to wave for help, and bartender Genaro Garcia steps out from behind his post to ask you about flavors and styles and a price range you prefer, and then he returns holding something rare from a small family distillery with a great story he probably knows by heart.
If you can’t catch every detail he’s sharing, it’s likely from the din I’ve noticed increasing exponentially with every dinner since Broken Spanish Comedor opened in October. I don’t really mind. It’s fantastic to see Garcia return to form and connect in kind with diners. Some restaurants are finite expressions of their time and place. They close, they reopen with surprise, and yet they can’t quite leap to where the culture has raced ahead. This one does.
Sheer deliciousness is eternally relevant. An informal room and scaled-back menu don’t diminish Garcia’s intents with Broken Spanish. They make them easier to appreciate.
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