Though I’m a lifelong lover of chilaquiles, I have yet to scratch the surface of the depth and breadth of styles offered throughout Mexico. Jimmy Shaw, the Mexico City native who opened Loteria Grill in Los Angeles, once told The Times’ Steve Lopez that “there are as many chilaquiles recipes as there are homes in Mexico.” Shaw made his with thick tortilla chips tossed in a pan with salsa verde and garnished with plenty of crema.
You might find chilaquiles rojo in Guadalajara with chips simmered in an earthy sauce made from tomatoes and chiles. Or mountains of chips covered in mole or salsa fortified with chile pasilla in Oaxaca. In Los Angeles, they’re everywhere, served alongside eggs or as a hearty filling in countless tortas.
When writer and Mexican cuisine expert Bill Esparza says a restaurant serves the best chilaquiles in the city, you pay attention.
I bookmarked Taquearte after Esparza’s Eater article on its excellent chilaquiles. And it was Food manager Laurie Ochoa‘s inclusion of the restaurant in our 101 Best Tacos guide (and her mom’s love of the chilaquiles) that brought me to a Pico Rivera strip mall on a recent Friday afternoon in search of tacos campechanos and the chilaquiles that would forever alter how I feel about totopos and salsa.
It was just shy of 2 p.m., and the dining room, filled with a mix of cafe chairs and picnic-style bench seating, was still bustling. Taquearte is a daytime operation that closes at 4 p.m., but there tends to be a line until someone locks the front door. On the walls, black-and-white printouts of newspaper articles, magazines and book pages looked like they were plucked from a Pinterest board on scrapbooking.
I ordered the chilaquiles verdes picositos with over-easy eggs and New York steak, then attempted to find a seat. The restaurant shares real estate with Duran’s Bakery, and when it’s busy (always), diners move through the space, looking longingly at the pastry case filled with conchas, barquillo and niño envuelto on their way out to the patio. On days when the Taquearte line stretches into the parking lot, the smell — and sight — of the pan dulce may be too much to bear, and you’ll wind up with shards of orejas on your shirt before you order breakfast.
But on this first visit, the chilaquiles arrived within minutes. The chips were barely visible under an avalanche of green sauce, crumbled cheese, zigzags of crema, two fried eggs and a strip of steak that dangled over opposite sides of the bowl. I moved the eggs and steak aside, then plunged a fork into the mountain of chips. The tang of the sauce was eye-widening and immediate, crackling with the bright, citrusy charge of tomatillos and serrano chiles. A few bites in, the guacachile announced itself in rippling waves of heat.
Scattered over the top were generous pebbles of queso panela, mild, milky and squeaky like halloumi. The chips beneath were noticeably thin, delicate but sturdy enough to retain their crunch. They hovered in a magical state of limbo between wet and dry, crisp and wilted.
At Taquearte, owners Monica Quinto and Anyelo Farfán are championing a style of chilaquiles specific to their childhoods in Mexico City.
“I grew up with my mom’s chilaquiles recipe,” said Quinto during a recent call. “And the queso panela is definitely a Mexico City thing.”
The green sauce is Quinto’s mother’s recipe, while the rojos comes from Farfán’s family. It’s a tomatoey salsa punched up with red chile serrano, and guacachile if you order it spicy. Though the menu doesn’t advertise it, you can go red and green halfsies with the chilaquiles divorciados.
But it wasn’t just the Mexico City-style chilaquiles Quinto and Farfán were hoping to bring to Los Angeles.
“Most of the tacos here are small,” Farfán said, referencing the Tijuana-style tacos that dominate Los Angeles restaurants, trucks and stands. “There wasn’t a place that makes really big tacos like in Mexico City. That was the whole idea of what we wanted to do.”
After noon, the kitchen flat top is crowded with hunks of pork chop, bistec, chopped chorizo, costilla and chicken. The meat is slid onto a vast corn tortilla and topped with grilled nopales, onions and boulders of fried potato that turn creamy and spreadable. If you’re protein-maxing, order a campechano, which comes with chorizo and a second meat. Then add some cheese. The triple decker taco boasts chorizo on the bottom, a half-melted, half-crunchy cheese skirt, perhaps a grilled pork chop, and the usual potato and vegetables. It will seem impossible to grasp in your hands, but you’ll manage.
Whatever you order, it will be served with a wooden plank carrying four bowls of red, green, black and orange salsas. The red is a salsa de pepino, fruity with cucumber and chile de arbol. The salsa macha is an oily, toasty condiment pasty with peanuts and sesame seeds. There are seven roasted, charred and crushed chiles in the orange salsa. And the hottest of the bunch, the green, is a fiery combination of both jalapeños and green habaneros.
When you place your order, make sure there is no shortage of things on the table to dress with the salsas. Maybe start with the chicharrón de queso, a big, curved sail of cheese melted until crispy. You break off shards of the cheese and add heaping spoonfuls of the salsas. If you’ve got enough Lactaid in your pocket, you may want to think about the mega queca, a gargantuan quesadilla made with a thick corn tortilla folded over about a half an inch of melted cheese and sautéed mushrooms.
The best time to visit is just before noon, when you can still order one of the restaurant’s molletes, then loop around back in line for the tacos. The restaurant sources its birotes from Duran’s to make the open-face, bean and cheese-smeared breakfast sandwiches popular throughout Mexico. At Taquearte, the split rolls are slathered with refried beans and chorizo, then blanketed in a single layer of mottled cheese. While some molletes are made with crusty rolls, these birotes are so soft and fresh, they border on squishy. Depending on how you spent your childhood afternoons, it may remind you of a slightly underbaked French bread pizza. Once you try it, you’ll never show up past noon again. And whatever time you visit, L.A.’s best chilaquiles will be waiting.
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