Taco Maria

101 Best restaurants of Los Angeles

@latimes

"#3 Carlos Salgado’s cooking is intellectual, syncretic and modernist, bound up in personal history, heritage and years of fine-dining training. You can see these disparate forces at work on the Taco Maria lunch menu, when you can try Salgado’s cooking a la carte; recently there was aguachile made with Hokkaido scallops; wood-fired pork cheek glazed in dark sugar; and ancho-almond mole draped over Jidori chicken. Salgado’s culinary vision is most fully expressed at dinner, when the restaurant switches to a taco-centric, four-course tasting-menu format. In the winter, dinner might begin with Tahitian butternut squash served with nuts and seeds ground into a nutty sikil p’ak dip, or mole de cacahuate drizzled over skirt steak. Summer may bring on the tocino taco, slivers of pork belly glazed in piloncillo, heaped with slices of stone fruit. For dessert, perhaps there’s a shot of spiced Mexican chocolate. Ingredients are sometimes plated over tortillas whose corn has been as judiciously sourced as the most expensive seafood or wine in the city. Salgado’s cooking is helping build a new language for the way we think and talk about Mexican cooking in California, and he’s doing it out of a tiny kitchen inside an open-air shopping center in Costa Mesa. It’s a wildly impressive feat. Beer and wine. Mall lot parking. Credit cards accepted."

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