LOS ANGELES — Tex-Mex, maligned by outsiders, skeptics and snobs for decades, is often mislabeled as a counterfeit branch of Mexican cuisine, or dismissed as the regrettable fuel of American sports bars.
If you’ve been duped and accepted this as the truth — if you have, in other words, rebuffed the vast regional cuisine of South Texas — it’s not too late for you. Start with the ranchero chicken at Amácita in Culver City.
The chicken is tender, pulled apart not in soggy threads but substantial pieces, lightly dressed in a thin but tenacious ranchero sauce, with a dark, smoky paste of pecans and charred red poblanos hiding underneath it all. As you eat, the dish expands in every direction, drawing out the pleasures of a basic pile of chicken and tortillas.
Ranchero sauce is now the stuff of a thousand Instant Pot dinners and combination platters, so familiar it can be inconspicuous. But the light, chile-propelled tomato salsa is one of the mother sauces of the region. Vaqueros once ate something like it on cattle drives across the estancias of South Texas, through the Rio Grande Valley, where Tex-Mex, or Texas Mexican, has its roots.
The chef Josef Centeno, who runs a cluster of restaurants downtown, elaborates on the cuisine’s foundations with creativity and range, and the swagger of someone who grew up in San Antonio — home of the puffy taco — but now lives in Los Angeles. His ranchero sauce is weightless, sunny, almost floral.
Mr. Centeno often seems interested in simultaneously delivering and unraveling the cuisine’s most persistent clichés. Happy hour, known as super nacho hour at Amácita, is when melted cheese and iceberg lettuce really shine.
Diners at the bar and the covered curbside patio spoon up frosé from tiny glasses and efficiently put away puffy tacos with picadillo and wonderfully messy piles of nachos — properly layered with cheese and salsa so that no one ever pulls out a sad, bare chip, and you don’t have to feel guilty about taking one off the top with everything on it.
There is queso, in large quantities, and on nearly every table, as if drawn from an eternal spring of warm, liquid cheese that runs below Los Angeles. The vegan version, made with roasted cashew nuts, isn’t technically queso, and can’t compete with the slick of Velveeta, but the creamy, blitzed mixture is built with care, on a foundation of charred onion, chiles and garlic.
Mr. Centeno’s great-grandmother, for whom his more traditional Tex-Mex restaurant Bar Amá was named, left Mexico for Texas, and once made a living frying tacos. There are a couple of these dorados on the menu. But Mr. Centeno’s most exciting dishes, though often less familiar, appear at dinnertime, after happy hour is over.
They require your attention, and not only because they’re delicious. These are the dishes that illuminate the joys of Tex-Mex as a cuisine that thrived in what was once northern Mexico — highly adaptable ranch cooking that made the most out of local ingredients in combination with flour tortillas, long-simmered stews and cheap cuts made just a little more deluxe by the kiss of an open grill.
In Los Angeles, those local ingredients happen to be different. The kitchen grills hamachi collars so that the fat renders and runs through the meat, the skin is crisp, and the bits closest to the bone are sticky and almost gelatinous.
The cut feels so luxurious with pickles, salsa, dressed herbs and a stack of soft flour tortillas that it may actually cause tension at the table over who will get to pick the bones clean. You could go for this dish alone.
But where’s the fun in that? A bowl of fresh, juicy boiled peanuts goes particularly well with drinks. These are slippery and white inside their soft shells, which are covered in chiles, lime juice and herbs. And though you’re instructed to eat them “just like edamame,” be warned, not discouraged, that biting into the shells may send a slightly obscene squirt across the table.
Maybe pomegranate seeds and queso fresco are overused as a colorful garnish, I thought on my most recent visit, which happened to be my fourth — and yes, that is more visits than are strictly necessary to write a review.
But later, it became clear that the restaurant wasn’t stuck in any kind of rut. The kitchen was just really excited about pomegranates that week.
A Tex-Mex restaurant might seem like an unlikely way to mark the microseasons in Los Angeles, but you could do it at Amácita. Since opening in July, the restaurant has changed its menu constantly alongside the availability of produce in Southern California, incorporating slender, sweet okra, the season’s first pomegranates, the season’s last peaches, jujubes and delicata squash, recalibrating salsas and swapping core ingredients.
If you loved Tex-Mex already, and you didn’t need any convincing, maybe this kind of range won’t come as a surprise. Of course Mr. Centeno’s food, which celebrates the richness and mutability of what began as a border cuisine, is thriving in Los Angeles, a landscape that is constantly shifting to accommodate more flavors, even as it changes them all in the process.
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