Cooking Fire

Today I went to La Polar, the famous bar that sells birria — spiced, stewed goat meat.

This was the first Mexican dish I fell in love with when I lived in LA. I would hop the bus to the subway, on into downtown. There, Los Angeles was a different city. It wasn’t the not-quite-urban sprawl of the Westside, Westwood, or Marina Del Rey where I worked and lived. This was a true city, in many ways, a foreign city.

In downtown LA, stores blast Latin music, all brass, accordion, and bass-boost speakers. In the center is Grand Street market. Like you find in China or Mexico, it is a covered block, filled with produce, meat, fish, and stands for prepared meals and snacks.

I would wander alone, buy a sack of tomatoes or salmon for amazing prices, and never fail to crowd in to order a “Torta de Birria.” The sign on the stand said goat — and I guess I was drawn in by that and the crowd of people always there.

After aching to go for a long time, today I made Carlos bring me to eat at La Polar, hands down the most famous birria in the city. It is served in tacos, or in a soup — consome de birria, with what must have been a full pound of meat of various types, fatty cuts, diaphragm, ribs, all stewed and tender to the point of falling apart.

The place was packed on this Friday afternoon, the floor of the room filled with mariachi-style roving guitars. The place is exaggeratedly male — I looked around for a single women-only table. There were none.

La Polar is, strictly speaking, a cantina: a bar. It is a decidedly upscale cantina, however, with food prices close to that of what you would pay in a restaurant in the U.S. However, as a cantina, there is still a stigma against women entering alone, a taboo most Mexican women still follow. This makes it a place perfect for illicit meetings — or at the very least covert flirting: a husband can be assured never to run into his wife, or her friends, unless of course she is there with a man.

There were several men-only tables. The majority, however, consisted of older men who appeared to have taken off for lunch, bringing younger professional women with them. The air was thick with the not-too-romantic atmosphere of office romance.

The food, however, was excellent. We ordered a plate of avocadoes to accompany the meat. The birria itself was served in a hot broth, flavored with chili and onions. There was a fork and spoon, but this is not an easy meal to eat and keep clean. I started with little spoonfuls of broth, picking up meat with a fork. Before long, I joined the rest of the room, and dug in with hands and fingers, taking the meat off the bones, filling a tortilla with dripping meat and avocado, and enjoying the meal immensely. By the end, my hands were a stained, sticky, and I had accumulated a pile of napkins at my side — a perfect dinner.

LA POLAR: Guillermo Prieto 129, esquina Melchor Ocampo, Colonia San Rafael Tel. (55) 5546-5066

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 25th, 2005 at 10:08 am and is filed under Restaurants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.