El Rincón Chilango in Santa Ana is Orange County's best re-creation of Mexico City, and not just because the street-side restaurant features the megalopolis' iconic Angel of Independence statue as its logo nor because its marquee screams "100% D.F." The eatery's appropriation of the word chilango—a slur on Mexico City residents—gives you some insight into the place: this is real regional pride. The menu is as sprawling as the city's Metro, with entrées painted across windows, hanging from wooden signs or scrawled on paper taped to the brightly colored, tiled walls. And El Rincón Chilango operates on 17th Street, meaning the stink of hot asphalt, exhaust and sirens (from the nearby fire department) give this place that same chaotic charm that characterizes the world's largest urban region.
You'll find the standards of any Mexican diner—tacos, enchiladas and burritos—but they're stuffed with such unorthodox ingredients as ham, hot dogs and cactus, greasy combinations that make sense nowhere except your mouth. The Rincón Chilango's cooks continue their home burb's mishmash diet by transforming tortas into something called a pambaso, a brick-sized bread roll dunked in salsa, then griddled until it achieves a crackly, fiery intensity. They also grill up chilango-style hamburgers, a bizarre hybrid that sandwiches Mexican meat cuts—like carne asada, carnitas, even beef tongue—between a toasted bun. Then comes a slab of moist Mexican cheese, a lettuce leaf, and a ladling of Thousand Island dressing and mayonnaise—the Mexican rancho meets the SoCal carhop.
Other Mexico City favorites are available: wonderful potato tacos with the shells fried until they shine like the Stanley Cup; supersyrupy sodas such as Jarritos and Boing; and the tlacoyo, a foot-long gordita bloated with earthy bright-yellow fava beans and splattered with diced onions and a tangy green salsa on the outside—the heartiest meal you'll eat until Thanksgiving.
But El Rincón Chilango's tastiest tweaking of the Mexican food canon is the quesadilla. It doesn't achieve the simultaneous crispiness and gooiness that Southern Californians expect from their quesadillas, but is instead lightly fried and melted with two kinds of cheese, chunky Oaxacan quesillo and a buttery variety that's like a Latino Velveeta. Even better, however, are the fillings: the stringy chicken-stew tinga, slightly sweet squash flowers or huitlacoche, a bitter, beautiful black plant that most English-language Mexican cookbooks diplomatically translate as "corn smut" but is, in actuality, a parasitic fungus. Continue the circle of life for the huitlacoche, por favor, and dig in.
—Gustavo Arellano EL RINCÓN CHILANGO, 1133 W. 17TH ST., SANTA ANA, (714) 836-5096.
