Cemitas Poblanas

Photo by Matt OttoFor sweet Oaxacan-style mole in this county, you want Fullerton's El Fortín. If you want to sweat over the radioactively sour Sinaloan shrimp dish known as aguachile, then you want Mariscos Licenciado #2 in Anaheim. And about every third Santa Ana restaurant boils the greasy carnitas of Uruapán, Michoacán, the world's carnitas capital and ancestral hometown of many Santa Anans.

But foodies aching for the bulky, gently spiced pleasures of the central Mexican state of Puebla are limited to but one local outlet: Cemitas Poblanas, a rickety lunch truck that shudders to a halt every morning outside a recently opened Northgate Supermarket in Santa Ana. Formality is a rumor here, as are utensils, seating and English. But the diners don't worry about such niceties, and neither will you after partaking of two foodstuffs so fanciful and wondrous their origins seem better explained by the Chariots of the Gods than a Diana Kennedy cookbook.

Primary amongst Cemitas Poblanas' offerings is the namesake cemita, an epic sandwich that most befuddled food critics liken to a torta. This is an inane comparison: a cemita is to a torta as a blue whale is to a snail darter. Constructing the mass is an engineering venture involving the same complexity that Puebla's pre-Columbian inhabitants faced in building their pyramids. The base consists of a toasted sesame-speckled bread roll, split in half with each side hollowed out; it's remarkably eggy, like a Mesoamerican challah. Then come the layers: avocado slices, a slab of wet panela cheese, creamy quesillo shavings, caramelized onions, some bitter herbs and enough meat chunks of your choice to pay for a Texan cattle baron's Cadillac. Pickled jalapeños are available, but the weathered old lady who lords over Cemitas Poblanas will roll her eyes if you request this zesty cliché. She'll instead recommend a roasted chipotle pepper; the sweet, smoky chile's incipient fire provides a marvelous contrast to the other ingredients' savor.

Tacos, tortas and burritos are also available at Cemitas Poblanas, along with the oily, elongated soft tostadas called memelas. But perhaps the strangest offering at Cemitas Poblanas, if not all of Mexican Orange County, is something called the taco árabe. It's really a mestizo version of a pita sandwich: a toasted pita bread rolled like a burrito and packed with marinated, charred pork sluiced in a curiously sweet salsa. But a taco árabe is a delicious sociological lesson, the legacy of thousands of Middle Easterners who moved to Puebla during the early 20th century. The spit-roasted pork used in the taco árabe exhibits the kind of succulence you'll find in the best Middle Eastern shawarmas; the salsa's spice is uniquely Mexican.

The taco árabe is almost iconographic, something we ought to stitch onto the county flag: a product of migration out of the Holy Land and into the hills ringing the Valley of Mexico, now served from a truck, itself a symbol of mobility in the new homeland of Mexicans, Asians, Europeans and Africans: Santa Ana, California.

Cemitas Poblanas, on the corner of Cubbon and Sycamore Sts., Santa Ana.

For more food fun, including Orange County's best damn dining guide and the weekly racist Mexican restaurant logo, visit www.ocweekly.com/food.

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