This restaurant has a taco for every diet (restriction)

Tacos at Pablito’s World

Pablito’s World is a place for taco lovers on the keto diet. The new Chinatown mini foodcourt houses four concepts from Pablito’s Tacos founder Danny Rodriguez. The digital menu lists food from Pablito’s Tacos, the stand turned food trucks turned bricks-and-mortar restaurant touting Tijuana-style Peruvian tacos; Pablito’s Pizza, offering pies topped with everything from lomo saltado to chile relleno; Pablito’s Chicken, a Peruvian rotisserie chicken restaurant with ceviches and saltados; and Mikaza Express, a bento box sushi spinoff of Rodriguez’s now-closed Nikkei-cuisine restaurant. You make your selections on a digital kiosk.

I stuck to the tacos but even then, there were decisions to be made. The lomo saltado taco looks good. But wait. Do I want it on one of the handmade corn tortillas, keto-style (for the uninitiated, the keto diet is a low-carb, high-fat diet, so corn and flour are no-nos) or protein-stye?

“About four years ago, I was opening in places like Studio City and Sherman Oaks, and so many people would come by and say, ‘Oh my God, I love your tacos but I can’t have the tortillas,” Rodriguez said on a recent call. “They’re on the keto diet or this diet or that diet. So I said OK, let’s start creating some options.”

About 18 minutes after I initially walked in, I decided on a pastor taco, an asada keto taco and a lomo saltado taco, protein-style. The original corn tortilla is thicker than most, made from La Jolla Tortilleria masa that’s delivered daily. If you visit the Circus Liquor Pablitos’, your pastor will be cooked on the trompo. In Chinatown, it’s grilled over mesquite out back. That wood imparts a bit of smoke to the meat, already flavored with dried guajillo peppers and pineapple and Peruvian panca chile paste.

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The lomo saltado was nestled in a leaf of butter lettuce, the strips of steak and sauteed onions spilling over the edges. It’s close to other lomo saltados you may find around town, seasoned with soy sauce and vinegar, crowded with onions and soft wedges of tomato. It works as a lettuce wrap, though I’ll stick with the corn tortilla next time for a little less drippage.

The keto taco is by no means “authentic” or “traditional” in any sense of either word, but that’s kind of the point of Pablito’s. The wrap is made using melted Monterey Jack cheese that’s been cooked directly on the flat-top until the surface crisps up but stays pliable enough to cradle a filling. It was a decadent cheese bomb full of mesquite-grilled asada. It does not taste like a tortilla. It tastes like you’re eating a pile of melted, crispy cheese. You can add a couple of drops of “crack sauce,” a pale green condiment made from cilantro, jalapeño and huacatay, or you can just eat your cheese taco as is, and marvel or gawk at this keto-diet-friendly interpretation of a tortilla.

Wedge salad at the Barish

The wedge salad from the Barish restaurant in Hollywood.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)

I don’t typically order the steak. At a steakhouse, I prefer the sides, the ambiance and the ice-cold martinis. Meat enthusiasts may feel differently, and I respect that, but a great steakhouse is made great by glasses of shrimp cocktail, teeming ramekins of creamed spinach and, hopefully, a good slice of cheesecake for dessert. I did not order the steak at the Barish, Nancy Silverton’s newish Italian steakhouse at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. I ordered the one dish I use as a litmus test for all steakhouses: the wedge salad.

The Barish interpretation is presented vertically, a tower of iceberg lettuce rather than a wedge. Chef Armen Ayvazyan cuts a baby iceberg head in two, salts the halves and dresses them with red wine vinaigrette and Gorgonzola dressing. He adds grand chunks of Gorgonzola, roasted onions and toasted hazelnuts, threads of bacon and fresh chives. Then he stacks one half on top of the other before it’s served.

The leaning tower of salad is structured to ensure that each leaf of lettuce is adequately draped in dressing, every bite has a bit of bacon and each forkful an extra crumble of cheese, an onion petal and maybe a nut.

The dressing is thicker than thick, like the béchamel base of a really good macaroni and cheese, only cold. And it has the familiar sharp, farmhouse funk of Gorgonzola. The onions are sweet, the bacon is bacon-y and the toasted nuts are there for flair and crunch. The chunks of cheese, some with radiuses bigger than quarters, are like treasures you don’t have to hunt for.

Order a steak if you must, but always, always order the wedge.

Emsakhan chicken at Jerusalem Chicken

The Emsakhan chicken from Jerusalem Chicken restaurant is served over flatbread with lots of stewed onions and sumac.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)

Deyanah Othman says the Emsakhan chicken is far from the most popular item on the menu at her family’s restaurant in View Park-Windsor Hills. That would be the lemon chicken. In fact, Othman says that most people aren’t familiar with the dish, so I’m here to tell you to order the Emsakhan chicken.

The recipe comes from Othman’s grandmother, who was born and raised in Palestine. The chicken, Othman’s favorite and the one thing she requests every year for her birthday, is the national dish of Palestine.

“It’s one of the meals that you’d serve for a large gathering, so it’s usually hard to find out in a restaurant,” Othman explained on a recent call. “For us to make a personal-sized one was something that we haven’t seen before.”

Othman says the name means “rebaked,” which is representative of the preparation of the dish as a whole. The chicken is baked, the onions are sautéed and the bread is baked on hot stones. Once you order, the bread is layered onto the bottom of a dish, blanketed in the onions and topped with the chicken. Then it’s all popped back into the oven for the flavors to meld and warm again.

The chicken skin glistens, slick with oil. The flesh is juicy and densely seasoned with sumac, giving it a tangy citrus flavor. The onions turn luscious, melted and creamy, full of the olive oil and spice they’ve been stewing in for hours. And the bread beneath acts as a sponge. The wet bits of bread at the bottom, the ones completely saturated in the cooking liquids, are the best part.

It’s a chicken so intensely flavorful and satisfying that I’m tempted to simply call it the chicken. Just as the sandwich at Roma Market in Pasadena is simply known as “the sandwich,” the Emsakhan chicken deserves the same sort of all-encompassing, if you know you know moniker. From this moment forward, if I say the chicken, you’ll know the one.