Loteria Stands Out at L.A.'s Farmers Market
By Eli Penberthy
Food Critic

Los Angeles, the polycentric metropolis that it is, is sometimes hard to define in food terms. If you are willing to scour the city looking for food, you will find pockets of places with good restaurants - the Artesia neighborhood has a few excellent Indian places, for instance, and Norwalk offers some wonderful Thai cuisine. But these places are remote and require traveling long distances. In general, unlike the other means of entertainment you can find in specific areas of the city (you can see new films in Hollywood or shop in Santa Monica), there is no centralized area to simply eat.

That is why, on a recent Friday night, I was thrilled to find a wonderful Mexican taqueria called Loteria, surrounded by a multitude of other restaurants in the Farmer's Market on the corner of Third and Fairfax downtown. This is not like the Claremont farmer's market, where local farmers come on Sundays to sell fresh fruits and vegetables. Instead, it is more like a funky open-air market with small restaurant stalls selling everything from "homemade" ice cream to French crepes to Korean barbecue. The place is a bit touristy and carnival-like, perhaps, but with live music and throngs of people eating and drinking on weekend nights, it has an almost surreal energy flowing through it.

Loteria definitely stands out as offering more authentic and quality fare than the other neighboring eateries offer. The concept is simple: you line up cafeteria-style and order a filling-choose from the list of vegetarian, chicken, pork, or beef-for your tacos or burrito. These fillings range from the standard, expected offerings like the simple carne deshebrada (shredded beef) and mole poblano con pollo (chicken in a mole sauce) to much more inventive ones like the conchinita pibil (pork roasted in banana leaves) and pollo en pipian rojo (chicken in a spicy peanut sauce).

The restaurant takes the most liberty in its vegetarian fillings, using such exotic ingredients as nopalitos (fresh cactus) and mushrooms sautéed with the spicy herb epazote. I had the latter, rolled in a burrito with rice and black beans and covered with a green chile sauce, and it was delicious, although the beans were a bit on the salty side. My friends, big meat-eating boys, were enamored with the tinga de pollo (chicken spiced with chipotle and chorizo sausage) and agreed that we should definitely go back to try all the other stuffings.

The prices alone make this a worthwhile venture; two tacos are $3.85 and a burrito is $5.95. With the free music, I'm not sure there is better entertainment for a comparable price in town.