Gills & All
The fish, the whole fish and nothing but the fish
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Boca Del Rio
3706 Whittier Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90023-1733
Category: Restaurant > American
Region: East L.A.
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Tacos Baja Ensenada
5385 Whittier Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90022
Category: Restaurant > Mexican
Region: East L.A.
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In the early evening, it seems like there’s always a small child poking a finger or two into Rong Hwa’s tanks, teasing dinner, upon which Santa Barbara spot prawns roll their beady black eyes and paddle like mad. The main event here is, of course, live fish, which can be had steamed or fried, but also in a lot of other ways you probably wouldn’t have considered. The ordering process is a little odd. You choose your fish, then elect whether to have it made into two, three or five dishes. The two-way involves “fish-head casserole,” a delicious, subtle fish soup that’s thick with bean curd, ginger, glass noodles and cabbage, and “stewed fish tail,” the rest of the fish braised in a chile-red Szechuan-style hot sauce, faintly perfumed with vinegar and surrounded with chunks of tofu. The three-way adds lightly breaded strips of fish, deep-fried to perfect crispness. With the five-way, you get a three-way plus stewed fish maw and fried fish in sour sauce, which means that you have to start with a fairly huge fish. Faced with the same fish ntimes over in a single meal, you may as well get a good one. Basically your choices boil down to two: sheephead, a deep-water fish, and farm-raised catfish. For a two-way, choose catfish; for three and up, go for the ocean fish. 230 N. Garfield Ave., Monterey Park; (626) 572-4629. Open daily for lunch and dinner 11 a.m.–10 p.m. Dinner for two, food only, $20–$60. Beer and wine. Lot parking. MC, V.
Tacos Baja Ensenada
Tacos Baja smells right, homey and oniony like a Mexican grandmother’s house, without a hint of seafood funk, and the various seafood cocktails — octopus, shrimp, clam, though not the pata de mula — are fresh and good. You’ve come, no doubt, for what may be L.A.’s finest fish tacos: crunchy, sizzlingly hot strips of batter-fried halibut, folded into warm corn tortillas with salsa, shredded cabbage and a squeeze of lime, sprinkled with freshly chopped herbs and finished with a squirt of thick, cultured cream, lightly done, delicately flavored. But in your lust for the tacos, don’t miss the spectacular cahuamanta estilo Sonora, a robust, fragrant kettle of Baja stingray simmered with vegetables until it reaches the consistency of poached chicken, then served as a sharply celery-scented soup or shredded and folded into comfortingly bland, vaguely marine-tasting tacos. Stingray tacos! The manliest taco in the sea! 5385 Whittier Blvd., East L.A.; (323) 887-1980. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Lunch for two, food only, $6–$14. No alcohol. Lot parking. Cash only.
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