Two worlds, one cuisine
El Portal explores Mayan heritage through food and fun
By Dan O'Heron 05/04/2006
Flying to Cancun to taste the classic cuisine of the Yucatan, while savoring leftovers of the Mayan civilization, can be ruinously expensive. Lagoon-view hotels will cost me $200. There aren't any of my kind of motels that have signs that read: "TV in Every Room."
Luckily, closer to home, though without the fascination of unknown lands, pyramids and paradoxes — blind fish and brilliant orchids, singing birds and screeching macaws, scented forests and mad foliage, there's El Portal restaurant.
While denied replicas of pre-Columbian trinkets, it's where I can still pick up echoes of genuine Mayan food heritage, complete with old world ingredients and classical techniques as close as any Conditional Use permit will allow.
Owner, Abel Ramirez, said he would like to dig a genuine "Mayan Cooking Stove" — that is a rock-lined, wood-fired pit, covered with fragrant leaves and bags of earth to enclose heat and slowly steam an armadillo in the parking lot — "but the city of Pasadena won't let me."
Instead, Ramirez and his wife Rosalia, both born and raised in the Yucatan, have transformed village pit-cooking into indoor steaming and baking with traditional recipes and ingredients like banana leaf wraps that impart their own flavor and aroma, while sealing in others, and complex, achiote-based sauces (brick-red achiote seeds collected from the pods of small trees) that keep Yucatecan-style cookery a head above the crowded field of other Mexican cuisines.
With exotic ingredients comes a genuine love of cooking, fun and fiesta, that was fostered as a rite of passage in the Ramirez's homeland. The operative word is "genuine" not just "authentic." You can have a good "authentic" French restaurant that imports paté in a can from Paris, and Caviar Helper from Trader Joe's, and not be French. But for "genuine" cookery — the kind that truly reflects the scenery of the age and place it is concerned with — you've got to belong to the territory.
Abel Ramirez was born and raised in a village with five brothers and four sisters. The brothers took turns daily riding horseback to the other side of a mountain to their father's cattle ranch. Each night they'd return with saddlebags filled with fresh milk, fruit and vegetables, including avocados "the size of cantaloupes, so sweet and tempting," said Ramirez, "they rarely made it to guacamole." But the whole family made it to the barbecue pit for dinner.
Beyond teaching values of freshness and family, the cattle ranch helped instill good natures toward fun and fiesta. "Dad raised fighting bulls, but they were used only for caping demonstrations at various village celebrations." There was no blood, no death in the afternoon, no ear for an Ava Gardner — Hemingway would have been disappointed.
But the fiesta crowds had no regrets; nor will guests tomorrow and Saturday at El Portal's Cinco de Mayo fetes, replete with food specials, mariachis, guitarists, folklorico dancers and "bottoms-up" for "revolutionary" margaritas, award-winning tequilas and ubiquitous Budweiser and Corona beer girls.
If you miss this, there's Mother's Day, May 14. Ramirez knows how to please very particular people at many levels. Before purchasing El Portal 11 years ago, he served 17 years as general manager of Caltech's Athenaeum, preceded by 14 years at the Huntington Hotel (now Ritz-Carlton). Ask him about smuggling hamburgers to several Ohio State football players who had been sent to bed hungry by legendary meanie, Coach Woody Hayes, because they missed curfew on the eve of the Rose Bowl game.
There are no time limits today at the restaurant for signature Yucatecan dishes like cochinita pibil. Autographed by Chef Cesar Soberanis, chunked pork butt is long-simmered down and frazzled to juicy tatters in a classic achiote recado marinade (herbed and spiced achiote paste, garlic cloves, bitter and sweet orange juice), wrapped in banana leaves and baked.
Apart from a myriad of Yucatecan-style dishes, El Portal offers a multi-region pastiche, including sizzling seafood fajitas platters ($14.25) and a large array of combos (under $10).
For good measure, to add more beauty to its relaxing brick and palmy Arcade Lane courtyard setting, the Ramirezes sponsor the works of rotating artists for monthly exhibitions. I was particularly fascinated by the creamy whorls and red-checked bell of a lily done by Laura Vazquez Rodriguez — I'm told that flowers like this might grow in treetops in the Yucatan.
I would have bought the acrylic for $975, but my art budget would only get me to Old Pasadena and a black velvet Elvis. Instead, I was attracted to the gastronomic baroque of Chef Reyna Guardado's many-splendored chocolate mole. Dark and sweet, soft and rich, it unctuously covered a Cancun-style enchilada stuffed with chunks of roasted chicken, chorizo and bell pepper, glazed with ancho chili and melted cheese, and pebbled with corn and peas, plus sides of rice, greens and black beans, squiggled with the buttered ivory of Monterey Jack.
I let all the ingredients smooch together and get all over each other. It got messy, but like a delicious Mayan ruin, it was excavated until I scraped porcelain.
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