![]() There’s live entertainment multiple nights of the week, but the draws here are the many food and drink options - including a list of cocktails known as the “avoid gridlock specialty drinks” - in a festive setting. His menu just west of Silver Lake incorporated recipes from his wife, Maria Garcia Olivares, which are still served today by three of the couple’s four children, who now run the Mexican Village together. hot dog stand Abel’s Place and Cantamar Restaurant in Baja, among others. in 1965, this margarita-happy spot with weekly live entertainment and a lengthy list of combo-plate classics was the culmination of the chef’s years in and out of various kitchens, including a few of his own: L.A. What began as a family operation remains so - and that goes for both ownership and the recipes in Koreatown’s hacienda-style Mexican Village, the kind of restaurant where papel picado hangs from the rafters and one can wash down a sizzling fajita platter with more than 50 tequilas and mezcales. Trippy and hokey, and also wonderfully comforting, El Coyote is so tightly woven into the city’s fabric that to rip out its thread would be an unthinkable loss. What’s more important is how the decades collapse between these colorful walls. Most of us determine our go-to enchilada or fajita or combo plate after one visit. The food is unexceptional, but that’s beside the point. Beneath strings of Christmas lights, with potent margaritas in hand, this is where natives and transplants alike come to be Angelenos. Its place in cultural lore was forever cemented on a summer night in 1969 when Sharon Tate had her last meal in one of the dining room’s cinnamon-red booths, but the restaurant’s community standing reaches far beyond a macabre tragedy. The iconic red and white sign has been mounted on the roof ever since. ![]() After two decades at its original location on La Brea Avenue and 1st Street, founders Blanche and George Salisbury moved their business to its current address on Beverly Boulevard in 1952. landscape as it is a restaurant, El Coyote is nine years away from its 100th anniversary. Call it classic American Mexican, or Mexican American, or California Mexican - “Cal-Mex” for short, as Times columnist Gustavo Arellano dubs them - these menus, heavy on tomatoes and meat and light on spice, are part of our inalienable culinary identity in L.A.Īs much a marker of the L.A. These seemingly eternal houses built from flour tortillas and kept afloat by mild salsa are as embedded in our cultural landscape as our beaches and our freeways. They have existed for decades among us, and some for nearly a century. If you’ve lived in Los Angeles for any real amount of time, and almost certainly if you grew up in Southern California, there’s likely a dish or an ambient aspect of a long-standing Mexican restaurant that stirs your memories. Maybe it’s how the first margarita hits at 6:30 p.m. Or the wonder-inducing mound of rice and a pool of refried beans that seem to spread forever across a platter that a dutiful server will warn is too hot to touch. Maybe it’s the thrill of a first slide into a squeaky red booth under a low-hanging wrought-iron lamp.
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