Metro Balderas Restaurant — Restaurant in Los Angeles

Metro Balderas, named after an underground rail station in Mexico City, is a small chain of restaurants in L.A. serving regional D.F.-style Mexican food. This is an enterprise with a large, diverse menu, but they are perhaps best known for their carnitas, served only on weekends.

The carnitas are prepared in a cazo using a family recipe of siblings Abraham and Jasmine Guzman, the owners of Metro Balderas. Their carnitas preparations adopt a "nose-to-tail" philosophy of wasting no part of the pig, encouraging diners to order any of eight different types of carnitas.

The "Carnitas Surtida Taco," a mixture of multiple carnitas enabled me to sample nearly all of the available pig parts. Here, the surtida consists of maciza (pork shoulder), buche (pig stomach), cueritos (pig skin), trompa (pig snout), costilla (pork ribs), and orejas (pig ears). The surtida features a delightful contrast of porcine textures: snappy ear cartilage, soft confit of skin and snout, sturdy shoulder, and chewy slices of stomach. Seasoning of the carnitas includes salt, garlic, and citrus. Of the three excellent salsas offered by Metro Balderas, I preferred the tangy and spicy tomatillo-jalapeño sauce with this. There is a fresh-tasting yet smoky tomato-chile de arbol salsa roja available if more heat is desired.

The "Carnitas Surtida Taco" here can be compared to the "Carnitas Taco" available at taco stand Tacos Los Güichos, the "Carnitas Mixta Taco" at Grand Central Market's Villa Moreliana, or the "Aporkalypse Taco" served by taco truck "Carnitas El Momo." As excellent as their tacos are, I'd come to Metro Balderas before these other three carnitas-focused ventures due to the more diverse, interesting variety of menu items at Metro Balderas, whose options include bionicas, milanesa, queso de puerco (head cheese), huitlacoche, gorditas, chilaquiles, pambazos, soups, and so forth. It'd take about 20 trips for me to order everything I want to order here. I spotted some guy at an adjacent table with a giant torta with thick toasted telera bread that made my mouth water. Next time!

One additional dish I had to order during my visit was the notorious "Carnitas Nana Taco," essentially pig uterus confit. It was dense and chewy like raw octopus -- but with a similar flavor to buche. Not as good as the Carnitas Surtida taco, but not bad. I treated it with the aforementioned fiery salsa roja which really made it hum. I've had everything from guts to lips to brains to insects to eyeballs in my tacos this year, but that was all stuff I had before. Uterus is a new one for me, and this is the only place I've ever known...

Actually 3.5 stars for me, but the company I was with said they enjoyed their meals. The Agua Fresca was good, as were the flautas. The chilequiles with steak was decent, though I tend to like mine with a little more heat. Tacos Al Pastor were good and decent in size, but the quesadillas were what really killed it for me. They looked like giant tacos. The corn tortillas were hand made, but they were thick and heavy. The fillings were pretty good, but the tortilla was overbearing. Everything prepared to order so there was a space of over 30 minutes from when the first person got their food, til the last of us received ours. Definately not recommended for large group And since I put a lot of emphasis on service, I had to push the...

My friend who writes amusing reviews of Huevos Rancheros, which he orders in both down-homey spots like this one, as well as restaurants that probably shouldn't be attempting the dish, recommended this place, which was crowded on a Saturday morning. The Huevos Rancheros were exceptional with crisp tortillas and a scrumptious tomatillo sauce, which is not so common on the dish. Even better, though, was the Huevo Huarache my wife ordered, also with a tomatillo sauce, little bits of fried egg on top, and yummy many times over. We also tried a Flor de Calabazza Quesadilla with zucchini flowers, which my wife loved. Check out the...