Veracruzing East L.A.

In East Los Angeles, there may be as many places to eat seafood as there are fast-food chains: fancy places that specialize in big-bucks lobster parilladas and converted burger shacks that serve octopus cocktails; places with octopus ceviche and others with Baja-style fish tacos; representatives of the coastal states Colima, Nayarit, Sinaloa, even Ensenada. When a mariscos joint is jumping, there may be no better way to spend an afternoon than laying waste to piles of garlic shrimp and oceans of cold beer. Everybody likes Mexican seafood, whatever its state of origin.

Still, although its food is underrepresented in Los Angeles, the East Coast seaport Veracruz is pretty much acknowledged as the center of Mexican seafood cooking and red snapper Veracruz-style as Mexico’s greatest seafood dish. In Veracruz itself, you find sweet freshwater shrimp from the vast network of rivers in the region, crabs and lobsters from the bays, fresh warm-water fish--snapper, sierra, pompano--from the gulf; there are as many seafood dishes in the state as there are villages to cook them.

Just down the street from the Eastside’s main shopping drag and a couple of blocks from Ruben Salazar Park, Boca del Rio is named for a Veracruz suburb that, like Puerto Nuevo in Baja, is more a cluster of seafood restaurants than an actual place to live, a town where you go to eat lobster and stare at the sea. The restaurant Boca del Rio is pretty close to a perfect family Mexican seafood restaurant--a few tables, a bar, a jukebox, thickly stuccoed walls that almost gleam in their whiteness, the clean, briny smell of fresh fish.

Boca del Rio may lack the elaborate chilpacholes , the exotic jungly stews, the strange licorice-like herbs you might find in Veracruz, but mostly it delivers the goods: fluffy, garlicky rice; pungent fresh salsa; grilled lobster; stuffed crab; and just the best shrimp al mojo de ajo imaginable, split down the middle, frosted with garlic and grilled until fragrant and crisp.

Shrimp Cancun, broiled inside thick flak-jackets of bacon and ham, then blanketed with melted cheese, may seem ghastly in concept but actually sort of works like an hors d’oeuvre bombarded with mutant radiation in a ‘50s monster flick. Shrimp and beer--what more could you want?

You’ll find the usual seafood cocktails here--the deluxe version, no more exciting than the others’, is called vuelve a la vida , a cocktail to “wake up the dead”--which are basically defrosted shrimp and octopus and canned abalone drenched in brine, served in fluted sundae cups, ready to be doused with chile, ketchup and lime. There are perfectly adequate, if bland, bowls of shrimp soup, the customary enchilada specials and grilled steaks.

Boca del Rio mostly specializes in crisp-edged griddled huachinango (red snapper), either marinated with garlic and dried chiles ( al pil-pil ); more simply al mojo de ajo with browned bits of chopped garlic or cooked in a dry egg batter to resemble the treatment fish is given in Korean pubs. There is a classic huachinango a la Veracruzana , braised in tomato sauce, sharply flavored with capers and olives, as complexly seasoned as anything you might order at, say, L’Orangerie.

But even red snapper can be pushed too far. Huachinango relleno is a complex work of culinary engineering but may be a little too weird to eat: a crisp-skinned grilled fish, split and filled with a mixture of shrimp and octopus, drenched with a quart or so of 40-weight cheese sauce decorated with baroque squiggles of ketchup and surmounted with toothpick-mounted olives that jut from the snapper’s flank like eye stalks from a crab.

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Where to Go

Boca del Rio, 3706 E. Whittier Blvd., East Los Angeles, (213) 268-9339. Open daily for lunch and dinner. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Beer and wine. Street parking. Dinner for two, food only, $22-$35.

What to Get

Huachinango a la Veracruzana; huachinango al pil-pil; camarones al mojo de ajo.