The El Cholo feeling. - Review - restaurant review

Sunset, Sept, 2000 by Peter Fish

* LOS ANGELES-The sight of El Cholo lifts the heart any time of day or night but is, perhaps, most cheering toward dusk. Western Avenue swims in headlights. The sky is the limpid pink of someplace tropical and pure. You see the sign: El Cholo Spanish Cafe. For more than 70 years that neon glow has said to Angelenos, "Welcome home."

"El Cholo has the kind of food that once people get hooked, they start craving," Ron Salisbury says.

The craving for El Cholo began in the 1920s, with Salisbury's father, George. He began courting a young woman, Aurelia Borquez, whose parents ran a small restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. The restaurant was named El Cholo, Spanish slang for field hand. George and Aurelia married and opened their own El Cholo in a bungalow on Western.

Los Angeles was a different place then: a city that had just reached the 1 million mark but remained in many ways a small town. It had a substantial Latino population but also a large contingent of new arrivals from Iowa and Kansas--people who might have looked askance when first confronted with a plate of chiles rellenos. Yet El Cholo was an immediate success. As Merrill Shindler writes in his El Cholo Cookbook, "Immigrants knew about the food. But it was Anglos, newly educated to the joys of tacos and enchiladas, who queued up nightly in front of El Cholo."

Today people of every ethnicity still queue up here. In his 60s, Ron Salisbury looks younger, and he possesses two essential accoutrements of Southern California success: a Porsche and a cell phone--both necessary since his restaurant has multiplied to include outposts in Santa Monica and Orange County. But he has little trouble recalling a more modest era of El Cholo history. "I started coming here when I was 3 or 4 years old," he says. "My mother taught me to count using the cash register. It was a simpler city then. I would go around thinking how lucky I was to have the parents I had. How lucky to be in Los Angeles."

Any restaurant that has endured for more than 70 years must give people good food-and El Cholo does. The menu has little that could be called nouvelle but instead offers comforting renditions of dishes that El Cholo helped make classic: enchiladas Suizas, fajitas, green corn tamales. The latter are available only from May through October, and customers clamor for them as they might Lakers tickets.

But El Cholo offers something else, easier to experience than to describe. Often in Los Angeles, when you're scanning headlines or watching the 10 o'clock news, the town seems less a city of the angels than a wrestling match of body-slamming interest groups. You never feel that at El Cholo. "I've always thought we had the best mix of people of any restaurant in Los Angeles," Salisbury says. "The best balance of what Los Angeles is." The famous come to El Cholo--their photos are on the walls, from L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan to baseball idol Nolan Ryan to Paul McCartney--but so does everyone else. So entwined into Los Angeles life is El Cholo that it is the only restaurant I know with a novel named for it: The El Cholo Feeling Passes, about a group of UCLA graduate students who find the meaning of life at--well, you can guess where.

The last time I went to El Cholo was on a Tuesday night when I expected business to be slow--but it wasn't. Customers enter: a blond-ponytailed girls' soccer league, a natty priest, a Korean family (Western Ave. is now the main street of Los Angeles's Koreatown). All straighten up. This is an occasion. From the kitchen they smell the pleasant assault of red chile sauce, the earthy sweetness of mole. They look pleased. They look embraced. Someone is cooking for us, they think. Someone cares. Shown to tables, they open their menus, pondering beef versus chicken enchiladas, or maybe tacos al carbon. And they wonder just how long they might linger here at El Cholo before they must return to the outside world.