I came to Bar Amá for one thing: puffy tacos. Bar Amá's Mexican-American chef (and recent Michelin Star winner), Josef Centeno, is from San Antonio, the city that invented the puffy taco. The puffy taco, a Tex-Mex staple, has made a slow migration to Southern California, now with (at least) two restaurants that serve them in L.A. County: Bar Amá and Arturo's Puffy Tacos in Whittier. At Bar Amá, they're available to order off of a "secret menu," and different varieties are rotated daily. I ordered both available on the evening I was here, the "Puffy Shrimp Taco" and the "Puffy Cochinita Pibil Taco."
Neither of the puffy tacos served to me here were particularly "challenging" and both mostly avoided fussy "chef treatments," instead coming across as straightforward rather than reinvented. That said, these are "designer" puffy tacos compared to what I ate and reviewed from Arturo's Puffy Tacos earlier this summer. Whereas Arturo's tacos evoked a Taco Bell Chalupa, Bar Amá's was lighter in weight and color, reminding me more of Indian fry bread. Yet, in both cases, it is masa and not wheat used to make these taco shells, a self-reminder that tastebuds aren't always reliable when coated in salt and oil.
The process behind the puffy taco shell is that a corn tortilla is deep-fried for a very brief time so that it puffs up from air attempting to escape the masa, thus creating large air pockets, making the tortilla "puffy." Once the tortilla is "puffed," it is removed from the fryer, glistening with oil and similar in appearance to a fried dough shell, then stuffed like a normal taco and served.
The "Shrimp Puffy Taco" consists of grilled butterflied shrimp that has been soaked in a sticky, spicy marinade. The edges of the shrimp are charred with a smoky crust of developed flavor, and these shrimp would be excellent on their own. Here they are covered with shredded red & white cabbage, with an airy avocado and chile mousse that channels Cielito Lindo's famous sauce (and indeed it is the sauce that Bar Amá uses on its own taquitos, according to my waiter), crispy fried parsley, a stewed tomato salsa, and a sprinkling of queso panela. This taco has so many things going on that could easily be overwhelming except that, in Centeno's skilled hands, you only get just enough of each flavor to derive what you need from it, and no component seems superfluous. I love how spicy and sassy this taco is, but that's not what is front and center: it is the tremendous grilled shrimp that you'll remember long after you've left here.
I enjoy cochinita pibil when it's done correctly, when the grassy achiote and sour orange is discernible, when it is thick enough to be scooped into a tortilla. By those measures, Bar Amá's "Cochinita Pibil Puffy Taco" mostly does its job, even if my hands were slick with grease mixed with recaudo rojo after eating this. Visually this taco resembles the "Shrimp Puffy Taco" due to its small mound of cabbage and specks of queso, but it is a much different animal flavor-wise. For sweetening and texture, the cochinita pibil here is infused with pineapple. It's a tasty taco that I think would also have been excellent if served traditionally in a regular corn tortilla with marinated onions.
To summarize, these tacos were excellent, service here was pretty good, and the place has an interesting menu. Will I be back? My current lifestyle doesn't really support the dietary demands of Tex-Mex, even as I have begun to acknowledge it as a legitimate regional Mexican cuisine. If you're the kind of person who can consume all things oily, salty, spicy, and cheesy, I can think of few better menus for you than Bar Amá's.
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