This story is fourth in a series. Zach will be posting a new story on Mexican food in San Diego every Thursday until he leaves Southern California for the San Francisco Bay, where he will continue to write and edit for The Eaten Path.

When I think of Mexico City, I picture Aztec sporting events, names of gods that are really hard to spell, and those framed photographs of a faded, sepia cathedral that you see hanging in the occasional restaurante. I can’t help it. That’s just the image that has been burned into me since my very first bowl of albondigas soup.

Modern Ciudad de México stretches my imagination, and so does the city’s storied cuisine. It’s the Rome of Latin North America; all roads lead there, even el camino real; and Mexico City cuisine is an intersection of all Mexican food from border to border and coast to coast. Add the influence of international cuisines like Italian and French to the melting pot. Consider the emergence of Nouveau Mexican and fine dining, and the street culture of one of the biggest cities on the planet. Put it together and you have to wonder: is Mexico City the greatest food city in the world?

I may never know the answer to that question, but living in San Diego, I do have the privilege of visiting Ranas Mexico City Cuisine, a small family-owned restaurant in Spring Valley. Maybe Ranas can’t stand in for the inherently diverse food culture of Ciudad de México, but at least it can introduce me to “Mexico City cuisine,” which, as it turns out, isn’t just a deli-sized tri-folding menu with hundreds of selections ranging from the ceviches of the Pacific coast and Caribbean flavors of the Yucatan to the moles of Oaxaca and flank meat of the northern countryside. Instead, Ranas imports Mexico’s national range of cuisine after it’s been thrown into the melting molcajete, mortared into the consistency of cornmeal and repackaged for a modern city.

According to Ranas Mexico City Cuisine, the result of this process is a bunch of really delicious sauces.

Tucked into a large outdoor shopping center by a Fresh & Easy market in an East County suburb, Ranas Mexico City Cuisine is one of a kind, even in the diverse Mexican food haven of San Diego. Besides the cutesy logo, it’s just your average mom and pop restaurant with around ten tables, a father running the kitchen, and his son running the front, chatting up newcomers. The service is friendly, the free samples are customary and taking pictures of your food in the small sit-down restaurant is extra uncomfortable.

The best way to order off the menu is via sauce samples. There are some more familiar flavors, like the classic chipotle and red mole, for which the free samples were so delicious that it was a struggle not to order them, but there are a few new players, too, at least in my experience. The peanut butter or almond sauces, creamy, almost dessert-like sauces that would go great with chicken, taste almost Thai. The Entomatado sauce, an earthy tomatillo- and cactus-based sauce with no lack of spice, won me over instantly, and the Yucatan-inspired Cochinita Pibil’s achiote and orange juice flavors tasted both tropical and pueblo.

Unfortunately for Ranas Mexico City Cuisine, the dishes don’t live up to their dressings. This is a shortcoming that I’ve found multiple times in San Diego; such highly regarded mole dishes as Cantina Mayahuel’s and El Agave’s pour amazing sauces over criminally tasteless meat. Fortunately for Ranas, it costs a fraction of El Agave’s and Cantina Mayahuel’s prices to enjoy sauces just as delicious, and truthfully the faults of Ranas’s dishes are not that they are sub-par, but that the inspiring gravies are that good. The pork in the Cochinita Pibil and Entomatado dishes is dry and flavorless on its own, but drenched in their respective dressings, nobody can complain.

I do have one complaint, though: I’m a pussy. Due to a spicy level worth every one of its three chile symbols on the menu, I couldn’t finish the Entomatado Pork despite every desire to keep tasting the delicious gravy. I’m a big fan of tomatillo-based anything and the Entomatado did not disappoint. The Cochinita Pibil was a superior version of the overrated Mama Testa’s. It still wasn’t the Cochinita Pibil that I fell in love with in Los Feliz Village, but I would pour that citrusy and earthy sauce on anything.

I don’t know if Ranas accurately reflects Mexico City cuisine, but I hope so. The possibility that somewhere out there, those sauces are being poured over tender, juicy cuts of meat is a dream worthy of the hard-to-spell gods.

Ranas Mexico City Cuisine
9683 Campo Rd Ste A
Spring Valley, CA 91977
(619) 589-1792

Zach’s San Diego Countdown
Week 1 – Super Cocina
Week 2 – Los ‘Bertos
Week 3 – El Tio Alberto
Week 4 – Ranas Mexico City Cuisine
Week 5 – La Fachada
Week 6 – Aqui es Texcoco
Week 7 – La Playa Taco Shop
Week 8 – Las Cuatros Milpas
Week 9 – Tacos El Paisa
Week 10 – Tacos Yaqui
Week 11 – Tacos El Gordo
Week 12 – Mariscos El Pescador
Week 13 – Rudy’s Taco Shop

Share this story. Stay hungry.

• 

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 9:05 am and is filed under San Diego.