L ATIMES.COM/FOOD THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2019F5
MEXICO CITY — Chef Antonio de Livier was in northern
Baja doing consulting work for a farm four years ago when he
had a flash of insight.
“We had this great lamb, I started doing birria with the
lamb, and then I threw noodles in it because I wanted noodle
soup,” he said. “I loved the alkaline noodle and how it reacted
to a very spicy broth, but with allspice and cinnamon and chi-
les and different Mexican ingredients.”
That birria-ramen, which De Livier calls birriamen, is
now the centerpiece at Animo, his burgeoning Mexico City
restaurant chain. A soup-based business model for a culi-
nary establishment seemed, at the outset, to be a preposter-
ous move — few others were doing it in Mexico City, and De
Livier knew that in order for the business to survive in the
megalopolis, he would have to offer something singular.
Birriamen became that calling card.
The road to a bowl of birriamen is a time-consuming,
craft-centered process, reminiscent of the hours that go into
making a bowl of pho.
Although his original version was made with lamb, De
Livier settled on birria de res for his restaurant birriamenfor
mass-market appeal. He begins his day by cooking beef
tongue, oxtail and a bit of lamb to create what he says is “not a
brodo,not a soup, but a broth.” He then adds chiles and
spices before moving on to the adobo. The first broth takes
about six hours to make; the birriaabout four. The ramen
noodles are sourced from a shop three blocks away and made
fresh daily. The lengthy process has its share of challenges,
and sourcing quality ingredients in particular has been an is-
sue, said De Livier, who also runs an escabecherestaurant in
Guadalajara and was previously a chef at a Cabo San Lucas
hotel chain.
“We live in a huge city and use big quantities,” he said, “and
sometimes things happen that you can’t control.” For in-
stance, occasionally the beef has been frozen and then
thawed before being delivered, a process that he said cor-
rupts the quality of the final dish. Unfortunately, there’s no
way to know if the beef was previously frozen until De Livier
can taste-test the broth. If it turns out that’s the case, he has
to start over.
The noodle soup — which costs 84 pesos, or less than $5 —
that finally hits the customer’s table is the culmination of
more than nine hours of stewing and cooking and prepara-
tion. The broth and noodles are topped with thin slices of
brisket; cilantro, onion and lime are available as add-ons.
The success of the noodles — De Livier sells around 350 bowls
a day — has allowed him to expand Animo to three locations
in the city. The restaurants also sell soups, tacos and other
items, but birriamen makes up about 40% of the business.
Mexico City’s Asian food scene has become, in recent
years, robust. In Zona Rosa, Korean BBQ comparable to that
of L.A.’s Koreatown is readily available; in Centro Historico,
Chinese buffets dot every other block; in Condesa, Japanese
ramen is wildly popular. Has the city’s comida orientalinflu-
enced the flavors of De Livier’s dish?
“The ramen scene in Mexico City is everywhere, but I
think I’ve only been to two of them,” De Livier said. Birria-
men“was not necessarily made to look like an Oriental ra-
men, per se. It was not driven by me going out to get some ra-
men; I just wanted amazing food.”
Indeed, birriamenis a distinctly Mexican creation that
just happens to have ramen noodles in it. He has experi-
mented with a few other Mexican-Japanese flavor combina-
tions, such as udon noodles in a black bean broth with Napa
cabbage, roasted pork belly, pickled squash and yellow chiles.
But the hybrid creations have to be balanced and make
sense, De Livier said. “It’s not just to look cute and put noo-
dles on every Mexican soup.”Culinary mash-up
in Mexico City:
birria and ramen
As Tijuana-style birria de reshas its cultural moment,
from the crimson-tinted namesake wonders at Teddy’s Red
Tacosto glimmering consommé pools offered by Birrieria
Gonzalezand so many more, those of us with roots in the
Mexican state of Zacatecas can’t help but to do a Jan Brady
and scream “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”
Food media and Instagrammers and Mexican Americans
alike are proclaiming birria de res— the beef version of the
famous goat stew — as L.A.’s latest Mexican-food trend. But
no esnothing new to the hundreds of thousands of zacate-
canosin Los Angeles and Orange counties, especially those
from the municipiosof Jerez and Tepetongo, who’ve feasted
on the meal for decades. While birria de res estiloTijuana
comes mostly in the form of tacos and a cup of steaming
broth, zacatecanosenjoy it on a plate as a proper meal. I’ve
gorged on it at family get-togethers since I was a child.
Zacatecas-style birria de resis our version of lechón— a
feast ultimately not that elaborate to prepare yet never-
theless reserved for special occasions. That’s why it rarely ap-
peared in restaurants, save for the burgeoning Burritos La
Palma empire — but all the rightful social media attention it
received over the past couple of years got subsumed by the
current Tijuana wave.
The dish’s relative rarity is a shame — for you. Me? Given
my massive extended family, I can eat it at least twice a
month, and that doesn’t even require going to a restaurant.
You’ll probably never get an invitation to try my Tia Paulita’s
birria de res, but a close approximation is at Zacatecas
Restaurant in Hawthorne. It’s an off-menu specialty, re-
served for the compaswho know better than to order the so-
so Cal-Mex platters that draw in the city’s tech bros and make
up the super-majority of the tiny spot’s cooking.
Here is the birria de resof my life: juicy but slightly
crisped, decorated only with diced, raw white onion, and
sluiced in a furious salsa de guajillo. It’s stringy and savory
and spicy and delicious, as important a cultural marker of
Southern California’s immigrant culinary heritage as Cam-
bodian doughnut shops or Dutch dairy farms.Zacatecas Restaurant, 13737 Inglewood Ave., Hawthorne,
(310) 679-5161, zacatecasrestaurant.com. Open daily, 10 a.m.-
10 p.m.Flavio Morais For The TimesWHAT WE’RE INTO
Go off-menu for
best of Zacatecas
By Lynn Q. YuBy Gustavo ArellanoMariah TaugerLos Angeles Times