September 16 is National Guacamole Day, and there’s no better place to celebrate than at Mercado Pasadena, owned and operated by entrepreneur Jesse Gomez and business partner Chef Jose Acevedo.
As Pasadenans and Pas-adjacent residents, we truly ought to count ourselves lucky for many reasons, not the least of which is that the South Lake Street Mercado location remains open.
In May, Gomez closed Yxta, his DTLA restaurant, at the intersection of Central Avenue and 6th Street. We may have called it The Arts District, but the hood felt more like Skid Row to me, making its 15-year run there even more remarkable. Gomez learned the biz from his enterprising mother, who owned the iconic El Arco Iris in Highland Park. He refinanced his own Silver Lake home to open Yxta in 2009.
“Rivera,” the pretentious failed eatery helmed by Chef John Sedlar, who’s credited with mas-o-menos inventing Santa Fe-style cuisine as a legit thing, had opened a month prior. Rivera was situated close to Staples Center (now Crypto.com Arena), making Yxta the seeming underdog. But Sedlar’s venue was defined by a confusing, three-tiered menu (rigidly enforced, no combining!) and bizarrely modern seating best suited to a Danish airport, which the chef curiously christened “tequila thrones.” The last entrée I ordered there arrived inexplicably garnished with the stenciled form of a WWII-era gas mask rendered in smoked paprika, a contrived experience that may only be described as Trying. Too. Damn. Hard.
Mercado Keeps It Real
Apparently I wasn’t the only puzzled diner, and so Rivera shuttered in 2014 while Yxta persisted until just now. Part of the reason: Gomez used prime skirt steak instead of scraps for the carne asada plate. More importantly, Yxta kept it real in every other way as well.
Suffice it to say DTLA has changed irrevocably since 2009, and fewer and fewer Angelenos find the coordinates even slightly appealing for an evening out.
And, at the end of June, Gomez announced on Instagram the closing of Mercado’s West Third Street and Santa Monica locations, ending a decade of contemporary yet emotionally authentic Mexican food, traveling beachward from the San Gabriel Valley. In addition to the Pasadena Mercado, the remaining Hollywood and Manhattan Beach locations will also remain open.
We caught up with Gomez as we prepare our palates not only for National Guacamole Day but also for the approach of Dia de los Muertos when the seasons shift. Gomez remarked, “We consider ourselves very lucky. Los Angeles can be a very fickle city, with lots of people looking for the next hot, new thing. We had lots of good years in our several locations, and we are so grateful to everyone who supported us.”
He explains that, naturally, COVID threw a wrench into his regular business. And, he adds, “Even after the nightmare itself quieted down, a lot of things had really changed. In downtown and on the Westside, people started working hybrid schedules, working from home as much as they could, so we lost a lot of our previous lunch trade and happy hour customers.”
But where there’s guac, there’s hope. Gomez says, “When we opened Pasadena in 2018, we were super-busy six or seven nights a week. So when the pandemic hit, we had built a solid base of loyalty in Pasadena.” This base, unlike clientele in DTLA or West Third, was largely residential.
He adds, “What’s interesting about Pasadena is that people really dine here, in the sense of dining, old-school. Our Pasadena customer tends to order more dishes, more drinks, and stay with us longer into the evening.”
Mercado’s Santa Monica location was on 4th Street, previously home to the then dazzlingly original Border Grill. Sadly, the beach city’s Third Street Promenade and the surrounding, once-glitzy area have now taken a hard fall into near oblivion from a retail perspective. As for the West Third Street location, Gomez adds that competition from The Grove proved too tough to beat.
Gomez attended junior and senior high school in South Pasadena and, in 2001, worked at the Smith Brothers’ Crocodile Café, a gig from which he was fired. “Sixteen years later, I bought the restaurant south of Lake, in our great location near Williams-Sonoma, SoulCycle, Philz Coffee, and Sugarfish,” he says, “so I still have a special love for Pasadena.”
The secret to his business success, Gomez says, is consistency. “We are committed to exceeding expectations,” he says. “We’re not selling $6 burritos.” As for the secret behind Mercado’s guac, there’s no great mystery. His team prefers the buttery-fleshed Haas, the variety with the bumpy, near-black skin, over the smooth, green-skinned Fuerte, which, in our experience, tends to be watery, although Fuerte’s firmness makes this variety suitable for slicing into sandwiches.
Rico y suave, but still real
A surprising sidenote: although “ahuacatl” as the Aztecs called it – actually an erotic reference to pairs of plumply pendant masculine genitalia – was cultivated in Mexico and Central America at least as early as 500 BCE, the Haas variety is a newcomer native to California. In 1926, a La Habra Heights postal worker named Rudolph Hass purchased some avocado seeds from the A.R. Rideout nursery and, in his backyard, grafted cuttings from the resulting young trees with Fuerte trees already established on his property. A few false starts later, he was rewarded with a pebbly-skinned fruit (it’s actually a berry!) with creamy flesh. In 1935, Haas secured a patent and named the new variety after himself. Sadly, the world of patents was still somewhat new and filled with loopholes, and so the Hass family never enjoyed the payday that a modern Shark Tanker might expect.
Consumers were initially put off by the new fruit’s funky color and texture, but growers and distributors quickly came to appreciate the productive, resilient Haas for its abundant yields. A mature Haas tree may produce more than one million blossoms and may bloom up to three times a year. Its tough, dark skin prevents unsightly bruising. The Haas is higher in healthy fats than other avocado varieties, creating a silky-smooth mouthfeel when mashed in the molcajete y tejolote (mortar and pestle). And these heart-healthy fats may even lower the risk of heart disease and stroke and do not spike “bad” cholesterol levels.
Gomez says that the avocados for Mercado’s guacamole need to be fresh and perfectly ripe. “Always use a splash of citrus,” he says. “We use fresh lime juice. And always have a heat element, not for spice but for flavor. We use Serrano peppers.”
The truth is that you can’t go too far wrong if you stick with the purity of this basic concept. Garlic is optional, usually not recommended, and it makes the guac heavier in taste and fragrance. Adding peas is a twist that I’ll never understand. Adding sour cream and mayo are cause for getting horse-whipped in my house, as is making guac in a food processor. Doing so produces a light-green, fluffy, mousse-like affair which might be okay for icing a cake but fails horribly as guacamole.
Mexican food, at last, enjoys its deserved status as an elevated world cuisine, but it’s essential to respect indigenous history. With a design dating back around 8,000 years ago, the authentic molcajete was born in a volcano, and the texture of the igneous basalt contains pores that evidence the stone’s origins as cooling lava. No pores? Then the molcajete is fake, probably made of reclaimed cement. The naturally rough surface of the “sauce dish,” as it’s known in Nahuatl, creates an artfully uneven grind, and this nuance in texture is part of what makes great guac. Gomez warns, “Don’t overwork it—the texture needs to stay chunky.”
Even when served with bacon crumbles and sweet hunks of lobster or sprinkled with pomegranate seeds, and especially when crowning a rich swathe of carnitas, Mercado’s guac keeps its cred.
If you lack a molcajete, just use an ordinary steel fork for the mashing and mixing, and stop way before you think you should to keep a bit of thrilling wildness in this beloved Mexican favorite.
DEETS
- Mercado Pasadena
- Open for dinner seven days a week
- Patio dining, happy hour specials
- Lunch — Monday through Friday, Brunch — Saturday and Sunday
- Delivery via UberEats and DoorDash
- 140 South Lake, Pasadena, CA 91101
- 626-345-5778
- www.cocinasycalaveras.com
- Reservations: https://www.cocinasycalaveras.com/mercado-ps
- Online orders: https://order.online/store/mercado-pasadena-476077/?hideModal=true&pickup=true
