Sometimes you have to tap into your inner Mary Poppins and remind your inner George Banks that flying a kite is a perfectly respectable way to spend an hour or two, even on a busy day. So in the middle of my mad apartment hunting, I gave myself a break by driving up on the highway to Sunland to check out a restaurant I bookmarked a few months ago after Jonathan Gold wrote about it; a Mole-specialty joint called Rocio’s Mole de Los Dioses (aka: Mole of the Gods).
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According to Jonathan Gold, when the mayor of Oaxaca comes to Los Angeles, he eats at Guelaguetza. It’s listed on Gold’s 99 Essential L.A. Restaurants 2011 and in his original review he calls it “one of the best Oaxacan restaurants in the country.” Clearly, then, I knew I had to go there; and I knew I had to go especially for the mole negro which Gold describes as “black as midnight, black as tar, black as Dick Cheney’s heart.”
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You know you’re in love with a restaurant when you have a specific craving for it. Usually when I visit a different city, I like to eat all my meals at different places to make the most of my trip. But yesterday after horseback riding (more on that later!) I turned to Kristin, Craig’s sister, and said: “I want to go back to La Carta de Oaxaca.” We were there last week and Kristin said the food she ate was some of the best food she’d had in a long time. “I want to go back there too,” she said and so we did go back. And now it’s in my top five favorite places to eat in Seattle.
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