A Walking Food Tour of East L.A.

Published July 12th, 2024

Photography by Jennifer Bain

“NOBODY WALKS IN LA,” taunted the all-caps message above my hotel bed on a thought-provoking black-and-white photo of a curving freeway.

Challenge accepted. To get my California steps in, I would join Melting Pot Food Tours for its East LA Latin Food Tour.

Now typically the $135 U.S. walking tour is public, lasts 3.5 hours and includes eight tastings and a Metro TAP card to get between Mariachi Plaza and Indiana stations. But my private group would do an abbreviated version, shaving an hour and two tastings off the experience.

We started famished at Un Solo Sol, where I had my first vegan pupusa. Salvadoran pupusas are one of my go-to foods in Toronto, but I always order my thick corn masa flour “pancakes” stuffed with pork and cheese.

Owner Carlos Ortez, an engineer, likes to harken back to a time when pupusas were filled with “wild stuff like blossoms, mushrooms and leaves” and so his version revolves around a plant called chipilín that’s native to Mexico and Central America. He buys Goya’s frozen version. His masa is produced here in Boyle Heights by Kernel of Truth Organics.

Ortez showed the uninitiated how to top a pupusa with curtido (pickled cabbage) and salsa (either a mild house or hot Mexican version), and regaled us with the story of his Rafael Escamilla mural that shows the “big bang” when the world was knocked out of balance. Ortez is all about curing yourself through holistic remedies and “taking your body towards balance.”

The restaurateur could talk forever, but tour guide Lurdes Muñoz had to keep us on track so soon marched us over to a Mexican spot called Birrieria De Don Boni.

Out came plates full of impossibly tender goat meat on shallow plates and swimming in “consommé” (the rich chile-garlic braising liquid). On the side came warm tortillas and salsas.

“This restaurant means a lot to me because I grew up here,” Muñoz shared. “I grew up in the Venice area but my cousins lived in East L.A. and we were Catholic so we’d come here for church on Sunday and then have birria.”

Melting Pot Food Tours guide Lurdes Muñoz

Don Bonifacio Gonzalez grew up in Guadalajara in the Mexican state of Jalisco where birria was born. He moved to the U.S. in the 1930s to make his dream of starting his own birrieria a reality. That finally happened in 1972 with Birrieria Jalisco here in Boyle Heights. After Gonzalez died in 2000, his family renamed this place in his honour.

The problem with food tours — and I’ve done plenty of them around the world — is that try as you might to pace yourself you’ll quickly get full and there’s never enough time to enjoy everything.

“You guys have four minutes because we’re running behind,” our fearless guide warned after birria so I gulped my glass of agua de Jamaica (Mexico’s beloved iced hibiscus tea) and got ready to move.

We took a short breather at Mariachi Plaza, the centrepiece in what’s one of the first middle-class neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, before hopping the metro to another part of East L.A. to save time.

Because we lingered at our first two stops, the final four stops were rather rushed. 

At Tamales Liliana’s, half a tamale — mine was red chile with pork — was laid out for each of us. We gratefully guzzled champurrado, a warm, chocolate-based Mexican drink thickened with masa harina (corn flour).

At the Mercadito (El Mercado de Los Angeles), we went straight to a stall called Sabores de Mexico to sample mole sauce, cajeta (similar to dulce de leche), dried mangos covered with a chile blend, and toasted crickets.

“They’re not jumping anymore,” teased vendor Ricky Rosado.

With the clock ticking, we doubled up our final two stops, lounging over coffee and tacos in Mi Lindo Guanajuato, while our hosts dashed to Pasteleria Luceros and brought back churros and two kinds of tres leches cake.

We couldn’t resist peeking in the popular bakery that made such memorable desserts and, on the way back to our private van, a man passed and shouted something in Spanish.

“This neighbourhood is for everyone.”

So back to that “NOBODY WALKS IN LA” mural. It hung above my bed at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown while I was in town for the IPW travel conference, and I thought about it as I enjoyed the art, modern architecture and gardens of the 110-acre Getty Center in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains off the 405 Freeway. 

I could have also massively upped my L.A. step count by taking the stairs to and from my room in the 73-storey hotel (which is the tallest building west of Chicago), but security was tight so I had to take one high-speed elevator to the 70th floor lobby and another with only key-card access to my room on the 62nd floor.

Some of my travel friends slept under “IN LOS ANGELES, EVERYONE’S A STAR” artwork and others rested under a photo of the iconic Hollywood Sign shot from the back.

There wasn’t time on this trip to commune with the iconic Hollywood sign, but I saw it in 2020 with Bikes and Hikes LA on a memorable 2.5-hour hike through Griffith Park.

The urban wilderness park is five times the size of Central Park and boasts an arid landscape with mountain lions and rattlesnakes. We hiked up a hill and across a ridge to the enormous sign, admired it from behind and then climbed down to the sandy spot where the park meets a residential neighbourhood and everybody poses for their sign selfie.

In other words, you can do it the easy way, hop an Uber and get out pretty much right where everyone takes the same photo. Or you can take a pleasurable hike to the sign and enjoy it from all angles.

You know what I’d recommend. Everybody walks in my L.A.

Jennifer Bain

After a career at daily newspapers, Jennifer began travelling the world in search of quirk in 2018. She goes wherever the story is, but has a soft spot for Canada and has been to all 10 provinces and all three territories. Jennifer has won multiple awards and written two cookbooks and three travel books. She lives in Toronto but has a vacation house on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, which some cheekily say is one of the four corners of the supposedly flat earth.