Sweet Meat - Great Tacos, Perfect Takeout

Carnitas: El Rey does one thing and they do it well, carnitas al estilo Michoacan. I visited their established first location, in Oxnard, over the weekend, however, this review is specifically for their second location, near Moorpark College in the Campus and Collins shopping center.

Still, it seems appropriate to begin, in reviewing a local business, by at least observing their first location. I actually met my two (adorable) nephews for the first time over takeout from the Oxnard location, which looks as if it has recently been remodeled, to judge from the forty-year-old awning left in place (a great choice), contrasted with the relatively new design of the company logo, affixed to the façade above, with a crown reminiscent of a Sacramento basketball logo, or perhaps a local pro hockey team, atop a capital R ('rey' means 'king' in Spanish).

The Oxnard location is spare, for all of the efficiency of the floor, which (under purple tier pandemic rules) has two very-wide customer queues. I might suggest extra airport-style retractable line-barriers to make the two queues obvious at a single glance, but it is clearly stated in the signage, so that is enough to be getting on with.

I am glad that I know what I wanted to order in advance, because there was a certain high-RPM to the operation that I was not expecting by my experiences in Moorpark, perhaps because the Moorpark location remains as-yet undiscovered. My mother works in...I believe the balance is now Fillmore and Santa Paula and not the other way around. For the orientation of global readers, that is the most interior and inland area of Ventura County, which is bordered by Los Angeles to the South-East, The Santa Barbara Channel of the Pacific Ocean, to the South-West, Santa Barbara to the North-West and the largest National Forest in the Southwest to the North-East, which covers the mountains between the coast and the so called Central Valley of Steinbeck and Grapevine highway fame.

'The' Valley, for once-and-all disambiguation, refers to the San Fernando Valley, which is the long East-West valley that one crosses the eastern end of to get to Pasadena and on over the Grapevine north on Interstate 5 (Southern Californians use a 'the' to connote interstates, 'the 5,' while Northern Californians use a naked, unqualified numeral, which is more often in the three-digit range, up there, with the exception of 'Five'). The Valley skirts Los Padres National Forest along its southern margin and connects to Simi Valley, the city and geographic region I start my day from, which borders Los Angeles County directly and Chatsworth specifically, a valley municipality, which are historically independent organizing blocs that have been annexed by the 'metropolis of Los Angeles.'

I begin those mornings driving west a few miles to the Starbucks that sits near the Moorpark location of this business, which is one of two here, so near the campus and on the outskirts of Moorpark (but quite central to the region, as I've just described it) that I most wished to advocate as an inspiration to starting this blog. Between 'here' and Oxnard, which lies at the mouth of the Santa Clara River, lies the coastal valley of Ventura County proper. Moorpark is nestled into a southeasterly corner and the campus is in the little pass between the town and now-city-sized municipality of Simi Valley. Simi, which, alone was its name before reorganization, prefers to still think of itself as a small town, which it even still managed to feel like, for a while after passing the official census count to municipal status, but it now completely fills it's eponymous valley, mostly with sub-urban-feeling urban space.

I am orienting readers to this space because my mother, a Family Practice physician, with fellowships in OB-GYN, etc. etc., delivers babies for poor women, mostly farmworkers, since we moved back to California. She works, therefore, as high up the river valley of the broadest agricultural-valley on the coastal side of the Sierra Madre Mountains (where we grow strawberries and spinach and tomatoes, acid loving plants) as is possible, and then also halfway back down the valley, where the hospital she rounds at is located. Fillmore, as it happens, also borders LA County, at LA's northernmost point, Valencia, famous for oranges, which merged with Santa Clarita, famous for Magic Mountain, the regional Six Flags theme park before the whole county merged into municipalities of the City and unincorporated county space.

Its confusing, thus I explain. Feel free to skim when I get like this.

My mother, as I say, works up in what must be called the hinterlands of the county, whereas my father, also a licensed physician, though he rounds just enough to keep his license, is the county's Health Officer, a public official and far more a bureaucrat than a practicing Pediatric Infectious Disease Specialist, his original discipline. As such, he works primarily in an office, which, as often as not, is in Oxnard, the...true, but newer and brown-skinned heart of the county's commerce, culture and population, as opposed to the City of Ventura, which has been of municipal size far longer, with a much greater percentage of White (very Californian) Californians, and also wealthier residents, not a coincidence, but ageing, and being made satellite to her faster-growing neighbor.

Either way, my Dad knows the more urban and coastal environs of the county where my mother has a strong sense of the most rural working population, not just the Latino residents, but especially them. Carnitas El Rey, apparently, has recently opened an outlet in Santa Paula, which has taken off with much greater popularity than the Moorpark restaurant. I want to encourage any of the, I expect, family who operate the business who may read this review to give the Moorpark location time and exposure because, as I argued in my review of Fatte's you have to take on the food-loving neighborhoods that are not intuitively drawn to your business early if you want to achieve broad penetration across a market as diverse as California.

So we are back to the food. My father has heard that the line for Carnitas El Rey in Oxnard is normally around the block at lunch time, even under purple tier orders, and everyday of the week and weekend (they are closed on Tuesdays). My mother, as noted, has heard similarly good things about the popularity of the food in Santa Paula, and for good reason.

I mean...carnitas, man! They. specialize. in. carnitas.

Al estilo de Michoacan means with the guiso, the gristle, which, frankly, is not for me.

Haa! We've gotten this far and I haven't mentioned yet that I'm super picky. Like...really picky. And I DNGAF. That's not true. I'm totally sympathetic to the fact that it is an extra effort to serve my order correctly. I'm not even slightly sympathetic to an ethic that one ought to eat what a chef or cook composes without thought or preference or feedback and must bend over backward to the convenience of the chef, much less a business that makes do with trained cooks. That's not how art works, that's not how eating works, so its sure AF not how Food works. I let you know what I like, you give me something you made...that I'll freaking like, gods damnit! That's the freaking point! Not for you to get your damned rocks off in my mouth.

Anyways...I've had more than enough gristle in my life, and I'm a Pagan. Fat is the due sacrifice to the Gods and it is not for me to cheat them because my distant cousins think my other ancestors would have done them that way. The cousins may be right as to the ancestors (my Mexican family argues about whether we are from Morelia, in Michoacán, or Aguascalientes, farther north, or perhaps somewhere on the Gulf Coast), but...no great disrespect to the Mixtec Gods, I have centered my practice and worship on the Grecco-Roman pantheon and will pay them their due as I expect my foremothers' rather exacting gods will appreciate.

Besides, it looks like its all cooked the same and the gristle parts end up in the gristle bins. My mother, who has heard of the new location at Santa Paula, but not yet been, had all of about ten seconds to digest all of this, including the (admittedly very simple) menu, and order, which we did, with more difficulty than usual, in Spanish. I even commented to my mother about how confusing it had all been, because normally she would have heard a word better than I and supply the response to a waiting native Spanish speaker, but on this occasion I helped the counter woman hear my mother.

It was crowded, to be fair, although we must have been lucky, because I walked right in the open door and joined one of the two queues inside with only two parties in front of us. We ordered at the hot-case, a cafeteria-style counter I'd almost compare to a Chinese 'express'-style restaurant, with tubs of pre-prepped food kept warm in chafing trays, only there were just the two choices, and the size you want.

We ordered one pound without gristle and got one single taco with, for my father. The family order comes with a pint of pinto beans, stewed, I think; Mexican rice and choice of 'red' or 'green' salsas (chile de arbol and hermosillo, if I'm not mistaken). It also comes with shop-made tortillas, as thin as you'd get from a store, but fried up on-site from fresh masa within, I'd imagine, the past 24-hours (though who knows what work is reserved for those Tuesday off-days).

The tortillas are basically worth the price of a meal regardless. I'd pay five bucks for a rolled one with butter and salt. Well, maybe three for three bucks, but still. My older nephew, who, it seems, is even more picky than I am, and doesn't like meat consented to smell the best-carmelized bit I could break off, and afterwards not only ate nearly two complete tortillas (drat him!), but he even dipped one in the beans (he apparently doesn't like combining flavors, either, weirdo...).

The carnitas are sweet and soft, moist and breaking apart to the touch, which means they can serve them to you to-go in whole shoulders, unbroken, which retains both heat and flavor until you release it.

The Moorpark location serves meat that is rather cleaner than the 'without' they offer in Oxnard, almost certainly due in part to the lower volume they've established here in the hills, and also to the cultural differences. Moorpark is Old Ventura, progressive-ish, and forward thinking, but very White.

The location itself, for its part, is beautiful. The interior is decorated with woolen worry dolls and other traditional art, there are perhaps eight tabletops and there is a patio, currently available under purple zone rules, with city-built tables around a twenty year-old sycamore in a bench-high planter just a few feet farther from the door. The campus plaza itself is a quietly bustling place, with a remote-learning school's offices and a yoga studio, build-your-own pizza bar (closed for quarantine) connected to a...I do believe it is a bit of a dive bar, though it is more recently open than the pizza business.

The two other restaurants in the mall will each receive their separate reviews, and I am of the impression that the Char-Broiler Express burger joint will be receiving as high a rating as the other two, for reasons that I will explain under their own headline. For now, let me say that a cup of coffee from the newly-Drive-Thru-equipped Starbucks and a bite to eat from Carnitas El Rey makes for just about a perfect breakfast-lunch combo to bookend classes, when they return.

Five stars, unreservedly.