Up All Night

The last time I drove down to Los Tres Cochinitos, which is a bustling Mexican restaurant among the tire stores and oil refineries of Wilmington, the place was out of cecina de res . It sort of bummed me out because Wilmington is a pretty fair drive for me, and the cecina is so good: flat slabs of Mexican dried beef, sliced thin as poker chips and fried until they are black and crisp.

Two wide pieces cover nearly an entire plate and bubble like freshly cooked bacon. Each brittle mouthful--you don’t really cut the stuff so much as snap off pieces with your fork--shatters into flavors of citrus and garlic and extreme well-doneness; a fugue of carbon and lime. As far as I know, Los Tres Cochinitos--the Three Little Pigs, if you feel like translating--is the only place in the Southland where you can get the crunchy kind of cecina , although El Porton in Montebello serves a pretty good version of the chewy kind. Los Tres’ cecina tastes not unlike Thai fried dried-beef. Cecina and a good fresh-tomato salsa make something close to the perfect taco.

Los Tres Cochinitos seems less like a home-cooking joint and more like a Mexican-American Canter’s, busy 24 hours a day and staffed by waitresses with attitude, most of the food less revelatory than well prepared, famous for its soup--intense, vegetable-studded cocido , free with most entrees. The place is all green tuck ‘n’ roll booths and sparkling Formica; limeade, horchata and red jamaica drinks churn inside glass machines arranged in the sequence of the Mexican flag. Late on a Saturday night, Los Tres Cochinitos is packed with young date-night couples, old guys sipping chicken soup at the counter, families stopping by for an enchilada plate after the drive-in, plenty of hungry cops. Sometimes the parking lot is as crowded with black and whites as the last half-hour of a John Landis movie.

Of course, cecina is not the only good thing to eat here: There is nopales , a fine dish of pork stewed with tomatoes and tender strips of cactus that might be the best version this side of my wife’s grandmother’s; sweet, intense beef barbacoa ; brick-red pork-hominy stew, posole , that has a nice toasted-chile smack.

The seafood--catsupy octopus ceviche , shrimp in an acrid hot sauce, mushy fried fish--isn’t too happening; the insipid refried beans are nothing to write home about.

But a quesadilla nortena is stuffed with chewy bacon and gobs of melted cheese--with a dollop of salsa, it’s close to the famous torta al carbon at Kokomo in the Farmers Market; sopes , fried cornmeal saucers topped with tasty chunks of pork, are decent, though not as crisp as they might be. Bistecitos a la poblana , squares of thin, grilled steak tossed with melted cheese, tomatoes and peppers, is a little weird, sort of like a plate of nachos with beef in place of the chips, but it’s easy to see how somebody could become obsessed with the dish. Even chicken fajitas , studded with freshly grilled chiles, strongly flavored with lime and oregano, are good.

But that night, denied a fix of cecina , I had a plate of Los Tres’ pork with green chile instead: long-stewed, not overly thickened, the clean bright flavors of citrus and fresh chile cutting through the richness of the pork, spiced hotly enough to smelt tin. I wasn’t bumming that hard, if you know what I mean.

* Los Tres Cochinitos

803 W. Pacific Coast Highway, Wilmington, (310) 549-0921. Open 7 days, 24 hours. Lot parking. Beer and wine. Takeout. American Express, Carte Blanche, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $8 to $15.