Lobster Taco

A live Pacific spiny lobster is split lengthwise on a wooden block at the back of the kitchen, salted, and dropped face-down into a wide steel pan of bubbling pork lard for about five minutes; the cook turns it once, lifts it onto a metal platter, and sends it out with a basket of warm flour tortillas, a small dish of melted butter, a bowl of refried beans, a bowl of Spanish rice, a wedge of lime, and a salsa. There is no built sandwich on the plate. The eater tears a piece of meat out of the shell with the side of a fork, lays it across an open tortilla, spoons beans and rice on, dresses it with salsa and a squeeze of lime, folds the tortilla closed, and eats it in three bites. The next tortilla starts the same way. The plate is a sandwich kit; the diner is the assembler.

That self-assembly format is the Puerto Nuevo signature. It is the single thing that separates the Mexican Pacific lobster build from its Atlantic-coast cousins on the other side of North America. A New England lobster roll arrives at the table already a sandwich: meat picked, dressed, packed into a split-top bun, handed across as one object. A British lobster brioche bun does the same with a smaller spoonful and an enriched bread. The Puerto Nuevo plate inverts the move. The shellfish comes whole, the bread comes separately, and the building happens between the diner's hands at the table over the course of fifteen minutes, four or five tortillas across a single creature. The cook stops at the frying. The customer finishes the assembly.

The frying is the craft. Pork lard at the right heat seals the shell almost immediately and steams the meat from inside, producing a tender, faintly milky flake with a thin band of crisp at the cut edges. Lard run cold gives a flabby greasy result the tortillas cannot rescue. Lard run too hot scorches the shell and cooks the flesh to the dry chalky texture every shellfish chef tries not to get back. A split lobster left in the fat a minute too long contracts away from the shell and arrives shrunken; pulled out a minute too soon, the centre is translucent and refuses to come away from the membrane. The tortilla has its own discipline. A flour sheet griddled cold from a stack tears under a heavy fold of meat and butter. One warmed soft and pliant, just to the point of pale freckles on a dry pan, folds without splitting and holds drawn butter at the seam without weeping for thirty seconds.

The eating reads in waves. The shell pops on the platter when the cook puts it down and a small mist of sea-and-lard rises off the plate. The first tortilla, dressed only with meat and a touch of warm butter, gives soft against the fingers and meets sweet shellfish flake against the teeth, with the butter running once at the back of the throat. The second adds beans and rice and turns into a substantial bite the jaw has to work. The third adds salsa, and the chile pulls the sweetness of the meat forward by contrast. By the fourth the diner has settled the working order of the elements and the shape steadies; the fifth scrapes the last of the bean smear out of the bowl with a torn corner of the wheat and closes the meal. A bottle of cold Mexican lager sits beside the plate the whole time, beaded with condensation against the heat off the platter.

The ordering grammar at the Puerto Nuevo restaurants is short and specific. A waiter asks chico, mediano, o grande at the lobster size; the small is around one pound in the shell, the large pushes past two. Estilo Puerto Nuevo on the menu is the split-fried-in-lard tradition the village is named for; al vapor or a la mantequilla are the steamed or butter-poached alternatives some kitchens offer for diners who want the lighter version. The flour tortillas come automatically and the question at the table is otra orden, another order, when the basket runs low. The lime is one wedge per platter and the salsa is whatever the kitchen made that morning, a red roasted-chile blend or a thinner green pico. A regular asks frijoles refritos enteros for unmashed beans at the side; the rice is non-negotiable.

The variations track ingredient and format. The plain butter-and-tortilla build is the purist's order; the diner who wants the meat forward and nothing competing with it leaves the salsa untouched and works through the basket with a pinch of salt only. The cheese-laden version with melted Monterey Jack folded into the tortilla alongside the meat is the cross-border San Diego adaptation that crossed back south through Tijuana restaurants serving California tourists. The tempura-tail Mexican-Pacific version, with the tail battered and fried into long crisp pieces and rolled into the tortilla with cabbage and a chipotle cream, runs at the Mexico City and Los Angeles upscale-Mexican restaurants importing the Puerto Nuevo format into a city kitchen. The strict New England-style cold-mayonnaise picked-meat roll on a split-top bun belongs to a different coast and a different sandwich and travels under its own name.

Puerto Nuevo and the Pacific spiny lobster

Puerto Nuevo is a small fishing village on the Baja California Pacific coast roughly thirty miles south of Tijuana, between Rosarito and Ensenada on the Free Road. The lobster-tourist tradition is documented as a mid-twentieth-century development out of the local artisanal lobster fishery. Pacific spiny lobster (Panulirus interruptus) had been worked off the Baja shelf by Mexican cooperatives since at least the 1930s, organised through the regional fishery federation FEDECOOP, which managed quotas for the cooperatives on the peninsula and along the offshore islands of Cedros and San Benito. The village's restaurant trade grew up in parallel with the wives of the lobstermen cooking the small or imperfect catch at home for visiting Americans who came down the coast highway in the 1950s and 1960s.

The split-fried-in-lard format is the village's named specialty, advertised on local menus as estilo Puerto Nuevo. Family-run restaurants that built the tradition into a tourist destination include Ortega's (the family business that grew from a single restaurant into the largest cluster of dining rooms in the village), La Casa de la Langosta, Miramar, and Ponderosa, most of them strung along the bluff above the small harbour. By the 1980s the village carried several dozen restaurants serving essentially the same plate, and the format was registered in California and Mexican food writing as the regional Baja signature seafood preparation; the Pacific spiny lobster fishery itself was certified by the Marine Stewardship Council in 2004 as a sustainable Mexican fishery, the first such certification awarded to any fishery in Latin America.

Ortega's opened its first dining room on Calle Tercera above the small Puerto Nuevo harbour in 1955 and the family business operated several restaurants under that name in the village by the late 1970s.