Santa Barbara's Essential Guide

Growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, Carlos Luna spent a lot of time around honest regional food. His grandmother owned one of the city’s many fondas, tiny restaurants that number in the dozens, open only at night and serve regional appetizers. When Carlos was older, he’d hang out with his friends who had opened their own restaurants. He got the bug, and when he came to the U.S. in 2006, his grandmother’s recipes in tow, he got busy and opened Los Agaves, a wonderful, nearly two-year-old addition to Santa Barbara’s thriving Mexican restaurant scene.

 

Tile floors, wood-and-tile tables and a paintings of Mexico, including a couple of large canvases featuring the namesake agave, the source of all tequila, bring a touch of Mexico to the casual, comfortable dining room. But it’s the food that completes the picture.

 

“Everything is made by hand daily, the tamales, the tortillas, the salsas,” says manager Jose Luis Jacobson, another Guadalajara native. “There are no preservatives, no MSG, no canned products, everything is made from scratch.” Good ingredients and careful cooking are reflected in a menu full of delicious regional dishes from central and southern Mexico, Puebla, Oaxaca and Guadalajara, in particular. Guests order at the counter, and their food is delivered to their table.

 

Specialties include chiles campestres, or farm-style, poblano chiles split lengthwise and stuffed with cheese and chicken, then oven-cooked in a jalapeño cream sauce. Another favorite is molcajetes, which is the name of a traditional lava-rock bowl and the dish prepared in it in Mexico City. At Los Agaves, the dish comprises sizzling pieces of either flank steak, shrimp, chicken or a combination, plus Mexican cheese, sausage, onions, avocado and salsa. Hot stuff! And representing Cancún and the Caribbean is the torta Havana, a kind of Cuban/Mexican ham and cheese sandwich on a semi-firm round roll.

 

The flautitas tapatias, one of Luna’s grandmother’s recipes, are similar to taquitos, with chicken or beef rolled up in tortillas, but the tortillas are coarser and offer a bigger hit of corn’s satisfying texture, crunch and flavor. “In Mexico, as all over Latin America, you go to a resturant to have a good time and relax with friends and family,” says Carlos. “You stay at the table for hours. We wanted this to be a place like that, where people can gather and have a good time in a relaxing and casual environment.”

 

As the restaurant begins to fill with locals at just past five o’clock, Carlos has to know that he’s accomplished what he set out to do.