Bar Amá

Sensational. The best tex-mex cuisine I have ever tasted. We were seriously full. I had the vegetarian enchiladas, rice and beans, selection of starters, oh and I discovered tequila! Greeted with a smile, thanks Eddy.

Amazing food! What a pleasant surprise. I had just gotten into town and stumbled upon this place in search of Mezcal in the area. While my drink was amazing, the food was the star! The only reason this isn’t a 5 star review is because our table was not ready, but we were offered to sit on the outside patio/alley for drinks until our table was available. We never got notification of our table as we wished to move inside as there was some sort of singles event going on outside. Possibly a missed communication. Would still highly recommend!

A few months ago the Food 52 cookbook club on Facebook (around 35,000 members) cooked from the Bar Amá cookbook and everyone fell in love with Tex-Mex, Josef Centeno's family stories, the absolutely excellent recipes, and the alcohol section too. When I finally decided to fly after months and months of being at home during the pandemic, I came to see my daughter in Los Angeles and had literally only one food wish - to go to Bar Amá. I wasn't disappointed. They have the alley open for outdoor dining, our server was fantastic and she seemed to enjoy all my cookbook stories ?, I mean, if she didn't, she hid it well lol! Everything we had was excellent, see the photos. If you haven't yet been you should go and don't forget the B side of the menu the blistered okra was stellar and so was the za'atar labneh & puffy bread. P.S. BUY THE COOKBOOK! I've made 40-50 of the recipes, they all are totally worth it!

The Happy Hour was wonderful. Friendly service. Delicious. affordable food. I was there with colleagues and I have been thinking about ordering the cookbook so I can make those tacos at home.

Incredible Mexican cuisine! The only thing we ordered that wasn't EXCEPTIONAL was the guacamole. The queso, hamachi ceviche (pictured), and entrees were absolutely delicious. They also carry Chef Josef's unique sodas which were delicious as well!

The Puffy Tacos were the Bomb!! After watching Taco Chronicles on Netflix I was like ok I will head over to Amácita's give these Tex-Mex tacos a try. Last time in Texas, Mexican tacos and food tasted bland. Swore to never eat Tex-Mex again! After eating these Puffy Taco with cochinita pibil mmmmmm delicious!! This taco just melts in your mouth. Tex-Mex finally has a taco worth driving an hour to eat. The service was spectacular! Food got there as fast as possible and the drinks kept coming. I washed this taco down with a unique tasting Michelada. I am still trying to figure what spices they used it was that tasty, it definitely wasn't Tajin. You just have to get there and taste for yourself!

I came to Bar Amá for one thing: puffy tacos. Bar Amá's Mexican-American chef (and recent Michelin Star winner), Josef Centeno, is from San Antonio, the city that invented the puffy taco. The puffy taco, a Tex-Mex staple, has made a slow migration to Southern California, now with (at least) two restaurants that serve them in L.A. County: Bar Amá and Arturo's Puffy Tacos in Whittier. At Bar Amá, they're available to order off of a "secret menu," and different varieties are rotated daily. I ordered both available on the evening I was here, the "Puffy Shrimp Taco" and the "Puffy Cochinita Pibil Taco." Neither of the puffy tacos served to me here were particularly "challenging" and both mostly avoided fussy "chef treatments," instead coming across as straightforward rather than reinvented. That said, these are "designer" puffy tacos compared to what I ate and reviewed from Arturo's Puffy Tacos earlier this summer. Whereas Arturo's tacos evoked a Taco Bell Chalupa, Bar Amá's was lighter in weight and color, reminding me more of Indian fry bread. Yet, in both cases, it is masa and not wheat used to make these taco shells, a self-reminder that tastebuds aren't always reliable when coated in salt and oil. The process behind the puffy taco shell is that a corn tortilla is deep-fried for a very brief time so that it puffs up from air attempting to escape the masa, thus creating large air pockets, making the tortilla "puffy." Once the tortilla is "puffed," it is removed from the fryer, glistening with oil and similar in appearance to a fried dough shell, then stuffed like a normal taco and served. The "Shrimp Puffy Taco" consists of grilled butterflied shrimp that has been soaked in a sticky, spicy marinade. The edges of the shrimp are charred with a smoky crust of developed flavor, and these shrimp would be excellent on their own. Here they are covered with shredded red & white cabbage, with an airy avocado and chile mousse that channels Cielito Lindo's famous sauce (and indeed it is the sauce that Bar Amá uses on its own taquitos, according to my waiter), crispy fried parsley, a stewed tomato salsa, and a sprinkling of queso panela. This taco has so many things going on that could easily be overwhelming except that, in Centeno's skilled hands, you only get just enough of each flavor to derive what you need from it, and no component seems superfluous. I love how spicy and sassy this taco is, but that's not what is front and center: it is the tremendous grilled shrimp that you'll remember long after you've left here. I enjoy cochinita pibil when it's done correctly, when the grassy achiote and sour orange is discernible, when it is thick enough to be scooped into a tortilla. By those measures, Bar Amá's "Cochinita Pibil Puffy Taco" mostly does its job, even if my hands were slick with grease mixed with recaudo rojo after eating this. Visually this taco resembles the "Shrimp Puffy Taco" due to its small mound of cabbage and specks of queso, but it is a much different animal flavor-wise. For sweetening and texture, the cochinita pibil here is infused with pineapple. It's a tasty taco that I think would also have been excellent if served traditionally in a regular corn tortilla with marinated onions. To summarize, these tacos were excellent, service here was pretty good, and the place has an interesting menu. Will I be back? My current lifestyle doesn't really support the dietary demands of Tex-Mex, even as I have begun to acknowledge it as a legitimate regional Mexican cuisine. If you're the kind of person who can consume all things oily, salty, spicy, and cheesy, I can think of few better menus for you than Bar Amá's.

There’s just something special about this hidden gem. Wonderful food, awesome atmosphere and affordable prices. If you want to look good on date night this is the spot for you.