Menudo - Toms #1. Santa Monica, CA.

Toms #1. Santa Monica, CA.

"Daddy drinks because you cry," I thought to myself as I looked blearily at my sleeping baby. I felt miserable and was still a little drunk. I was trying to find a scapegoat for my head-splitting hangover. Chloe just happened to be the first thing I could focus my bloodshot eyes on. My alcoholic aftereffects were so hellish even Nick Nolte himself would consider smoking a shotgun to end it all. It was another hazy, foggy, cotton-mouthed Sunday. It seemed for me every Sunday was the movie "Groundhog Day" only with a severe hangover. I could still taste the rotgut in my mouth and it was nauseating me. An Ashlee Simpson-esque acid-reflux was tearing up my throat and leaving a terrible taste of bitter bile in my mouth. Even worse, my head thumped like a cheap, ten-dollar subwoofer bought from a couple of guys out of a plain, white van. It was a punishing cadence that I wished to silence as soon as possible. The morning sunlight was objectively pleasant enough, I guess, but to me it might as well been a white-hot branding iron coming down on my eyelids. I was hurting. I was paying the price of too good a time (was there such a thing?). I found myself mumbling the familiar hangover prayer slash oath that I would never drink again if only somebody or something would please, please, please take this unbearable pain away!! Amen. There are no atheists in foxholes, and especially none the morning after an alcoholic binge. While I waited for my prayers to be answered I would chug a tall glass of pure, mountain spring water. That didn't seem to do much. The dull pounding in my skull now got louder and louder like Poe's Tell-Tale Heart.

I needed food. I needed a dish with powerful and magical healing properties. A dish specifically concocted for the ailment of overindulgence. A dish that shares the same name as a certain Puerto Rican boy band with whom Latin heartthrob Ricky Martin formerly busted tunes. It's quite appropriate considering that if you're choosing to live la vida loca, it's advised you chow down on this Sonora, Mexican masterpiece in order to save your vida period. Then suddenly before me St. Menudo, the patron saint of the pathetically hungover, appears. He kindly offers my sad, dehydrated soul salvation in the form of tripe soup.

Menudo is yet another sacred ethnic dish that has its roots firmly planted in peasant food heritage. Menudo is also a byproduct of conflict. Long ago in northern Mexico, the select cuts of a town's cattle would go to battle-weary and hungry Mexican soldiers while the leftovers went to the peasant folk. These leftovers consisted largely of Fear Factor staples like innards, tails, hooves, et al. Inventive and/or desperate peasant cooks created a soup that made good use of a couple of these ingredients - the stomach (tripe) and calf's foot (hoof). Classic menudo is basically a slowly cooked stew of honeycomb tripe and calf's foot later infused with several varieties of chiles and spices and balanced in flavor and texture with white hominy. It's presented as a soup and served with corn tortillas.

I was exposed to Chinese tripe dishes long before I had my first nibble of menudo, and I had my first menudo well before my first hangover. So tripe, the key player in menudo, is no stranger to my dining repertoire. However, I can appreciate why the uninitiated would suffer tripe trepidation when sampling menudo for the first time. Tripe, particularly honeycomb tripe, is a rather bizarre experience. Visually this form of tripe, well, like the name says, resembles honeycomb. However, the tactility of it is what unsettles most people. The texture is like little rubber waves sweeping over your tongue and brushing down your throat as you swallow it. This meat is so alien you might as well be eating Klingon. But for the same reason that makes this organ meat so strange is what also makes it so great for menudo. The honeycomb pockets of the tripe acts as an efficient delivery system for the spicy, tangy soup. The organ's odd design traps the tasty liquid that simultaneously gives you soup and flavors the tripe. Tripe can be really skunky if not cooked properly. When it is cooked right, tripe becomes sort of bland with just a kiss of skunkiness. This unique flavor combined with the spicy chile soup, the wholesome hominy, a dash of oregano and some squirts of fresh lime juice make menudo a crazy witch's brew of taste sensation and rejuvenation.

The same idea is behind another hangover cure - the Bloody Mary. Menudo and the famous Bloody Mary are similar in the kick in the ass they give to the afflicted. Both remedies are spicy and sort of nutritional. But whereas the Bloody Mary uses the "hair of the dog" method to chase away the pain (i.e., using booze to cure overboozin'), menudo appears to be using belly to heal a bellyache. Maybe a dollop of brain or two would perfect the recipe and get rid of this hellacious headache. Whatever the trick is, menudo seems to make me feel almost whole again.

The weekend belongs to menudo. Most Mexican restaurants, taquerias and taco trucks serve menudo only on the weekends. Why? Menudo takes a long, long time to make which is one reason. Clearly the other reason is that most of the alcoholic fueled debauchery happens on Friday and Saturday nights. It's basic market timing principles at work really.

I've eaten menudo at various and sundry places all over Los Angeles and for some reason very few of them include hominy in the recipe. Hominy is a hulled corn from which the bran and germ have been removed then the kernel is boiled until tender. I'm not sure why hominy is deleted. Besides being a purist, I really enjoy the added texture and mellowness that it brings to the dish. The restaurant I frequent for menudo excludes hominy as well. But because of how superior their menudo's flavor is and how generous the portions and ingredients are, it's easy to forgive the lack of hominy - so long as everything else is on key.

My favorite restaurant menudo in LA isn't found at a typical Mexican eatery. In fact, technically, it isn't a Mexican restaurant at all. It's Toms #1 (no apostrophe - maybe it's named after lots of Toms) on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica. Toms #1 is a lot like those other generic diners in cities across America. These joints have really simple yet hard to recall names like Bob's #3, Jons #2 or Jim's Burgers #4. Toms #1 began as a burger stand then started doing pretty good Mexican fare when the neighborhood's palate reflected more south of the border rather than just south of the Palisades. Every single time I go to Toms #1 there is some kind of significant blood alcohol level coursing through my veins. And every single time I'm there, I stare dumbstruck at the massive menu that hangs over the grill just behind the front counter where the bored looking Mexican lady waits for my order. I mumble on and on about what I should get, sounding very much like Toms' semi-regular, schizophrenic, homeless customers. And, predictably, every single time I end up ordering their best dish, the menudo. As previously noted, Toms' menudo doesn't have any hominy. It does however have a hefty helping of honeycomb tripe and nice big chunks of tendon removed from the hooves. I heart tendon. And for me tendon plus tripe is like peanut butter and chocolate to Reese's Peanut Butter Cup enthusiasts - two great tastes that go great together!

Menudo is also an interactive dish because there is some prepping to do before mowing down - kinda like Vietnamese pho noodles. Escorting the steaming bowl of tripe soup is a little, cardboard container filled with menudo dressings like fresh fragrant cilantro and diced, crisp, sweet, white onions, also included are a couple of slices of juicy zesty lime. Shake on some lively oregano and then drizzle on a bit of hot sauce, and finally you can kiss your hangover adios!

However my all time favorite menudo isn't found in a restaurant, taco stand or even a taco truck. Like most of the world's best cooking it's found only in someone's home kitchen. My good friend Gina's father made the best menudo I've ever eaten. He would mercifully serve it up every New Year's morning. Although I didn't drink like Mickey Rourke back then, her dad's menudo was still able to revive me like a hearty bowl of chicken soup would. Best of all, Gina's dad never forgot the hominy.

Now that my hangover's gone, I swear never to touch another drink, so help me. Then again, menudo just wouldn't be the same without a hangover to get rid of. Some things just go hand in hand, I suppose. Okay, so maybe daddy doesn't drink because the baby cries. Maybe he drinks because he's a good for nothing drunk. Or maybe he drinks just so he has a reason to eat menudo. Oh, who cares why. Bartender, set 'em up!