After seven years of serving beef birria out of a Sunday pop-up, chef Carlos Jaquez has opened his first brick-and-mortar restaurant, Birria Pa La Cruda, on Alhambra Road near Cal State L.A. — just blocks from where he grew up and first started selling the dish that built his name in El Sereno.
Jaquez spent seven years building a reputation for his birria de res before launching the new storefront near his old pop-up spot, according to LAist. He launched Birria Pa La Cruda — Spanish for “for the hangover” — as a Sunday pop-up back in 2019, and the new restaurant now serves birria de res braised for eight to 12 hours alongside a growing lineup of vegetable-forward dishes. “I don't wanna just be the birria guy,” Jaquez said, per the same outlet.
That philosophy shows up clearest in the mushroom quesataco, a lightly crisp avocado-oil-griddled tortilla filled with cheese, refried red kidney beans, and shimeji mushrooms braised in house-made salsa verde. It's a deliberate counterpoint to the restaurant's signature birria mulita, which pairs two corn tortillas dipped in spiced braising liquid with beef cooked in a pot lined with charred blue agave leaves that Jaquez harvests himself from the El Sereno hills. That braising technique traces back to ancient Mesoamerican pit-roasting methods used in Mexican barbacoa, where maguey leaves have sealed in moisture and smoky, botanical flavor for centuries, according to KCRW.
From Wagyu Butchery to Birria Consomé
Before he was slinging birria out of a pop-up tent, Jaquez worked as a fine-dining butcher at Otium in Downtown Los Angeles, where he broke down Wagyu beef and managed dry-aging, and staged as a line cook at Bestia, according to L.A. Taco. That high-end training shows up in how he sources and handles meat today, even as the menu leans harder into dishes built around produce, mushrooms, and masa.
The restaurant's seasonal tamal changes with the seasons but currently features sweet potato and organic yellow corn masa steamed in a banana leaf, topped with a mole made from California-grown dates and almonds, and served with pickled carrots and amaranth leaves grown just outside the restaurant, per LAist's report. The tamal is vegan. “Its uniqueness comes from the locality and the quality of the ingredients that we're afforded because we're in L.A. and California,” Jaquez said.
Indigenous Roots on the Plate
Jaquez grew up in El Sereno and attended Anahuacalmecac, an Indigenous-focused charter school in the neighborhood that teaches Nahuatl from third grade through high school, per the same account. The amaranth featured in his tamal carries deeper historical weight: cultivated amaranth, known as huauhtli in Nahuatl, was a sacred staple crop across Mesoamerica before Spanish colonizers tried to ban its cultivation in the 16th century over its ceremonial significance, according to KCRW. The crop remains a symbol of Indigenous agricultural sovereignty in Mexico today.
“Serving that on a menu today is a reflection of the resilience of our roots,” Jaquez said. Anahuacalmecac itself made headlines beyond the kitchen in 2023, when it facilitated a historic Land Back transfer, purchasing 12 acres of undeveloped land in the Monterey Hills for $800,000 to establish the Chief Ya'anna Learning Village and return stewardship to the Gabrielino Shoshone Tribal Nation, according to the Los Angeles Times.
A Hyper-Local Supply Chain
Jaquez leans heavily on local ingredients, and his supply chain reads like a map of regional craft producers. Kernel of Truth mills tortillas and masa in Boyle Heights, where it was founded in 2014 by Marshall High School alumni Ricardo Ortega and Ommar Ahmed as Los Angeles's first exclusively organic, non-GMO tortilleria using traditional nixtamalization, per L.A. Taco's earlier reporting. Heirloom tomatoes come from Valdivia Farms, a family-owned Carlsbad operation known among Southern California chefs for specialty produce.
The restaurant's arrival fits into the broader arc of the late-2010s L.A. birria surge, when local pop-up taqueros adapted regional Jalisco goat stew and Tijuana beef birria into a distinct, spice-heavy L.A.-style beef birria de res, per L.A. Taco's trend reporting. Jaquez's move from pop-up to storefront also reflects easier permitting pathways under California Senate Bill 972, signed into law in September 2022 and effective the following January, which established Compact Mobile Food Operations to streamline health permits for sidewalk food vendors statewide.
Part of a Changing El Sereno
Birria Pa La Cruda's debut lands amid a run of civic change in El Sereno, where the Elephant Hill Trail opened to the public this past May after decades of community advocacy, adding 0.75 miles of protected ridgeline near Cal State L.A. Jaquez has also taken his cooking beyond the neighborhood, leading a guest chef takeover at Descanso Restaurant's Plancha Privada in May, where he brought his regional Mexican dishes and live-fire cooking to a broader Los Angeles dining audience, according to Descanso Restaurant.
For now, though, the new storefront on Alhambra Road remains the center of gravity — a place where a chef trained in fine-dining butchery serves birria next to mushroom tacos and vegan tamales, insisting the whole menu, not just the stew, tells the story of where he's from.
