Flor del Rio: Eating Ambrosia-Like Birria in Boyle Heights

There’s something intriguing about a specialty restaurant, an operation that’s so confident in a single dish that they don’t even bother featuring other options. If that dish doesn’t pan out, they’re out of luck, and out of business. In East Los Angeles, you’ll find several hyper-focused Mexican restaurants/trucks specializing in foods like cemitas, barbacoa and shrimp tacos. Flor del Rio is a colorful Boyle Heights restaurant fixated on birria, which can be either be beef or goat, depending on the chef’s native region. At Flor del Rio, which Jonathan Gold stylishly identified in LA Weekly, the choice was goat, and it more or less lived up to the hype.

The restaurant features colorful murals inside and out, with a flower (flor) standing in for the word on murals of Nochistlan’s church and aqueduct.

Don’t bother asking for a menu. Your only choice is whether to get the meat on or off the bone. Either way, birria costs $10.65 per order, but by all means, eat on the bone. As food aficionados know (and Ruth Reichl titled a book), meat is more “tender at the bone.”

Roast goat was certainly tender, but also spice-rubbed and crusty at the edges. Still, the highlight was definitely addictive chile-flecked consomé loaded with goat-y debris. Strangely, the broth’s cumulative flavor was similar to pepperoni pizza.

The basic idea is to form your own tacos with the meat; load a steaming tortilla with several clumps of juicy goat meat, sprinkle on onions and cilantro, try to squeeze on some lime juice from Flor del Rio’s stingy specimens, and douse the concoction with salsa. I preferred the orange salsa with added chile kick.

As the pile of birria dissipates, it clears the way to load your spoon with that ambrosia-like broth.

Corn tortillas were just fine, but lost their powers of persuasion after cooling, much like pizza or French fries. Thankfully, cool air had no such effect on the birria.