Restaurant Review: La Oaxaqueña & Café Guanaco 

• Alex Springer

It's been exciting to watch places that celebrate the food of Mexico City, Sonora and Oaxaca start building an audience and finding success among Utah diners. While ruminating on this development, I decided to check out La Oaxaqueña (multiple locations, laoaxaquenaut.com), mainly because Oaxaca cheese is one of my love languages.

As I got to know the restaurant, I learned that its Salvadorean sister restaurant Café Guanaco shares kitchens with both La Oaxaqueña's locations, which was a bonus. When the regional foods of Mexico and El Salvador come together, you're going to have a good time.

La Oaxaqueña has been a local must-visit because of their traditional take on Oaxacan cuisine, most notable of which is the tlayuda (pronounced cla-you-da). A tlayuda is essentially a party on a plate, as a 12-inch crispy tortilla gets tossed with whatever toppings are readily available. I've seen plenty of online recipe bloggers call this "Oaxacan pizza," but I feel like that's a minimization of this dish's true power. Sure, one could argue that a tlayuda consists of tasty toppings and melty cheese on a crispy crust, which is pretty much what pizza is, but there is a spiritual difference here that must be acknowledged.

During my first visit to La Oaxaqueña, I tried the tlayuda de mole ($21.99), because a nice mole negro sounded like it would hit the spot. The wait times here can get a bit long, since they make everything to order, so it's a good time to take in the floral tables and the rows upon rows of colorful Oaxacan streamers. It's also a nice time to sip on one of the restaurant's aguas frescas—the pineapple ($5) and Salvadorean horchata ($5) are particularly flavorful and refreshing.

When the tlayuda does arrive, be prepared for the shot of joy that ricochets through your body when you see how much cheese that sucker is packing. In contrast with the house tlayuda ($25)—which comes with a meatier mix of chorizo, steak tasajo and cecina, a type of cured meat—the tlayuda de mole is a more understated way to experience this dish. Before it gets a glorious pile of shredded and melted Oaxaca cheese, the crisp tortilla is doused in a homemade mole negro. The whole thing is topped with some sliced avocado and served with a bottle of salsa verde to liven things up a bit.

The first thing a newcomer to this dish might notice is that the whole 12-inch round of tortilla has not been pre-cut into more manageable slices. Though you can ask for your tlayuda to be folded before preparation, I would argue that the original presentation is much more fun to eat; it's like nachos that you have to break apart yourself. I went with the stab-and-fold approach, where I poked my fork at a pressure point and then pinched two sides of the tortilla together, making a dope-ass little taco that was easy enough to devour.

Though the tlayuda de mole was a bit more low-key than its associates, it nevertheless maintains a tenuous balance of flavor extremes. A perfect bite—one that balances the subtle sweetness of the mole and the gooey saltiness of the cheese with the creamy avocado—is precisely that. But the magnitude of cheese can sometimes overwhelm the palate, which can be combatted easily enough with liberal doses of their fiery salsa verde. It's safe to say that eating a tlayuda is an entire spectacle of a moment, and I can't recommend it enough.

On the Salvadorean side of things, you've got a very nice variety of pupusas to choose from. These traditional monsters of Salvadorean street food are typically made by filling masa dough with anything from beans & cheese to shrimp & veggies, before they hit a griddle for a nice, crispy exterior. These pupusas are made to order so they take a bit of time to hit the table, but once you take a bite, you're grateful for all that extra time. I went with the pork and cheese revueltas ($3.75) and the shrimp & cheese ($3.75), which come with some red sauce and a tableside container of vinegary cabbage and peppers for dressing. These pupusas are primo, and quite decently sized compared to other places I've been.

La Oaxaqueña and Café Guanaco are a power couple in every sense of the word. They've worked hard to bring their affection for traditional Oaxacan and Salvadorean cuisine to the Wasatch Front, and have achieved some phenomenal results. Any fan of Mexican and Central American cuisine will feel right at home at either their South Salt Lake or Taylorsville locations. Combining their traditional takes on regional cuisine along with whipping up some truly refreshing aguas frescas for the toasty months ahead makes this place the feel-good hit of the summer.