One goes to the shrine at Lourdes in order to be healed. One travels to Vichy to take the waters and recover from the sundry ailments that assail the body and soul. But one goes to the Santa Barbara's La Super-Rica Taco to be born again in the bosom of the best Mexican food found in the state of California and possibly the whole United States of America. Don't just take my word for it – Julia Child, who lived nearby, said it was the best. And she should know.
I don't think there's a time I've driven through Santa Barbara, when I haven't taken the convenient Milpas Street off-ramp, and gone the mile or so up the road to the small stand at 622 N. Milpas (11 AM–8 PM daily; 805-963-4940). Actually, La Super-Rica is a stand that has expanded into a covered dining room in what was probably the parking lot at one point. It all looks very homegrown and organic, as if it's been at that particular Santa Barbara intersection since dinosaurs roamed the earth. I've never tasted a dish at La Super-Rica that isn't the Platonic ideal of what that dish should be. Pardon me for growing hyperbolic, but this is probably as good as Mexican cooking gets in California. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to name a place as good in Mexico.
If anything, La Super-Rica reminds me of the legendary Fonda El Refugio in Mexico City, a shrine to the regional cooking of Mexico, one of the few restaurants in the country that pays homage to dishes from Guadalajara to Oaxaca to La Paz to Merida. At La Super-Rica, they also pay close attention to the regionalities of Mexico, though mostly in terms of those ubiquitous appetizers called antojitos. This is a grazing restaurant, one where no fewer than four or five dishes per person will do.
What one orders here is the astounding quesadilla filled with authentic Mexican cheese and musky chunks of chorizo sausage. Or you go for the guacamole, recently mashed by hand, filled with chunks of avocado and tomato, produced as spicy as you want it to be. Those who get the beans will be rewarded with beans unlike any they've ever tasted before – whole tender pinto beans, served in a broth thick with chunks of chorizo and Mexican bacon, which is to smoked meats what beluga is to Caspian caviar. And then there's the chorizo especial, the house variation on queso fundido, which is melted cheese in a crock, cooked with an excess of that super-rica chorizo.
As a main course, there are assorted soft tacos, served on tortillas made for you as you stand at the counter waiting. With lightning speed, a small woman drops a ball of kneaded cornmeal onto a press, turns it flat as the earth used to be, then cooks it on a grill for a matter of seconds. On top of this are placed strips of charbroiled steak (taco de bistec), chunks of top round (taco de costilla), pork steak (taco de chuleta), marinated pork (taco de adobado), strips of grilled pasilla chiles (taco de rajas) and more. On different days of the week, there's hominy and pork soup (pozole) in the style of Jalisco (with lots of red chiles); and an assortment of tamales filled with vegetables, fish, chicken or pork, served with a fruit-and-milk drink called atole. For dessert, there's a rice pudding, as creamy and cinnamony as any I've ever tasted. As a beverage, there's horchata, a rice/cinnamon/vanilla drink that tastes exactly like the rice pudding.
That's what they serve at La Super-Rica Taco. But that doesn't answer the question of exactly why the food is so good here. The answer is the one it always is: This is food as it's made at the source, rather than food which has been filtered through the needs of an alien population. No concessions are made at La Super-Rica to American taste – if you don't like horchata, don't order it; if the trio of freshly-made salsas are too hot, don't pour them on your food.
Over the years, La Super-Rica has become a mecca for hungry students from the nearby University of California at Santa Barbara, for the rich and the super-rich who take time off from their polo matches in nearby Montecito and even for Mexican-Americans, who show up at La Super-Rica in droves to eat the food they left behind South of the Border. It stands out as a gem in a world of ersatz Mexican restaurants, where the size of the margaritas mean more than the quality of the tortillas. They don't served margaritas at La Super-Rica Taco; they just serve beer, and Mexican beer at that.
– Merrill Shindler