When chef Andy Zambrano started Comal, he worked and learned at Kitchen Mouse in Highland Park. After culinary school in Colorado, he moved and cooked around the Pacific Northwest for almost a decade before heading back to Los Angeles. Then in 2019, wanting to experiment with his favorite flavors and ingredients and wanting to do something about what he felt was a lack of honesty or versatility in a lot of vegan Mexican food in Los Angeles, he decided to create his iteration. Now, he navigates San Gabriel Valley and other L.A. areas to pop up and collab with businesses like Burgerlords and Soft Humans. He also leads Mantra Coffee as head chef, and he has been able to grow Comal into a vehicle for tradition, experimentation, and understanding. Most importantly, he’s developed a vision that he’s proud of and is constantly growing.
At the end of March, he popped up at Burgerlords in Highland Park. That night, owner Fred Guerrero gave him complete access to the kitchen, and the line started to fill up pretty early. Andy regularly designs Comal versions of things like esquites, empanadas, chilaquiles, pozole, and a guajillo-broth Risotto. But for that evening, he kept service streamlined with four types of tacos. Atop fresh-pressed and perfectly-stretchy corn tortillas, each filling had a distinct pull into savory, sweet, and spicy levels and ranged in textures from juicy to crunchy to that tingly feeling you get in your jaw when you drink Sangria or eat Thai food or red starbursts.
All four taco variations were bonkers. The crispy/tender chorizo in the recado negro chile paste; the salted Yukon potatoes with a tangy spice of the salsa verde; the smoked jackfruit marinated in a sweet annatto sauce and habanero chile, topped with red onion curtido; the delicately seared button mushrooms tossed in salsa macha, each with fresh onion, cilantro, and lime (the real “holy trinity” for many of us in Los Ángeles).