[dropcap size=big]W[/dropcap]hen turning your passion for eating ceviche into a side hustle, a pelican with a blunt in hand is perhaps the most ideal spirit animal to identify with.
“They just swoop into the ocean and eat everything, you know?” Guillermo Guitron of El Pelicano Loco tells L.A. Taco half-jokingly as he stands outside his home in Long Beach. “Kinda like me.” It’s 99 degrees, and he’s holding two heavy containers packed to the brim with his “Ceviche Flight,” the kind of sampler plate that is alluring enough to make a seafood lover drive down the 710 to taste, even during a heatwave.
Inside the container are four generous scoops filled with his four styles of chilled ceviches that are not strictly Sinaloan, Nayarit, Jalisco, or Baja in style, but straight-up Long Beach style. It is a mishmash personal interpretation of them all after a lifetime of eating mariscos up and down Mexico’s pacific coast.
The scallop in his “Callejero” is sourced from one of L.A.’s most consistent black market suppliers of Callo de Hacha (scallop-like pen shell clam); his fish ceviche known as “El Resbaloso” has grated carrots; his shrimp “Verde es Vida” ceviche is like an aguachile and ceviche hybrid. And the crab in his “El Mordelón” ceviche is lump crab meat—not surimi, or as he refers to it, “the bologna of the sea.”