Razo Bakhtamian didn’t set out to make the best lobster tacos in Los Angeles.
It just sort of happened.
Just a year ago, the Armenian-born chef was running his family's trio of fine-dining restaurants in his hometown of Kostrama, Russia, as their head chef. Then came the flight to Mexico City, the border crossing on foot, and the ensuing six months of detention in Nogales, New Mexico, and Jacksonville, Florida.
Today, you’ll find him beneath a square tent next to a weed dispensary in North Hollywood, making fish, lobster, and shrimp tacos that are recognizable by Baja fish taco fans but delightfully unbound to traditional recipes and techniques.
After arriving in L.A. around three months ago, Razo was taken under the wing of his uncle, Robert Gamil, a partner at Big Mama & Papa’s Pizzeria and the former owner of Eagle Rock’s Five Line Tavern, who also owns the company Pizza Box Store, a supplier of custom packaging and supplies for restaurants including Tokyo Fried Chicken, Wetzel’s Pretzels, and Dave's Hot Chicken.
Razo, a strapping, 32-year-old John Snow-lookalike, eventually found himself cooking at the weekly backyard hang-outs casually held each week beside Gamil’s Burbank Boulevard offices, where a group of men meet to cook, barbecue premium meats, and kick it.
One week, Razo prepared fish tacos for the group, igniting the entrepreneurial spark in Gamil, who has loved Baja’s fish tacos since first having them in San Felipe as a hungover young man. His encouragement and support led the young chef to launch Razo’s Fish Tacos.
“There are no good fish tacos in the Valley,” Gamil tells L.A. TACO. “I was like, ‘man, these are off the charts, worthy of people experiencing this.’ I said, let’s do a pop-up and go from there.”
Razo's has been open for less than a month at the same location where the chef first prepared those tacos. With little marketing save word of mouth, it is quickly drawing regular customers back to crowd its picnic tables for what one neighboring customer in a Dodgers hat yells out are, “the best tacos in Los Angeles,” during our recent visit.
Though the fish and shrimp tacos of Baja, California are the clear inspiration for Razo’s menu, he doesn’t fall over himself trying to stick meticulously to regional recipes or rules. The tacos benefit more from the instincts of an experienced restaurant chef than adherence to ideas of authenticity.
Though he may have scant experience or frame of reference with Mexican cuisine, the ultimate brilliance of his food offers proof that ignorance can produce something wholly original. And maybe even better.
While waiting for our order, a box of creamy guacamole that the chef whipped up was offered to our party with chips straight out of a bag. In about five minutes, cardboard boxes of hot, golden tacos hit our table, as the smell of a freshly lit spliff drifts over from next door and some fantasy-inspired, foreign electronica bats our auditory nerves around from a nearby speaker.
A more middling seafood taco in L.A. might be made with tilapia, chewy lobster, and exhausted oil, with more sodden batter breaking off in your mouth than actual meat. Razo’s seafood is deep-fried to order with the sunflower oil central to the cooking of so many former Soviet states, resulting in a sweeter, lighter, bright orange hull.
The chef, who buys sturdy, “Sonoran-style” flour tortillas from Vallarta and uses Mahi-Mahi (often the whole fish) from Restaurant Depot for his fish, first sears his seafood on the grill with a sandwich press to ensure every bite of his tacos stays consistently packed with protein. He won’t tell us everything that goes into the crispy batter he makes from his recipe, only to say that a good quality beer is involved.
After rolling each fat, seasoned lobe of lobster in batter and then frying it, Razo takes a pair of scissors to the lobster and snips it in half, letting its pearly white meat peep through a gaping hole in the fried batter and saving guests from a mouthful of too much meat to chew.
Lobster, so frequently misused and lost in luxe sides of mac-and-cheese and over-the-top tacos, may have finally met its apex as a co-star here. These are snappy, juicy tacos where the flavor of lobster pops beneath waves of butter and garlic.
The fish and shrimp are similarly plump and perfectly proportioned, sizable cuts of succulent seafood offered in a snarl of crunch; from the crisp, yielding batter, from the firm tortilla, and the curls of fresh cabbage.
Razo makes his own sauces to accompany each of these tacos: a pink crema for the shrimp tacos, made from boiling shrimp shells and fries them with spices. He blends it all, squeezes the juices out, and thickens it with butter. And a herby green sauce to match the Mahi-Mahi’s sweet flesh, made from cilantro and basil. Making them takes four hours, Gamil says.
Squeeze bottles of a tropically-tinted hot sauce also sit on every table, which Razo makes with chile serrano, habanero, and mango.
To add more textures and flavors, Razo sprinkles these two saucy tacos with golden jalapeno chips that look like fried onions and leave a lingering coat of chile in your mouth. On some nights, Razo also makes octopus tacos.
Across the board, the tacos are great; they are among the very best seafood tacos we’ve had in town. At $6 for the shrimp and fish and $8 for lobster, they are much better than many offered at twice those prices by more polished restaurants.
Razo, friendly and studious as he concentrates intensely on each step of his cooking process, looks to be enjoying his new realm, a traffic-fluxed, commercial stretch of Burbank Boulevard that must be a far cry from the high-end restaurants in Russia he recently oversaw.
“There are no opportunities over there,” he tells L.A. TACO in Russian, recalling the tarnished country he left behind. “You can't even say words. Even if you mention words like ‘weed,’ you can be arrested… and they send young men off to war."
Now Razo is in North Hollywood every Wednesday to Saturday evening, presiding over the best lobster tacos we can recall having eaten in L.A. At this point, the possibilities for a greater enterprise might be infinite.
Could he be the second coming of Ricky’s? The next Rubio’s? How far might a lobster taco empire extend for this newly transplanted chef?
“We’re just having fun with it right now,” Gamil says, unsure how Razo’s dedication to each taco could be scaled up and priced. “Just fun is the dream.”
Razo’s Fish Tacos ~ 11513 Burbank Blvd. North Hollywood, CA 91601
