Razo Bakhtamian didn’t set out to make the best lobster tacos in Los Angeles.
It just sort of happened.
Only a year ago, the Armenian-born chef was running his family's trio of fine-dining restaurants in his hometown of Kostrama, Russia, working 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, Arizona, and Jacksonville, Florida.
Today, you’ll find Razo beneath a square tent next to a weed dispensary in North Hollywood, preparing fish, lobster, and shrimp tacos that would be recognizable to the cult of the Baja-style seafood taco, but delightfully unbound to traditional recipes and techniques.
After arriving in L.A. roughly 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. Gamil 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 that are held each week behind Gamil’s Burbank Boulevard offices, where a group of men meet to cook, barbecue premium meats, and just kick it.
On one of those evenings, Razo prepared fish tacos for the group, igniting the entrepreneurial spark in Gamil, who has loved Baja’s fish tacos since he first tried them in San Felipe, Baja California, 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 already 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 one of our recent visits.
Though the fish and shrimp tacos of Baja 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 anyone's 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 drifted over from next door and some fantasy-inspired, European electronica batted our auditory nerves around from a nearby speaker.
A 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, using the sunflower oil that remains 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, 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 for his recipe, only pausing from the prep 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, with sizable cuts of succulent seafood offered in a snarl of crunch; from the crisp, yielding batter, to the firm tortilla and 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, then frying them together with various spices. He blends that together, squeezes all the juices out, and thickens the remaining sauce with butter. There's also an herbaceous green sauce to match the mahi-mahi’s sweet flesh, made from cilantro and basil. Crafting these sauces takes four hours, according to Gamil.
Squeeze bottles of a tropically-tinted hot sauce also sit on every table. Razo makes this, too, with a base of chile serrano, chile habanero, and mango.
To add more texture and flavor, 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, his tacos are great; among the very best seafood tacos we’ve eaten 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 domain: a traffic-fluxed, commercial stretch of Burbank Boulevard that surely must be a far cry from the high-end restaurants in Russia he was recently overseeing.
Of course, that was before he left everything he ever knew behind. Or maybe it left him first, with censorship and conscription raging across wartime Russia, dashing the hopes and dreams of its younger generations.
“There are no opportunities over there,” he tells L.A. TACO in Russian, recalling the tarnished country he ran from. “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 L.A.'s best new lobster tacos. At this point, the possibilities for a greater enterprise appear infinite.
Might he be the second coming of Ricky’s? A Rubio’s in waiting? 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
