Phillip Charles Cejudo is food truck royalty.
He grew up in Highland Park, sitting on a milk crate inside his father’s legendary blue mariscos truck, El Mar Azul. Growing up, he helped feed the neighborhood on the truck’s shrimp stock-based cocteles and cucumber mayo-spread tostadas. As an adult, he helped clean up and detail the truck, while improving its operations.
Phillip’s parents, Felipe and Rosie, closed and sold El Mar Azul last year after 41 years of service. Cejudo and his sisters would not inherit the big blue dragon his parents commanded, forcing him to forge a new path as a chef and entrepreneur with the knowledge he’d acquired along the way.
“[Taking over the truck] would have been against his wishes,” Phillip tells L.A. TACO about his dad. “It was his baby, and he wanted it to go to the grave with them.”
Today, Phillip greets the morning on Venice’s Rose Avenue, trim in a button-down and apron beside his black Land Rover Discovery and a tight, hyper-organized mise en place where he scrambles, stuffs, and flips omelettes on the side of the road under the name Omelette Pan.
Cejudo used his inheritance from the sale of El Mar Azul and the family home to buy the car—which he lives in—along with a vintage 1962 Airstream trailer, the future form of his dream restaurant: Rosie’s Canteen. The trailer currently sits in storage in Long Beach while he tries to raise the funds he needs to transform it.
The 43-year-old Cejudo says he has worked “every station” at an untold number of L.A. restaurants, pursuing earlier dreams of becoming a fine-dining sous chef.
He has also spent time volunteering at Midnight Mission, working to help the Skid Row shelter organize and clean up its meal distribution program. Preparing street omelettes started as a “charity idea” of sorts, itself.
While working at Le Pain Quotidien, Phillip noticed the large amount of bread that was being thrown away. With extra money in his pocket for the first time ever, an idea began to form.
“I asked the manager if I could practice my omelette flipping skills on the street by using our bread to feed the homeless,” he says. “And she's like, ‘no, you can't have the bread, but we do keep it in the back by the dumpster, and no one is there when [we] get out.’”
Expanding on his idea of what his proposed omelette station would look like, Omelette Pan was born.
On the morning we arrive to interview Cejudo, he is surrounded by cops. He tells us he reluctantly just had to pepper spray a man he says was assaulting him with his pants dropped. This is the last thing the soft-spoken, spiritual street chef and pacifist wanted to do.
He is known in the neighborhood for giving food away to those living on the streets and has a great reputation in the area, evident in the number of people who come in to check on him after witnessing the incident.
Cejudo has been sober for 12 years and says he’s homeless himself. His giving back is mostly limited to offering free bread from the previous day’s service. Though he does have one regular living in her car he gives full meals to, who reminds him of his mom. He feels grateful to have a car to live in, as well as his mom and sister in Norwalk and access to a hotel once a week.
His ability to empathize with people living on the street fuels his intent to give back. Despite his “only breaking even most of the time,” Omelet Pan offers omelets with a salad or fruit and baguette slices for a relatively affordable $13, and the cold brew he sells is just $2.
“If I see someone who's thin, I want to feed them,” he says. “It's just part of the personality I have now, and also the desperation that I'm familiar with, understanding that, having empathy for that, but also wanting to give back, having a desire to pay it forward. I was an alcoholic who used to steal and treat everyone around me like dirt, and I just want to have a better life.”
Order from Phillip and he’ll immediately get to work, scrambling your eggs in a plastic to-go container, flipping your omelette in a hot frying pan, topping it, and handing it over hot within a quick couple of minutes, as he stands at his clean and tiny street kitchen set-up.
His menu changes each week. That day, there’s an egg white omelette with grass-fed butter, gouda, chives, and lemon zest; as well as one with whole eggs, havarti, and spinach, topped with fat wedges of avocado and a slick of chile oil.
In the past, he’s featured ricotta-and-pesto omelettes with a side of peaches; ones with tomato and basil; organic egg white omelettes with prosciutto and a side of figs; and omelettes with aged cheddar and roasted scallions. New, limited-time specials are introduced each week in a style meant to be “minimal and rustic,” as described on his Instagram account.
The omelette we're served is fluffy and fat, soft and smooth, light, and bright yellow; the streaks of orange chile oil adding an unexpected spark of sweet flavor, delicate heat, and freshness. It's more the kind of hardy and pleasing, half-shell omelette a talented friend in the kitchen would whip up in the morning than the butter-folded, tirelessly battered style that graces brunch at one of L.A.'s French icons. With a generous serving of avocado on top.
The salad is pleasing, with pops of pepita and a rich, tahini-like dressing. The morning meal nourishes us well into the afternoon.
Having grown up cooking with his mom and sisters, Philip caught the bug himself as an EDM DJ at the now-closed Bamboom in Agoura Hills. The owner and chef, a friend, invited him to make sushi, thinking this lover of art and mariscos would really take to the form. The experience changed everything.
“The knife work just got me,” he says. “I was watching the other chefs be so calm, so skilled, it was like watching a tea ceremony. I guess that energy kept drawing me back into the kitchen.”
Newly sober in 2014, he started anew as a dishwasher and porter, finding himself in and out of different kitchens in just about every position. In Phillip’s free hours, he was amassing recipes from wherever he could.
“I was bringing home huge stacks of books from the library; South Pasadena Library, and other libraries,” he says. “Read all of my mom's collection, read all of my collection, including 'vintage cookery,' as they would put it, Victorian cookbooks, Victorian recipes. So I mean it's been a long process of falling in love with cooking.”
Trying his luck with Omelette Pan at first in the Palisades, before the fire, he found it mostly devoid of the kinds of construction workers he hoped to sell to.
“It was a deserted old town,” he says. “Only big rigs were going by with dirt and rocks and foundations, and so it was like that for a full week, and they were just buzzing right by me, and no one was on the street walking.”
On a hunch, he hightailed it to Venice one Friday morning.
“I called my mom to tell her what I was about to do, and to tell her I don't know what could happen,” he says. “I don't know if I'll get arrested or if they'll confiscate all my things, but I'm going to go to Venice Beach. It was still dark, and I was looking for a spot, and I stopped exactly where I am now. And until today I've had nothing but blessings and growth.”
Phillip is extremely grateful to local sushi restaurant Wabi Sabi, which has been very cool about letting him set up in front of its restaurant.
He holds his own love for cooking completely separate from the childhood he spent on El Mar Azul.
“My father's business is what we needed to survive. It's the things we prayed about when I was a little kid, watching my dad stare out the window and pray to God for the next customer,” he says. “Or you know, count his money and set it aside, and say, ‘well, maybe we'll be able to make the mortgage, or rent this month, and still be able to buy shrimp.’”
For his own operation, Cejudo tries to buy organic, free-range eggs and ingredients when possible. Once he’s able to sustain Omelette Pan, he plans to strictly buy from farmers markets.
In addition to running Omelette Pan towards his goals, there’s a Go Fund Me page dedicated to helping Cejudo build his Airstream into Rosie’s Canteen.
Rosie’s is his dream project, named for his mother. A fitness adherent with male model good looks, Cejudo plans to serve some of El Mar Azul’s time-honored dishes, only with a healthier slant.
“The philosophy is like, simple, fresh food, plated in a way that's pretty,” he says. “There will be a variation on my father's seafood tostada, but I want it to be healthier. Because, along with adulthood and the gentrification of my old neighborhood, I realized that it was a super unhealthy place to eat out. It was pizza, tacos, and hamburgers, and unless you were active and fighting the fight for your health and running that stuff off, you were just gonna become like a chubby Chicano eating that stuff.”
Though he says his father’s tostadas, deep-fried and laden with mayo, were “like a salad compared to a lot of food in the area,” he plans to bake his tostadas using a blue corn tortilla, light oil and his own aioli, and infusing it all with flax and other seeds, and “a little bit more veggies.”
Similarly, his burger at Rosie’s will have a nutritious bun baked in-house, and a patty with a healthier fat-to-muscle ratio.
The road to Rosie’s could be long. But when it does become a reality, Cejudo has his eyes set on returning to his old neighborhood, coming back a better man himself with a nutritious menu onboard for the community that raised him.
“When I do return to Highland Park, I want to come back with not only a healthier me, but with a healthier product,” he says. “I want to cook for people the way I would cook for my mother while looking out for her health.”
Omelette Pan ~ 512 Rose Ave. Venice, CA 90291
