2018 Primetime Emmy
& James Beard Award Winner

Where the Salsa Is Fresh and the Huevos Come With Weenies

Where the Salsa Is Fresh and the Huevos Come With Weenies

Huevos con Weenie in L.A.

The conventional wisdom on Ciro’s Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles is that you get the flautas. These are the thin, crispy tubes of corn tortilla stuffed with shredded beef and presented in a veritable pond of guacamole. Ciro’s flautas are well-documented on Instagram and Yelp. They have been duly analyzed and deconstructed on Chowhound. And they have been lauded, on more than one occasion, by L.A.’s Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic, Jonathan Gold.

I am indeed an ardent fan of the flautas, along with the huevos rancheros, and the chorizo con huevo (a good hangover resurrection food). But the item on the menu that always grabs my attention—for its alliteration, its aesthetics, and the sheer nostalgia it induces whenever I see it on the menu in all-caps Times New Roman—is HUEVOS CON WEENIE. Eggs scrambled with hot dog.

As a kid, there were two food items in my mother’s refrigerator that could turn a trivial portion of leftovers into a meal. The first was an egg. The second was pan-grilled sausage. And by sausage, naturally, I mean a wiener: an industrially extruded cylinder of animal parts in some resplendent shade of pink.

A fried egg could transform a plate of white rice into a meal. A sausage could make up for an arroz con pollo (chicken and rice) that had already had all the pollo picked out of it. Put huevos and weenies together and you had the ultimate dinner of last ingredients.

At Ciro’s, a small, family-run diner that has been dishing up breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles since 1972, the huevos con weenie do not disappoint. Partly, this is because this bountiful breakfast platter arrives with rice, beans, tortillas, and the restaurant’s legendary avocado salsa, the latter spilling out of its black plastic mortar. And partly because they simply taste familiar, soft and salty, tucked into tortillas with mounds of beans and salsa.

But I also like the huevos con weenie because they are so resolutely of this place. Ciro’s isn’t the kind of spot you go to on an impossible foodie quest for some rare taco from the mountains of Durango. The menu is simple. And the décor is straight out of the tía handbook of interior design: wood-paneled walls and Mexican blankets capped with a stellar jukebox that plays oldies.

Ciro’s isn’t about being out. It’s about being at home, where the salsa is always fresh and the huevos con weenie are always on the menu.

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