Langosta Puerto Nuevo

This dish belongs to one village. Puerto Nuevo, on the Pacific coast of Baja California, between Rosarito and Ensenada. A few blocks of restaurants, all serving the same thing, all claiming to have served it first. The langosta is local: Pacific spiny lobster, langosta roja or langosta verde, pulled from the cold Pacific water by men who have been diving the same rocks their fathers dove.

The technique is unromantic and exact. You split the lobster live, head to tail, season the cut flesh with salt and pepper, and drop it into a deep pool of hot pork lard. Six minutes, no longer. La manteca es el sabor. This is northern Mexican cooking, where lard is not a confession and flour tortillas are not a substitute for corn tortillas. They are the tradition. Baja California is wheat country. The flour tortilla here is small, thin, and made fresh, nothing like the rubber discs sold in plastic bags up north of the border.

The plate that comes to the table is the Puerto Nuevo combination, and you do not deviate from it: lobster, frijoles puercos cooked with bacon and chorizo, arroz rojo, melted garlic butter, salsa de chile de arbol, lime, and a stack of flour tortillas. Each person builds their own taco. That is the dish. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to a single fishing village in Baja that figured it out in the 1950s and has not seen a reason to change it since.