San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The Bay Area’s best, spiciest Mexican seafood comes from a food truck
Find love in the aggressive acid and chile heat at Mariscos El Charco
Sinaloan-style mariscos are among the foods that make me feel the most alive. The spicy beestings of these seafood dishes like ceviches and aguachiles bring me to a euphoric place.
I spent months chasing that feeling in the Bay Area, searching for a truly great mariscos spot. Finally, I came across Mariscos El Charco, a phenomenal Mazatlan-style food truck in San Jose.
Because Mazatlan is a coastal city — in a coastal state, Sinaloa — it has high-quality seafood, which means dishes like aguachiles, for example, are marinated simply, quickly and presented raw. But simple doesn’t mean boring: I was immediately humbled by the piquant parry of crushed chiltepin, the only chile used on the truck.
A chiltepin is like a period made of ferocious anger and dragon fire condensed into a singularity. There’s a swiftness to its incinerating properties, something like flicking a lit cigarette onto a gasolinedrenched surface — only it’s contained in your mouth. But if you’ve eaten chiltepin, you know that the vengeful blaze
I found that aggressive heat, acid
and more at the sea-blue marisqueria,
and in my opinion, Mariscos El Charco serves the highest
caliber of Mexican-style seafood I’ve come across in
the Bay Area.
of spice — stinging your lips and putting your saliva glands on overdrive — quickly fades. If you’re a nerd for that sort of thing, it is spicier than serrano and jalapeño peppers on the Scoville scale but does not reach habanero levels. It clocks in at 50,000 to 100,000 Scoville units, just like Thai chiles, with a dry, almost floral heat.
While I’ve enjoyed aguachiles — shrimp marinated in a chile-lime sauce — from Chuy’s Fiestas in San Francisco and Mariscos Costa Alegre in San Jose, I often feel in the Bay Area like I am cheated out of the exhibition of extremes that I crave from the dish. But I found that aggressive heat, acid and more at the sea-blue marisqueria, and in my opinion, Mariscos El Charco serves the highest caliber of Mexicanstyle seafood I’ve come across in the Bay Area.
An easy tell of quality when on the search for good mariscos is the use of scallops for aguachiles. Implicitly, it communicates a boldness, that these scallops are good enough to eat raw, and they are. Raw seafood is one of the many trademarks of Mazatlan’s aguachiles, which mirror the Peruvian technique of marinating to order before the seafood has a chance to “cook.”
The scallop aguachile tostada ($12) is hauntingly beautiful. The raw, quickly marinated scallops are fanned out over a bed of cucumber slices and topped with an uzumaki (spiral) — straight out of a drawing by Japanese artist Junji Ito — of umami-packed salsa negra. The scallop marinade consists only of lime juice, salt, sliced red onions, crushed chiltepin and black pepper. Even in its excesses of heat and acid, there’s harmony in the flavors and textures. While I’d argue that for best results you should order everything spicy, El Charco is more charitable and lets you doctor your own doom.
If you’re talking aguachile, especially in the Bay Area, you’re generally referring to raw shrimp in a green pepper-lime marinade.
But aguachile wasn’t always associated with the popular crustacean:
In its original preparation, aguachile referred to a pre-Hispanic salsa of sorts made of boiled, salted water and chiltepin, paired with machaca (dry beef ). Shrimp came into the picture when Sinaloa’s fishing industry solidified in the 1970s. Today, aguachile is seen as one of the most recognizable dishes from Sinaloa but it exists throughout Mexico and uses different chiles.
El Charco’s take on the Sinaloan delicacy is rooted in both tradition and modernity, thanks to the use of chiltepin: the chile of antiquity. The butterflied, marinated shrimp have an almost creamy mouthfeel with raw seafood sweetness. The sour and fiery marinade acts like a lining of electricity, zapping your tastebuds. You can order them by the tostada ($12) or botana ($18) — which means “snack” but here it refers to a seafood plate — though shrimp appears across the menu.
In the 701 tostada ($9), cooked and raw shrimp share space with jaiba (imitation crab), octopus and fish. It’s a small aquatic mountain with each bite losing a stray piece of octopus or scallop as it splashes onto the plate. For sharing with groups, there’s the Mazatlan botana ($24), a plate that adds other proteins like octopus
and scallops with a crown of cucumber half moons to make your own tostadas.
El Charco offers seafood cocteles, too: While a classic campechana features Clamato in a cup with seafood, this version ($20) uses a delicate, homemade shrimp broth. Then there are placebased innovations, like the campechana mega ($34), which adds pata de mula (blood clams) that tint the cup black. The clams (half dozen for $13) have a succulence that’s a little sweet, chewy and pleasantly slimy.
Usually in Mazatlan a campechana calls for oysters, but local customers requested blood clams, which owner Jessica Osuna and Mario Bonilla source from Ensenada. That’s an outlier, though. The truck buys all other oceanic proteins directly from Mazatlan’s seafood bazaar Las Changueras. El Charco started three years ago, when the married couple moved from Stockton to San Jose. Initially, like other Sinaloan operations, the mariscos truck almost exclusively served others from Sinaloa. Word of mouth expanded the clientele to more locals, some
of whom are squeamish and ask for the raw shrimp to be marinated longer. The marisqueria has a few cooked dishes too, if you’re adverse to the raw stuff, like fried shrimp tacos or quesadillas. But you should skip them entirely in favor of the fresher offerings, which are more rewarding and punchier.
The mariscos lonchera is set up in a strip-mall parking lot, with four communal tables and canopies for shade. Positioned at each table is a bag of tostadas and a basket of bottled hot sauces to tailor your own experience. On weekdays, construction workers gulp down vasos locos ($18), a meaty seafood cocktail, on their lunch break. (On one visit, I overheard one of them say, “We should become fishermen.”) On weekends, more customers dine there while others show up to pick up bags of mariscos to enjoy at home. Find an open spot and eat the dishes immediately for peak freshness.
On all of my visits, I needed a moment to decompress — stunned by pepper heat — with my entire consciousness focused on my pulsing lips. Sitting there, I must have looked like I had just got my heart broken. Then I gathered my composure, just enough to order another tostada.