Las Brisas de Apatzingan - Review #1

Las Brisas de Apatzingan 1524 S Flower St Santa Ana, CA 92707 (714) 545-5584 Listing on Yahoo! Local Listing on Ask.com's Citysearch No known official website.

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In my recent review of Peña's I tell of trying out their pozole verde which was recommended in a Register review. The OC Weekly's Gustavo Arellano read my report and left a comment that in effect said, "What you were supposed to get at Peña's was their cochinita pibil. You were supposed to try the pozole verde at Las Brisas de Apatzingan."

Being game for another bowl of pozole verde and finding myself near Las Brisas de Apatzingan one day I decided to compare and contrast this green pork soup from both restaurants. Gustavo states that Las Brisas de Apatzingan is "in a bad neighborhood" and that might be true but at least it's not deep in a bad neighborhood.

I ordered the soup and grabbed me a bottle of Squirt from Mexico. When the soup came I saw that it was very similar to that served by Peña's: almost exactly the same serving size with a plate of cabbage, onions, radishes, a lime wedge, a cheese-stuffed pepper, some chicharrones, and two potato taquitos. But the plate of soup condiments from Las Brisas de Apatzingan also had an avocado slice and some pepitas (pumpkin seeds).

As you can see from the picture below I loaded my soup up with the pepitas but still had some left over to snack on later. Most of the other condiments went into the bowl too making this soup more like a stew that took almost forty-five minutes to consume. A minor drawback was that the chicharrones (fried pig skin) were either too chewy in parts or impossibly hard to crunch into rather than possessing the evenness of the chicharrones at Peña's. I suspect though that this was a fluke, more of an exception than the rule. Another difference I detected is that the pozole at Las Brisas de Apatzingan was not as sinus-clearing as Peña's. You can decide for yourself if that's a good thing or not.

Just judging the soup Las Brisas de Apatzingan earns a four and a half Speedy Gonzales rating:



Click here to see the unedited album (6 photos) at .