Delightful dishes with a mission

Homegirl Cafe is the most intriguing new Mexican restaurant I’ve stumbled into lately. Stumble is the right word too, because this pretty little cafe with a special mission is on 1st Street in Boyle Heights, where construction of a new Metro station has created traffic and parking hassles.

But there’s a reason to make your way through the construction chaos to the tiny storefront with the bright yellow walls. Open for breakfast and lunch, with just eight tables, Homegirl serves light, fresh Mexican food, and what really makes it distinctive is the nonprofit organization backing it.

The cafe, which opened in mid-April, provides training and jobs for at-risk and formerly gang-involved girls. It’s part of Homeboy Industries, which helps youths formerly in gangs remake their lives.

Homegirl Cafe may be modest, but it certainly has style. Fresh flowers, mangoes piled in brightly colored pottery bowls and a giant azure glass jar of drinking water stand on the counter. The yellow walls show off Diego Cardoso’s lighthearted paintings of local scenes.

The young women who take your order, tend the cash register and help in the kitchen are “Homegirls,” interviewed and assigned by Homeboy Industries. Guadalajaran-born Patricia Zarate, the manager, created the recipes and designed the menu.

Although lunch begins with the familiar restaurant greeting of chips, here accompanied by a great smoky-tasting salsa made with dried morita chiles, Homegirl Cafe’s emphasis on lighter foods and vegetarian options soon becomes apparent. Don’t ask for carnitas or carne asada. The choices are chicken, fish, cheese and tofu. There’s no red meat on the menu except for a lone roast beef sandwich. The cafe will make even pipian and mole with tofu.

The food is light because that’s the way Zarate cooks at home. “We Mexicans don’t eat rice and beans with every dish,” she says. “We eat whatever is in season.” Everything I’ve tried at the cafe has been good, from fish soup made with garbanzo beans to pasta with jalapeno pesto.

Each dish bears the name of a woman, with soups, salads, entrees and even drinks named for Zarate’s friends and relatives as well as staffers in the program.

Pepa’s creamy poblano chile soup is one of the cafe’s best dishes. It’s velvety green, a little spicy and contains zucchini, corn, poblano strips and either chicken or tofu. Another soup, fideo, is delicious too, loaded with fine noodles, peas and chicken or tofu in an orange broth mildly spiced with smoke-flavored chipotle chile.

Two outstanding sauces are cornerstones of the menu. Rosa’s mole, named for a friend who showed Zarate how to make the sauce, blends six kinds of dried chiles, four kinds of nuts, pepitas (squash seeds), ginger, banana and many other things. This is top-level artisanal mole, slightly sweet, mellow and rich.

So go for the mole, but the next time try pipian -- chicken or tofu covered with a green sauce composed of roasted pepitas, green chiles, cilantro, spinach and radish tops. It’s a pleasantly nutty sauce, and the vegetables give it a delightful fresh taste.

The five salads (with citrus, cilantro or chipotle dressing) are large enough to share, or to eat as a main dish. My favorite was Caro’s salad, a gorgeous arrangement of garbanzo beans, black beans, bits of green bean, sweet corn kernels, red bell pepper slivers and tomato on lettuce.

Instead of beans and rice, most main dishes, including enchiladas, come with zucchini cooked so lightly it must have barely touched the pan and a salad as fresh and bright as a sunny day in Mexico. You pour a cheery yellow dressing spiked with jalapeno over slivered apple, jicama, lettuce and a scattering of toasted pepitas.

Tacos sudados (“sweaty” tacos) do have beans and rice on the side, but with a twist. The black beans have been cooked with whole jalapenos, tomatoes and onions. And the rice is green, flecked with spinach and cilantro. The tacos are wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed until they’re so soft it’s impossible to pick them up, so you have to eat them with a fork. Each of the three tacos that make up an order has a different filling: chicken tinga (shredded chicken in a light orange sauce), roasted poblano chiles with mushrooms, onions and tomatoes, and diced potatoes cooked with onions and tomatoes. All three are tasty and make an appealing combination.

The low prices are as welcome as the originality and variety of the food. Main plates are $6.75; sandwiches such as Yuyu’s, with turkey, dulce de mango and chipotle, or Enriqueta’s, with roasted poblanos, mushrooms and cheese, are $3.75. Salads range from $4.50 to $5.50.

There are a couple of unusual drinks. Sarah’s drink combines raspberry and mango juices so that both colors show. It’s named for the Homegirl who suggested the combination. Angela’s green potion blends spinach and mint with lemonade. It’s a dusky green, and the taste that stands out is mint, not spinach.

For dessert, check the counter to see if Zarate has baked cookies. She makes excellent sugar-dusted Mexican wedding cakes, with the nuts reduced to fine crumbs, and cookies filled with mango marmalade.

Breakfast includes scrambled tofu as well as chilaquiles, eggs with nopales and enfrijoladas (tortillas dipped in black bean sauce and folded like enchiladas). There’s a fruit bowl and sometimes freshly baked muffins are available.

Homegirl Cafe is across the street from Mariachi Plaza in an interesting neighborhood that will be easy to visit when there’s Metro access. In the meantime, it’s worth dodging construction hazards to eat genuine Mexican home cooking and give the Homegirls a hand.

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Homegirl Cafe

Location: 1818 E. 1st St., Los Angeles, (323) 268-9353.

Price: Breakfast dishes, $3 to $5. Lunch plates, $6.75. Salads, $4.50 to $5. Sandwiches, $3.75.

Best dishes: Rosa’s mole, Tita’s pipian, Pepa’s soup, tacos sudados, enchiladas.

Details: Open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. (breakfast served until 11 a.m.), Monday through Saturday. Street parking. Major credit cards.