When Omar Limon serves tetelas at Hoja Blanca, a weekly pop-up held midweek at the sleek bar Truss & Twine in Palm Springs, he uses their pointy scalene-triangle shape as a central subject, guiding the viewer’s eye through a series of shapes and colors and contrasts. His plates stun you with their composition before they jolt you with their complex deliciousness.
Seriously great Mexican cooking in Palm Springs
Earlier this month, he stuffed a tetela made of blue-corn masa with creamy refried Mayocoba beans booming bacon and chorizo. Underneath: a lime-green puree of tomatillos and poblanos smoothed into a silky ring. Over top: a thin, precise square of fried pork belly, glazed with piloncillo and finished with a flurry of cotija.
The food arrived on a mottled brown ceramic plate, its inexact edges forming something between a circle and an octagon. It had been chosen with intention to visually complete the layered geometries.
Like a little kid touching a finger to a painting when the museum guard isn’t looking, taking knife and fork to this artistry felt subversive. For a few seconds, anyway. Then earthy-rich flavors were colliding with sharp ones, and the ping of dark caramel sweetness had offset the crackly meat. The demolition held its own beauty.
Omar Limon and Blanca Flores Torres, the married chefs who run the Hoja Blanca pop-up in Palm Springs with Omar’s brother Arnold.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times )
Dining in the desert upholds plenty of clichés: martinis and wedge salads and beef Wellington in midcentury Continental splendor; long lines for gussied-up diner spin-offs serving buttermilk pancakes and eggs Benedict; the hotel restaurants where a slick of harissa can push a burger into risqué territory.
Coachella Valley harbors surprises too, particularly in the strip malls farther down California State Route 111 where places specializing in Filipino, Peruvian, Argentinian or even Balkan cooking can thrive.
For your getaway travel planning, The Times last week published my updated dining guide to Palm Springs and the surrounding areas. Fresh additions include the swankest new bar in town and an excellent breakfast and lunch option with a particularly spectacular patio.
But the greatest pleasure among recent trips was returning to Hoja Blanca.
Quesabirria tacos at the weekday Hoja Blanca pop-up at Truss & Twine in Palm Springs.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Omar works alongside his chef wife, Blanca Flores Torres, and his brother Arnold Limon, who runs operations and delivers plates to customers. It’s the three of them, a tightly functioning trio setting up on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, beginning at 6 p.m., in the far corner of Truss & Twine’s concrete-chic bar. They label the cooking “modern Mexican inspired,” composing a short menu of masa-based standards and street-food favorites reconstructed through Omar’s imagination.
The road to a long-running pop-up
Omar was born in Los Angeles, though his parents moved to Palm Desert when the brothers were young. As a child, Omar he was transfixed by the chefs on the Food Network, especially Emeril Lagasse, and in the early 2010s he trained at the now-closed Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena. He volleyed between restaurant jobs in the city and the desert before he and Blanca, who met working in a kitchen, decided they wanted to try doing something for themselves. Early on, Omar said in an interview, his style was particularly influenced by the configurations and flavor combinations mastered by Enrique Olvera at his seminal Mexico City restaurant Pujol.
Enmolada at the weekday Hoja Blanca pop-up at Truss & Twine in Palm Springs.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Exempting the hottest summer months, they’ve been setting up weekly at Truss & Twine — where Los Angeles native Bryan Jimenez leads a team that crafts meticulous classic cocktails and listens patiently to a fellow’s detailed martini order — since 2022.
During my first meal a few years ago, I remember loving a ramen variation steeped in birria consommé. The idea has since evolved into an elegant take on quesabirria tacos, with a bright-orange sheath of griddled Monterey Jack cheese cradling shredded beef and the obligatory bowl of consommé on the side.
Arnold and Omar would spend childhood summers visiting their grandmother in Puebla, Mexico. Omar recalls loving the quesadillas she would make for them filled with squash blossoms and quesillo — not unlike the ones, he points out, that Fátima Juárez fashions at Komal inside Mercado La Paloma. The Hoja Blanca crew has experimented with their own gorgeous versions, making rainbow patterns with different shades of masa. Lately he honors their grandmother with a mole negro, symphonic with fruits and nuts and the smokiness of burnt tortilla, that he uses to enrobe chicken enmolada.
Esquites with cauliflower at the weekly Hoja Blanca pop-up in Palm Springs.
There are also acknowledgments of springtime’s rising temperatures in lighter creations: a snowy-looking bowl of esquites, in which cauliflower mingles as a bonus texture among the corn, and bracing shrimp aguachiles in salsa negra, and flan fanned with Cara Cara orange segments for dessert. The next iteration of Omar’s tetela will be filled with fresh fava beans and arranged with mushrooms.
The trio’s ultimate goal is to open a small restaurant in the same downtown vicinity as Truss & Twine — perhaps, says Omar, a tortilleria that also serves meals at night. They’re not rushing the process. For now, the most exciting cooking happening in Palm Springs remains ephemeral. Many of us love our weekends in the desert. Hoja Blanca is worth building in visits that include Wednesday or Thursday evenings.
A martini at Truss & Twine during the weekly Hoja Blanca pop-up.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
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