Sonoratown

In a city rightly obsessed with corn tortillas, Sonoratown arrived as a gentle corrective, reminding Los Angeles that the flour tortilla traditions of northern Mexico are equally worthy of reverence. The operation is almost absurdly small, a sliver of a storefront in downtown where tortillas are pressed and stretched by hand from dough made fresh each morning, then filled with carne asada that is trimmed, seasoned, and grilled to order over open flame. The simplicity is the point. There is no elaborate salsa bar, no modernist reinterpretation, no farm-to-table manifesto on the wall. There is just flour, beef, heat, and the kind of focused execution that turns a lunch break into something you think about for the rest of the week. The line at noon tells you everything about the food.