Long Beach Food Scene Week kicks off July 31 and runs through Aug. 9, celebrating our city’s ever-evolving food culture. To uplift our chefs, restaurateurs, managers, bartenders, line cooks, servers, bussers, and everyone else who makes Long Beach hospitality what it is, I will be highlighting specific participants—like this focus on Lola’s Mexican Cuisine’s annual tradition of creating a new mole.
At first, Lola’s Mexican Cuisine—a 15-year Long Beach food scene staple—brought the famed mole Oaxaqueño from Chef Susana Trilling for the first Long Beach Food Scene Week back in 2023. It was then followed by Chef Luis Navarro’s reintroduction of his elusive but beautiful mole rosa. Last year, he created a roasted pineapple mole. And now, officially cementing mole as an LBFSW tradition, he is taking on something he has never made before: mole blanco.
“Mole is the other blank canvas of Mexican food outside the tortilla,” Chef Luis said. “There are so many ways to interpret it, and it varies with each state you visit in Mexico. With the success of the first year’s dish, it’s been both fun and an honor to continue this tradition for LBFSW.”
This year’s iteration of mole proves to be Chef Luis’s mightiest: spicy, slightly sweet, plentily nutty.
For Chef Luis, mole isn’t simply a sauce. It is one of Mexico’s greatest culinary expressions, capable of telling countless stories through regional ingredients, family traditions, and painstaking technique. This year marks a personal milestone: the first mole blanco of his culinary career, a notoriously intricate style that trades the deep, chocolatey, earthy hues of more familiar moles for a luminous sauce built on layers of spice, fruit, nuts, and delicate sweetness.
The resulting mole blanco is every bit as complex as its reputation suggests. The list of ingredients seems endless.
Honeycrisp apples, yellow raisins, white chocolate, and plantains act as its base. Habaneros for the heat. An herbal array of cinnamon, cloves, anise, black pepper… And almonds, pine nuts, and sesame seeds for that nuttiness.
The result is a wonderfully spicy, gently sweet, and richly nutty dish without allowing any single flavor to dominate. Chef Luis pairs the labor-intensive mole with a hanger steak and charred toy box squash, creating a dish that celebrates both the depth of Mexican culinary tradition and his own continued evolution as a chef—exactly the kind of ambitious, one-off creation that Long Beach Food Scene Week was designed to inspire.
Let’s take a look back his mole journey…
A Chef Luis original, mole rosa is one of Lola’s Mexican Cuisine’s best-kept secrets.
There have been many great moles at Lola’s, but Chef Luis’s mole rosa is particularly special.
The first time I had it was at a mezcal tasting in the summer of 2022. I called it one of the best dishes he’s ever created. And then he briefly featured it, rightfully, as a Valentine’s Day special nearly a year and a half ago. It has never been served publicly since, except once, for LBFSW 2024.
This stunning, massively layered mole—a red rose-hued sauce dotted with Mexican squash and flowers—is a gorgeous ode to the mighty moles of Oaxaca. But in this particular version, the swirls of chocolate, bitterness, and baking spice are replaced with swirls of acid, heat, and nuttiness. Habanero and chile güero punch up the spice. Cloves, and other spices, adding hints of sweetness. Cranberries for tartness and color, and nuts for earthiness…
This amalgamation truly sets it apart as one of the most intriguing moles on this side of the border. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it could easily hold its own on Chef Óscar Garza’s celebrated mole platter from Bruna in Guadalajara. It’s not just a fine addition, but a potential standout among the offerings of one of Mexico’s top mole purveyors.
The first mole for LBFSW cemented Lola’s place in the food scene as one that looks at the broader picture of Mexican cuisine.
The arrival of Chef Susana’s mole to Long Beach largely cemented how Lola’s Mexican Cuisine—more than any other Mexican restaurant in the city—was trying to examine its relation to the best of Mexico proper. After all, Chef Susana’s mole made even Thomas Keller and Rick Bayless say, “Yeah, I can’t create something that well.”
Trilling’s mole is the stuff of culinary legend. That mole, using sole ingredients native to Oaxaca, is one of the reasons Trilling vacated Texas for the fertile land of Oaxaca. American chefs can try as they might to make traditional mole negro Oaxaqueño, but the simple fact is that many of the ingredients—from the beautifully black pasilla mixe and earthy chillable chile to the rare bi-color cacao beans—aren’t here or if they are, aren’t as fresh or quality-centric.
This isn’t to talk about the ingredients: Her chile paste alone mixes five chiles—chilhuacle negro, dried guajillo, dried pasilla mixe, dired ancho negro, and dried chipotle meco—while a seemingly plethora of other ingredients are combined separately (like a nut paste and bread-and-plantain mixture) before being met with one another: canela, almonds, pecans, raw peanuts, cloves, avocado leaves, peppercorn, sesame seeds, Oaxacan oregano, chocolate, tomatillos, tomatoes…
It’s a definitively geocentric dish—which explains why there’s that “It’s not quite like the version I had in Oaxaca” -ness to nearly every version of it outside of Mexico—and Navarro decided to introduce it to Long Beach. Arriving in a five-gallon plastic tub, stamps all over it from its check-in points en route from Oaxaca to Long Beach, Lola’s Mexican Cuisine unleashed this deeply umber-hued sauce onto Long Beach last year.
The importance of mole to not just Lola’s Mexican Cuisine, but the entirety of Mexican food
With that memory, Chef Luis wants to continue doing mole on various levels. Because mole is, much like the tortilla, a very wide canvas within Mexican cuisine. Looking at the aforementioned mole sampler from Bruna alone—Chef Óscar’s famed plate has everything from a white chocolate mole and truffle mole to traditional mole Oaxaqueño and mole Jalisciense—the depth to which moles are taken across the great country of Mexico blinds what most Americans receive here.
For Mexico, mole is not just a dish complex in flavor but in history. Like many of those born in Mexico, mole straddles the country’s indigenous culture that stretches back to the Aztecs and Mayans with its colonization by the Spanish. It is an identity struggle that spans language, cultural identity, and yes, very much food. It is also why it is such a beautiful concoction.
For Chef Luis to take on this mighty Mexican cuisine diaspora cog is an admirable reminder of Lola’s legacy. And I don’t mean as just a restaurant—responsible for introducing Long Beach to birria long before the birria craze came to be in SoCal—but from the woman Lola herself; to introduce Mexican food in all its glorious facets.
For more information about Long Beach Food Scene Week, click here.
Lola’s Mexican Cuisine will be serving their mole blanco at both locations: 2030 E. 4th Street on Retro Row and at 4140 Atlantic Ave. in Bixby Knolls.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Aug. 10, 2024. It is updated annually to reflect Chef Luis’s newest mole contribution.
