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The salsas here are wonderful. There are three on the table – a very hot roasted red chile salsa, a green chile salsa and a genuine salsa borracha (drunken sauce), tangy with beer, and irresistible with the freshly made chips. You can have caldo de pollo any day, but albondigas soup is reserved for Tuesday. And you have a choice: beef or chicken. The chicken albondigas are terrific – lovely, light meatballs fluffed out with rice, floating in freshly made chicken broth along with carrot, potato, zucchini and chayote chunks.

Most Mexican restaurants serve chilaquiles – fried tortilla chips in chile sauce – but the best are at Teresitas. Some places let the tortillas stand in the sauce until mushy. Here, the sauce goes on just before serving, and the tortillas stay so crisp that you can pick them up as if they were chips with dip.

On Thursdays, the mole poblano is a not-too-sweet version based on mole paste that family members bring directly from Puebla. I went one Friday just to get espinazo con nopales (pork spine and nopal cactus in red chile sauce). It’s not a common dish here, and Teresitas does an excellent job with it. The meat is tender and easy to extract from the bones – a pleasant surprise, because the last time I had this dish in Mexico, the bones were almost impossible to manage. The chile sauce has a nice bite without being overly hot. And the restaurant insists on fresh cactus for the espinazo. (In other dishes, the kitchen will use canned nopal, if fresh ones are in short supply.)

But beware the pork chile verde. The menu says the sauce is hot, but not since a recent incendiary meal in northern Thailand have I tasted anything so painfully spicy.

The antidote is to drink something cool, and Teresitas has a standout Jamaica. Berry-like and acidic, made by soaking the dried flowers of a variety of hibiscus, it is a gorgeous dark red drink sweetened with very little sugar. Flecks of ground cinnamon are apparent in horchata, a creamy, sweet drink based on ground rice. There’s no lemonade, although I spotted a Mexican lime tree in the parking lot. No margaritas either, but beer and wine are available.

For dessert, skip the flan. It looks like a miniature volcano with a puff of cinnamon-sprinkled whipped cream covering the top like a cloud. The presentation is fun, but the flan is made from a mix. Instead, try the arroz con leche (rice pudding), studded with raisins and spiced with cinnamon. The pudding is usually served cold, and that’s fine. But one day, it came to the table fresh and warm from the stove. The sort of comfort food you would expect when Mom is working in the kitchen.

"Copyright, 2004 the Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission."