Jimi Famurewa reviews La Chingada: 'One of the most exhilarating food discoveries of the year'

This place, if you believe the reports, serves food so impressive that people are making pilgrimages from Liverpool and Brighton, thronging its tiny shop front before the shutters come up, making earthbound deities of its baffled Mexican-German owners. It brings hitherto unknown culinary fuss to an area perhaps best known (depending on your life stage) for either a massive, child-appeasing branch of sports superstore Decathlon or the pulsing, all-day-sesh cathedral that is Printworks nightclub. But while I welcomed the swirl of a rare hype-storm in my part of town, I worried that it was all too good to be true. I worried, really, that it was a case of people like me, people who are extremely likely to have an Anthony Bourdain quote in their social media bios, freighting an unsuspecting place with expectations to which it couldn’t possibly live up.

Or, at least I did until I rode my bike there on a curious whim and had my mind steadily blown. La Chingada (which, incidentally, gets its name from a versatile piece of Mexican profanity) is, it turns out, capable of proper magic: a lovingly conceived portal to Latin America that, if you catch it at the right moment, justifies all the frantic attention.

Probably the first thing to note is that the decor here is faithful to the best Californian taco spots in the sense that it’s a kind of garish camouflage for the riches within. Small as a modest kebab shop, it’s painted screaming orange, piped with Mexican pop songs and fitted with a ‘dining area’ that is simply two parallel banks of high, fluorescent stools. It is also, as I found, squinting among regulars ordering burritos in Spanish, so brightly lit it has the apparent aim of attracting passing air traffic.

First up came the tacos el pastor: meat freshly winnowed from the twirling trunk, tumbling in juicy, deeply marinated amber shreds, heaped with brightening coriander, cubed onion and hunks of griddle-kissed pineapple. Just fat and zing and dimpled corn tortillas packing a revelatory high waft of freshness. Chorizo tacos, meanwhile, added the messy drip of delectable crimson liquor to the equation. And then came the suadero: brisket slow-bubbled in beef fat for four hours until it liquefies into a hypnotically rich stew. Frankly, it had me posting fallen scraps of meat into my mouth with an unstoppable zeal that I’m quite glad no one I know was there to witness.

The quesadillas — pale, flapping wheat tortilla sandwiches of gluey melted cheese — were perhaps the only thing I wasn’t crazy about. But even they had virtue as a vehicle for a pot of fantastically fresh, neatly chunked guacamole. Or maybe even to mop up one of the vivid rainbow of house-made salsas, ranging from the gentle green tomatillo to the pale orange lava of a habanero, that sit in help-yourself patterned bowls on the counter.

La Chingada’s effectiveness is surely heightened by a collective longing for the kind of cheap, unaffectedly appealing operations that draw queues in the cooler boroughs of the US. But all I can tell you is that this feels like one of the most exhilarating food discoveries of the fledgling year; a heartfelt triumph that blazes as bright as its light bulbs and puts this slept-on stretch of the capital firmly on the culinary map.

2 Tacos el pastor £4.50

2 Tacos suadero £4.50

2 Tacos chorizo £4.50

1 Quesadilla £4.50

1 Guacamole £1

1 Jarritos soda £3

Total £22

206 Lower Road, Surrey Quays, SE8 (020 7237 7448; lachingada.co.uk)