So it’s, like, three o’clock on Saturday and Pica is jammers.
The tunes are banging, everyone has a margarita or a mezcal in front of them, the vibe is sky-high, the tacos are ace, there isn’t a seat in the house, and it feels like Belmont Road is Belfast’s Berghain.
So, 3am, right?
Sorry, 3pm. Saturday afternoon. ‘Cause, you know, Belfast, tacos, tequila, tunes = Pica.
Pica messes with your circadian rhythms. You step into this little room in mid-afternoon, and in five minutes it feels like the middle of the night. The secret of this East Belfast time travel isn’t just the excellent food or the excellent drinks: it’s the vibe.
Pica has caught a wave. Cally Carrigan and Ady Hamilton opened the room back in May, cranking out 700 hand-pressed tortillas each week. That dedication to hand-made dishes shines with every plate, and shows the simple truth about Pica: this crew get what Mexican food is all about.
You can see that straight away in the dust-rust-pink colours they have used for the room, colours that you would see in Mexico city itself, a fact which is always an important signifier for real Mexican cooking – if they can’t get the colours right, then they sure can’t get the grub right.
And the attention to detail with the drinks is inspiring. The clear ice cube in the mango, chilli and coconut margarita – from a list offering 11 different riffs – was topped with a sliver of chilli, and you could make a merry idiot of yourself with a few of these. The house Modelo beer was just bang on, and there are half a dozen mezcals and a rake of tequilas.
The menu divides into tacos, small plates, sides and a single dessert, the horchata ice cream. Follow the crowd and start with the totopos, a bowl of fried corn chips with an excellent house guac, which is accompanied by a trio of house salsas – verde; roja and macha, and we added a habanero salsa for a little more fire.
We chose six plates for our trio: raw tuna tostada; brochetas al pastor; crab tostada; beef birria; Baja fish; and padron peppers.
The most radical riff here was to serve the classic pork and pineapple of the traditional al pastor as four meticulously executed brochettes of pork confetti’ed with coriander and pineapple salsa. This was a daring move, and the dish worked, offering the sort of original vision that you might expect from a great taco expert like Alex Stupak, of New York’s Empellón.
The Baja fish was made with halibut, and again the vital detail here was the slender shredded cabbage in the slaw, allowing it to partner with the crisply battered fish, the crema and the pico de gallo, top level cooking.
The padron peppers were arrayed in a merry ferris wheel around a wodge of jalapeno ricotta and were resplendently charred, and the kitchen handled the raw tuna and the crab tostados with real skill, each tostado yielding freshness, acidity and crispness.
The quesabirria beef tacos are nothing less than a Hulk of flavour, the beef inside the crisp, folded taco a mess of wonderful, primal flavours, bolstered by a dunking consomme that would resurrect anything on Mexico’s Day of the Dead.
All around us the entire room of people sitting at the bar, on stools at the window and at the tables were making merry, and for every table that left there were hungry punters walking straight in. Despite the advertised opening times, the team were working straight through ‘til 10pm, a monster shift.
Pica is a tiny room and, just like a fine hand-pressed tortilla, it is pretty perfect.
