Versailles
10319 Venice Blvd., Culver City

We visited Versailles Friday @ 8:15 pm
Dish we will try to cook – Roasted Leg of Pork $10.95

Restaurant Visit
Since the 1970s, Versailles has been THE place to eat in Los Angeles when you are craving Cuban. And we certainly enjoyed our casual evening at their original Culver City location. We arrived to a packed house around 8 on Friday night and were surprised to be sat right away.

The restaurant is nothing fancy – casual glass top tables and ordinary metal chairs. The diners are mostly families and our visit was enhanced by a nice, yelling baby only a few tables away. What keeps patrons returning over and over again, however, are the slow roasted Cuban dishes. The menu is broken down into the following main categories: pork, chicken, beef and seafood. We noticed that not a single vegetable is mentioned on the menu. Even the two vegetarian options were simply rice and beans. This week’s post is for the carnivores out there but we’ll try to make it up to our vegetarians soon.

We ordered the #3, Pierna de Puerco Asada/Roasted Leg of Pork (oven roasted leg of pork marinated with garlic mojo sauce) $10.95, and the #6 Famoso Pollo Versailles/Versailles Famous Garlic Chicken (our famous house specialty – juicy roasted half chicken marinated in our delicious garlic sauce garnished with sliced white onions) $10.95. Both dishes were served with fried sweet plantains, white rice and beans. We also ordered a side dish of yellow rice, $2.95, and enjoyed two glasses of their sangria, $3.99 each.

When our dishes were served, we couldn’t wait to dig in. Both the pork and chicken were extremely tender. The garlic mojo sauce was very intense, with a strong tangy flavor. The famous garlic chicken was served with onions that were practically raw, but this may be how the Cubans like them. We would have preferred for them to have been sauteed a bit longer. There was a good amount of mojo sauce on the plate that became a tad overpowering when we dipped each bite of chicken in it. But we weren’t complaining. Even though the sauce wasn’t shy about being tangy, it was irresistible. The beans and rice helped to cleanse the mojo sauce from the palate. We felt the pork dish was a little dry and could have benefited from a bit more sauce. The onions served with the pork were grilled more than the ones served with the chicken and therefore, more enjoyable.

If you love meat and garlic, Versailles Cuban food is the restaurant for you. They have five locations which makes them an easy, after-work dinner spot: Los Angeles, Culver City, Encino, Manhattan Beach and Universal City. While we thought our readers would enjoy cooking both dishes for themselves at home, we decided to cook the roasted leg of pork simply because we’ve cooked more chicken recipes for the blog than pork. The secret to both dishes is perfecting the garlic mojo sauce. If you want to make preparing the dish at home even easier for yourself, we noticed they sell their special mojo sauce by the bottle in the restaurants.

Shopping
(prices reflect the cost of the package, not the portion we used.) The rest of the ingredients we already had in the kitchen.

Whole Foods
Orange Juice $5.49
Unsalted Butter $4.79
Pork Leg, about 1lb., sliced $6.78
Limes $2.00
Yellow Onion $2.41
Garlic $2.00

Recipe
Below is our take on roasted leg of pork. While we have no idea exactly how they prepare theirs, we looked around online for directions of roasted pork and flavor profiles for garlic mojo sauce. We then combined that knowledge with the flavors we tasted in the original dish and went from there.

Makes 2 servings.

Pierna de Puerco Asada

1/4″ thick sliced pork leg (have meat dept. slice it for you)
1 head garlic, peeled
2 cups la lechonera sour orange juice or 2 cups juice from seville oranges
1/2 white onion cut into 1/4″ rings
1 tsp finely chopped oregano
1 tsp salt
12 whole black peppercorns

Using a mortar and pestle (or food processor if mortar and pestle is not available), mash half the salt, pepper, oregano and garlic into a paste. Transfer to a bowl then mash the other half of the same ingredients and add to bowl. Mix sour orange juice with the paste. Next, place the pork in a sealable freezer bag and pour the mixture in with the pork. Burp and seal the bag and marinate 40 minutes – overnight. Once marinated and ready to cook, preheat oven to 450 degrees. Place marinated pork on roasting pan or baking dish and pour marinade over pork. Place in oven and cook for around 40 minutes. Turn the oven down to 375 degrees, take pork out of the oven and baste with pan juices, as to not dry out the pork. Assort sliced onions on top of pork. Place back in oven and cook another 30 – 40 minutes, or until pork is cooked all the way through.

Plating
On a oval plate, place a large slice of roasted pork on one side and place sautéed onions on top. Place a large helping of rice on the other side of the plate, along with several pieces of fried plantains. Serve with a small bowl of black beans.

Rating- We give our dish 2.5 out of 5 stars.
As often happens, we don’t realize the difficulty in recreating a dish until after we have our minds determined on a certain food. Which is exactly what happened. While standing at the meat counter in Whole Foods, we realized by ‘roasted leg of pork’, Versailles more than likely roasted an entire leg of pork, which we certainly were not going to do. Whole Foods did allow us to purchase only a few slices of the leg meat, which was helpful, but also made it impossible for us to fully recreate the Versailles’ style of slow cooking. Thus, the lower score this week.

We were pretty successful with figuring out how to recreate the garlic mojo sauce, however, and look forward to incorporating it into future dishes. The white rice and beans are pretty easy to make, thus we skipped typing out a recipe for them.

How would you rate our recipe? We look forward to hearing feedback from you guys. Do you have a secret brand or recipe for a mojo sauce that is your favorite? Do you find yourself craving a dinner from Versailles? Feel free to email us if you have any questions on the recipe and don’t forget to vote for next week’s restaurant!