We ordered Amanda's Salad ($2.95) just because it was a cabbage salad, not a slaw.
Like most guacamole dips that are served freshly made, it was delightful. Alongside came a good cooked salsa and crisp chips. The very first item we tried, a guacamole appetizer ($4.95), was a very fresh preparation of cubed guacamole stirred with onions and other accents. The nopales bits themselves don't have a bold flavor but provide an appealing contrast in texture for the dish. The tasty mix comes with flour or corn tortillas and a choice of homestyle sauces, in our case verde. One of the restaurant's specials is nopalitos con carne ($6.95) in which de-thorned and diced nopales are served with tender pork, chilies, refried beans and rice. Nopales, thick paddle-shaped leaves of the prickly pear cactus, are highlighted in at least one of the dishes, and might appear in other traditional preparations. The slightly unusual element in the cafe's cooking figures in its name. Adding to the family feel, the day we dropped in for lunch we were able exchange smiles and chat briefly with Lopez's mother on our way out. When he decided to reopen the cafe last year, he spruced up the building's walls with vivid colors, added comfortable booths and table seating, and hung attractive portraits of his ranchera star sister, Alicia Juarez, and her late husband, Jose Alfredo Jimenez.
"Some of my fondest childhood memories were at the restaurant!" "I practically grew up at the restaurant," Lopez writes on the cafe's website. The Seventh Street eatery has been in the family since 1954 when it was owned and operated by his grandmother, Delfina Palazuelos. Nopalito Cafe continues as part of that family tradition. Lopez himself operated Angelo's Comida Mexicana in Camarillo in the late 1980s. His grandfather Adolfo Palazuelos owned and operated Sinaloa Cafe in Oxnard in the mid-1940s uncle Rudy Palazuelos and his wife Delfina ran the Don Panchos restaurant in Oxnard and his aunt, sister and cousin each owned separate eateries in Colorado. Now holding forth at his Nopalito Cafe in Oxnard, Lopez is proud of his family's long history as restaurateurs. Angelo Lopez feels the force is with him, or at least there's an ample supply of cooking genes in his DNA.
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