Restaurants in Santa Fe Springs

Harbor Mexican Café's chefs stoke ovens and tend grills to build a menu with some of Mexican cuisine's most iconic staples. To fill each burrito and enchilada with authentic, homestyle flavors, the chefs simmer chunks of beef in salsa roja, make guacamole in-house, and hand-flatten ears of corn to make tortillas.

At first glance, green2go may just seem like any other modern eatery touting healthy fast-food options. However, founders Anita Allison and Joulia Kallah make sure there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface. The two are on a mission to bolster and expand a food culture that respects pesticide-free produce and local farmers, and they source their ingredients accordingly. They only serve seasonal produce and meat purchased from farmers who follow strict guidelines on humane and organic practices. As two moms who share a passion for keeping their families healthy, Allison and Kallah are dedicated to supporting a dining revolution with their natural and fresh comfort food.

Executive chef Brunson Achiu concocts their menu, channeling his Hawaiian heritage alongside his experience cooking for presidents, California governors, and celebrities such as Lucille Ball and Cher. Under his guidance, the kitchen churns out tacos, poke salad, veggie burgers on whole-wheat buns or lettuce wraps, and bowls of rice milled in Williams, CA. Once it’s ready to eat, the food is placed in biodegradable packaging for takeout, on, recycled serveware for dine in, or in cryogenic stasis for future snacking.

It all began with a young wanderer named Ernest Gantt. Inspired by the culture of the South Pacific, where he sometimes worked on film sets, he opened a small watering hole just off Hollywood Boulevard in the mid-1930s. He decorated it with old fishing nets and trinkets he’d picked up during his travels to the South Pacific and created a menu of exotic rum drinks, which he etched onto a board hanging behind the thatched tiki bar. Back then, drinks cost a quarter, or five wooden nickels.

Today, Don The Beachcomber still serves some of Ernest’s original rum cocktails—including his signature mai tai—in a tiki lounge inspired by that 1930s watering hole. A few things have changed over the years, however; the joint now serves a full menu of Hawaiian specialties such as ahi-tuna tacos and Kalua pulled pork piled on sweet a hawaiian bun. On Friday nights, live musicians perform Hawaiian tunes next to an indoor waterfall.

"If you succeed, it will change your lives." Accountant Afram Nimeh uttered those words to his two sons in 1993 after investing the last of his savings into a failing restaurant. Though he passed away the following year, his sons—Joseph and Steven—carried on his legacy, Chicken Dijon Rotisserie & Grill. Today, they have expanded the family franchise to seven locations, where customers gather to sample casual, healthy Mediterranean cuisine without having to build their own private jets. The kitchen staff efficiently assembles gyro and chicken platters flanked by sides such as rice pilaf, mediterranean potato salad, and stuffed grape leaves, as well as sandwiches topped with chicken, sliced gyro meat, or falafel.

The decor of Habiba Abdi’s restaurant, Gendershe Cuisine, is not ostentatious—she tries to impress the four senses besides sight. The aroma of all-halal meats marinating in signature spices tints the air, heralding Somali entrees such as the hilib ari, a goat dish that OC Weekly deemed "gamy and glorious." Mango lassis cool the tongue with a mix of almond milk, fruit pulp, orange juice, and vanilla. Pieces of bur—somali fry bread baked onsite—engage the hands, encouraging patrons to soak up lingering sauces with their dough instead of a friend's shirtsleeve. All the while, guests absorb the sizzling sounds of salmon and tilapia being sautéed in the kitchen's special "mother sauce."

Named after the Somalian city where Abdi’s father grew up, Gendershe Cuisine is an outpost of a kind of cooking rarely found in the United States, much less Orange County. Even so, Somalia’s rich culinary tradition—influenced over the years by Italy, India, and surrounding East African cultures—means that many dishes may look familiar even to the uninitiated. Crispy, triangular sambusas are relatives to indian samosas, ethiopian injera pops up beneath stews of beef, chicken, goat, or fish, and spaghetti and lasagna lie under sauces subtly spiked with Somali herbs and spices.

The food at Cafe Lafayette alludes more to a sumptuous and expensive restaurant than a simple corner café. The kitchen greets the day with Florentine omelets and mango-blueberry crepes, and toothpicks adorned with fringe or tiny semaphore flags skewer sandwiches filled with salami and provolone or waldorf chicken salad at lunch. Dinnertime is when the upscale flavors are at their best, as gnocchi with wild mushrooms and beef stroganoff prepared with filet mignon share space with the house Pollo Di Lafayette, a chicken breast stuffed with spinach, walnuts, and blue cheese and topped with creamy pesto.