Little about Birrieria La Sabrosa de Los Mochis’s ground-floor space in a beige midcentury building hints at its greatness. Even the name is misleading: The folks behind the deep, rich birria that inspired me to immediately text a half-dozen people that they needed to come down to Burien and try it don’t even come from Los Mochis, the Sinaloan city in the restaurant’s name.

Sipping the sunshine-yellow mango agua fresca, lavishing the super sope with green salsa from the condiment bar, and biting into the traffic-cone orange quesabirria at La Sabrosa felt like the scene in Ratatouille when Remy combines cheese and strawberry and the colors begin swirling around him. The chunk of fruit I slurped through the straw assured me that it wasn’t just that I had been eating too much Parisian sewer trash lately—the drink tasted so good because it used real fruit, freshly blended.

Speaking of sewage (not a phrase I use often in food writing), on two separate occasions, I and my dining companions were struck by the exceptional cleanliness and pleasantness of the restroom. Do you know how clean a bathroom needs to be to impress people into randomly commenting on it to their friends? As clean as La Sabrosa’s.

There’s no hook here, no trick, only a pretty typical taco shop, with colorful papel picado strung across the ceiling to brighten the bare room, with Maná and Juan Gabriel crooning over the speakers, or sometimes a YouTube DJ. The gimmick is doing everything right and never skipping over the smallest details.

The Varela family comes from Guerrero, nearly 1,000 miles south of Los Mochis. Roselia Gonzalez Vargas and Francisco Varela Ayvar loved cooking and always dreamed of owning a restaurant, their son, Axel, explains. Gonzales Vargas spent her life working in other people’s restaurants, at El Rinconsito, Taqueria El Aguacatero in Kent, and most recently as a manager at Taco Street. Last year, the family found the perfect opportunity at just the right time: a business for sale whose owners happened to be moving back to Mexico. It also just happened to specialize in birria, the slow-cooked meat stew that became the hot taco trend starting around 2020, mostly through its modern interpretations as quesabirria, birria ramen, and pizza birria. That was fine; they had birria in Guerrero, too.

The inherited specialty left me wondering what other delicacies they might have worked their magic on, had a different restaurant been up for sale at that particular moment: Was it possible that they could make flautas, pozole, or barbacoa as good as the birria?

I assume so, because what makes the birria—and the restaurant—so good comes from commitment, rather than some secret recipe. “We buy good quality meat, and we cook it very, very slowly,” Axel says. Customers on a Sunday afternoon might hear the noises of the kitchen prepping a batch that won’t hit tables until Tuesday morning. “Don’t turn it up all the way and have it boil for like five hours,” says Axel. “No, just let it do its thing. Let it cook by itself.”

Traditional birria is simply the soup, usually eaten with a few tortillas on the side. When the dish evolved and became popular in the US, it proliferated and evolved, spreading quickly and showing up all too often as bland as it was brightly colored. La Sabrosa’s quesabirria makes no such mistake, the melted cheese entwined with the beef, barely contained by the thick, handmade tortilla. The silky broth subtly suggests it spent a long day relaxing on a stove with plenty of dried chiles, cinnamon sticks, and other spices. It stains the griddle-crisped tortillas a fiery orange; the gently stewed chuck roll inside walks a tightrope between tenderness and integrity.

The pizza birria magnifies that effect, sandwiching a massive amount of meat, cheese, and fixings in between a pair of 14-inch tortillas to create a dish that could easily feed six or even eight people—making the $26 price tag a far better deal than it might seem. When I ordered one on a rainy spring Tuesday night, the cashier commented that this was her fifth pizza birria in a row. It comes on a round wooden lazy Susan, or, for takeout, in a pizza box, both of which feel appropriate for the grand scale of the dish—as do the impressively enormous grilled peppers and onions on top.

The kitchen tucks the chopped onions and cilantro into the tacos, but the rest of the condiments are self-serve: limes, radish slices, pickled onions, escabeche (pickled peppers, onions, and carrots), and a quartet of stoplight-hued salsas. It was at the salsa bar on my first visit that I began to understand I had stumbled into something unusual. The sharp, fresh smell of the salsas—each labeled with name and heat level—tipped me off that this place does things differently.

They make a fresh batch of salsa each time they run out, they make the desserts in-house, they blend the aguas frescas from scratch. Their commitment to flavor manifests in the warm scent of rice in the horchata, the petite chunks of pineapple that sneak up the straw, and the sleek jiggle of the flan.

Despite the geography of the restaurant’s name, Axel credits their small hometown as what drives them. “Any place you walk into you know it's going to be good. You don’t have to pull up Yelp or Google reviews,” he says. “You just walk in there and you order anything off the menu. Something that piques your interest, order that and eat that.”

What piques both his and my interests are the picaditas, which are on La Sabrosa’s menu as sopes, the name more commonly use in northern Mexico. In Guerrero, though, picaditas are a staple, with stands dotting the streets like hot dog carts or taco trucks in other cities. The sope caught my eye on the menu because it listed acientos as one of the ingredients.

The giant sope at La Sabrosa is like an oversize, extra thick tortilla, with a small lip added around the edge by keeping one side softer and pinching out the edges. That added size and border allow for stacking more toppings—lettuce, guacamole, sour cream, cheese, diner’s choice of meat—without overflowing. But first comes a layer of acientos—the little nubbins of pork or beef that settle at the bottom of the pan during cooking, frying until they become crispy, meaty crumbs suspended in the last bits of fat.

Those tiny tidbits, and the act of taking the time to collect them, of building up the sope from this first thin, barely perceptible layer, serves as an example and a metaphor for what sets Birrieria La Sabrosa de Los Mochis apart from the slew of similar spots—a small extra step that results in immeasurably better food.