Don’t let the $60 price tag on Rock-N-Taco’s molcajete scare you away. This dish — the crown jewel on a solid, Southern California-style Mexican menu — is packed with carne asada, chicken tinga and jumbo Gulf shrimp and easily feeds four. Add in the guacamole, pico de gallo, rice and tortillas, and it’s a feast for sure, all served in a bowl made from volcanic rock. But it’s the sauce that is a wonder, a complex simmer of Roma tomatoes, dried chiles and queso asadero, or Mexican melting cheese, for creaminess. It’s so captivating that a spoon is necessary, and so addicting that as soon as the weather chills, it will be on the menu as a soup.

This is all Logan Trotter’s doing. Trotter, a New Orleans native who spent 10 years of his childhood in San Diego before returning to Louisiana, opened Rock-N-Taco on Cinco de Mayo. Although there’s no business connection to the neighboring Rock-N-Sake on Fulton, it’s because he was working there, rolling sushi in between business enterprises during the pandemic, that he saw the space was for lease. “I walked by and remembered how great the space was when it was RioMar,” Trotter says. “I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do there, but I knew it was time to really go back to work.”

Trotter has seven years’ experience in restaurant operations as a franchise owner, at one…