Update: it’s been closed for a few months now, that didn’t last very long….
Tucked away in that odd cubbyhole space off of 11th avenue behind the strip of shops that holds Big City Diner on Waialae, on our way to Himalayan Kitchen, we saw a new Mexican place show up. A few weeks later, we decided to try it out. Its a small, intersting space. I’m thinking some of it is holdovers from when it was a Japanese restaurant, Bozu. We spent some time hemming and hawwing outside deciding if we wanted to do it, looking at the menu posted didn’t help, it was in microprint that all us old fart hyperopic eyes couldn’t deal with. I went in to grab a printed menu and that sucked us in. As soon as we we headed inside to a table, I had to arch an eyebrow at the bottles of Tabasco on the tables. That already raised a question mark in my brain.
We were efficiently enough served by a waitress with a southern drawl, no complaints there, although we didn’t bring up anything challenging for her to deal with.
Pictured above, I ordered the chicken mole. In a bit of a departure from the typical Mexican people have come to expect, the plating was fairly artistic. The sides were also different, on the left was a cup of baby corn dressed with cotija cheese and some type of slightly tangy preparation. I liked that. On the right is a cup of grilled pineapple, which was grilled pineapple. Judging by the uniform form factor, canned pineapple. It was nothing special to me. The main entree was a large chicken breast smothered in mole. Hard to avoid with this cut, the chicken was quite dry. What bothered me was the mole sauce was very sweet. Sweet and savory do work together, but this was too much. Just because mole is made with chocolate doesn’t mean it should be like a melted chocolate bar. I overexaggerate, but not by a whole lot. While not unpalatable, I ate the whole thing, I didn’t especially enjoy it. Moles I’ve enjoyed at other places are more balanced, and have other spices to play with your taste. I kind of liked the slivers of pickled red onion.
Some people tend to judge mexican by quantity per dollar, I am not one of that camp for food. Although my plate quantity wise didn’t look like a lot, the breast was a good size and I would have been more than satisfied value wise if it had filled me with happiness, but unfortunately this gets a sad monkey from me. I give them points for trying to be different, but in the end, I have to say I did not enjoy the food. I have a feeling that this space may be seeing another change soon, its a wierd difficult space to survive in, as evidenced by the number of places its seen.
Ditto to Root’s overall assessment of this place. For the $10 USD cash outlay, my three “pastor” tacos were a reasonable value. In general, the ingredient quality was also reasonable, but the final product was just average. The pork was ground meat (as opposed to shreadded) and there was a strong, lingering annatto/achiote aftertaste that lingered long into the next day, that along with the evil pickled red onion tongue carpet sensation. The service was fine even considering we arrived just as they were thinking of closing up and going home early for the evening. The Tabasco should have been the dead giveaway – that’s Louisiana hot sauce: A Mexican restaurant should have at least Tapatio on hand! I might be convinced to try it again, but if I never revisited, my life wouldn’t be ruined. Considering you can go and get good stuff up the block at Azteca there isn’t really a reason to track down this place. It was better than Jose’s though (not difficult to do).
In general, I give it a ma-ma: umakunai demo mazukunai.
Tabasco! No pun intended, but that’s weak sauce.
Gracias pero no. Cholula por favor!
Cholula? The lady on the Cholula bottle should hook up with the dude on the Tapatio bottle. They are both from Jalisco (well, the family that produces Tapatio traces its ancestry back to there anyway – the sauce is manufactured in California).