Terra Mexican Cuisine opened yesterday in Overland Park
Don’t go to the one-day-old Terra Mexican Cuisine at 6705 West 119th Street — in the La Paloma Plaza — if you’re looking for Tex-Mex favorites like fajitas, chimichangas and cheese-smothered burritos. This new venue, owned by Mexican-born Arturo and Maru De Luna. is not that kind of Mexican restaurant.
Arturo De Luna is unapologetic about his sophisticated (and not inexpensive) menu, created by the restaurant’s executive chef, Gabriel Solis.
“This is a place for authentic Mexican cuisine,” says Arturo De Luna, the former telecom executive who decided, after taking a corporate buyout, to open a restaurant serving the kind of cuisine that he most missed from his home country.
%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150bbc89121ca96b94a11d” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%
This includes a sumptuously delicious costillas en salsa de tamarindo: meaty pork ribs marinated in a sauce of fresh tamarind (the fruit pod, filled with a mahogany sour-sweet pulp, of a tree native to Asia, India and Africa, which gives the meat a lightly sexy sweetness). Terra serves the ribs with colorful swaths of pureed beets, sweet potato and peas and a tiny, lightly charred cobette of grilled corn.
This dish is one of only 10 entree choices, two of which are, essentially, sandwiches: a torta with slow-braised pork and another version, torta poblana, which may be the Mexican spin on the American Italian steak sandwich. In this case, the beef is breaded, fried and smeared with a dollop of basil-cilantro pesto, then topped with sweet chipotle, creamy panela cheese (and, supposedly, avocado, but ours was MIA) and tucked into a yeasty torta loaf.
The opening-night service in the mostly empty dining room was, predictably, on the faulty side, but the servers were so charming that it was easy to look past mistakes destined to be ironed out this weekend. My favorite faux pas was when our server asked us, with great concern, how we liked our desserts. My friend and I looked down at the empty table, then back up at Luis to tell him that he hadn’t brought them to us yet.
He blanched, then scurried back to the kitchen. There was only one other table in the restaurant, but the opening night of any restaurant is usually awkward and frantic.
Still, it was a postre well worth waiting for: Pastel Impossible, a layer of moist chocolate cake topped with a thick layer of satiny flan sprinkled with nuts and sided with a scoop of house-made caramel ice cream. It was delicious.
De Luna and chef Solis may want to rethink the petite sizes of the appetizers; The fresh-tasting, jade green guacamole was una pequeña porción, and a single empanada, a fragile masa wrapper encasing hibiscus and caramelized onions, couldn’t live up to its price tag or its creative presentation in a highball glass.
And yet, I look forward to returning to sample chef Solis’ pan-seared scallops or his camarones a la Diabla, in which the shrimp are flambeed in tequila.
Terra also has a separate bar menu with additional appetizer choices not found on the dinner menu; the happy hour, with reduced prices on the tasting plates, is offered from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.
