Sexless Mex

My friend Beatriz, a native of Guadalajara, Mexico, can remember the first time she ate in a corporate-owned Mexican restaurant. “It was Annie’s Santa Fe on the Country Club Plaza, and it was really fun, an interesting atmosphere and energy,” she says. “The menu had dishes that I, as a Mexican-American, had never seen before. Lots of fried foods. You didn’t walk out of the place talking about the food but about the atmosphere of the restaurant.”

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Kansas City-based restaurant chain Gilbert-Robinson was having great success with the Annie’s Santa Fe concept, which blended a sort of swinging-singles bar — with heavy emphasis on the frosty margaritas and fruity sangria — with a menu that another friend remembers as “Sex-Mex,” a polyglot of Mexican and ethnic flavors. The 1976 menu offered tortilla pizzas, hamburgers topped with guacamole, tortillas rolled around crabmeat, and baked lemon soufflé.

At the same time, another national chain, Kentucky-based Chi-Chi’s, was targeting the same young, hip audience. Both restaurant chains were considered really hot and trendy at the height of the disco era. Until the flashy new upstarts arrived on the scene, most Mexican restaurants were either humble mom-and-pop operations or fast-food joints like Taco Bell. One of those family-owned Mexican restaurants, the 50-year-old Acapulco Mexican Restaurant (owned by Beatriz’s uncle, Rafael Jimenez), has easily outlasted most of its corporate-owned rivals — Annie’s Santa Fe is long defunct, and the badly aging Chi-Chi’s has filed for bankruptcy.

But a new, big-name player returned to the scene when the Texas-based Abuelo’s Mexican Food Embassy opened in the Zona Rosa shopping district last December. By local Mexican-restaurant standards, the upscale Abuelo’s seems as glamorous and palatial as one of the mansions in Mexico City’s Las Lomas neighborhood. There’s none of the raucous noise and clatter that was an essential part of the old Chi-Chi’s personality. Instead, the dramatic dining room — with its carved-stone statue of St. Francis of Assisi, its dignified columns, its Diego Rivera-inspired murals, its flickering light fixtures — is discreetly quiet, even on a busy night.

In this more conservative day and age, a concept like Abuelo’s (the Spanish word for grandfather) brilliantly combines family values — the restaurant is extremely child-friendly — with the illusion of high culture and good taste. The Disney version of good taste, that is: glossy surfaces, cloth napkins, expensive china, familiar flavors and deft service. Plates don’t clatter, waiters are outfitted in clerical black, and the bar has all the sex appeal of a cloistered chapel.

One Sunday afternoon, as I ate with Bob and Ned, the whole dining room seemed to have an almost reverential spirit. “It’s the after-church crowd,” Ned concluded after giving other customers the once-over. “They’re still on good behavior.”

He wasn’t, of course. After guzzling a margarita and pronouncing the pale orange fundido del mar “more like a soup than a dipping sauce,” Ned decided that our tall, gruff-voiced server “looked like he was hungover.”

He wasn’t a very good waiter. I wasn’t surprised to hear, during my next visit to the restaurant (on a weeknight with Bob and Jennifer), that he had been excommunicated from the restaurant. That night’s peppy waiter was so incredibly chatty (goaded on by Bob, I’m afraid) that a manager finally came over to find out why he was neglecting his other tables. I wish I could remember all of the restaurant gossip he confessed to us, but I was focused on grabbing as much chopped shrimp as I could from our coctel de camerones — with its buttery chunks of avocado, cilantro and tomato, more like a chop salad than a shrimp cocktail — before my dining companions caught on.

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We had been dipping tortilla chips into a mild salsa roja before I asked the waiter if there was anything with a little more heat. He returned with a dish of dark, warm salsa brava, which had a nice, smoky flavor but no fire. Come to think of it, none of the dishes I sampled here were particularly spicy. But aren’t hot and spicy dishes associated with Satan? I glanced guiltily toward the statue of St. Francis just as our dinners arrived. The meals in this restaurant may be virtuously seasoned, but at least they’re decadently abundant in rich sauces, masses of melted cheese and wildly generous portions.

Bob raved about this restaurant’s signature dish, Los Mejores de la Casa (“The Best of the House”). It’s a fancy title for a traditional Midwestern combo meal: bacon-wrapped beef tenderloin medallions and bacon-wrapped shrimp — though, in a nod to Southwestern cuisine, the crustaceans were stuffed with jalapeño and cheese. Both the beef and the shrimp were tender and juicy; it’s no surprise that this is the best-selling entrée in the joint. I ordered the Chile Manzanillo, a roasted poblano crammed with crabmeat, scattered with shrimp and scallops, then drenched in a luscious lobster sauce.

Jennifer was more restrained with her meal, three thick enchiladas stuffed with avocado and sumptuously laden with the same array of shrimp, scallops, peppers and mushrooms that had been ladled on my fat pepper — hmm, maybe culinary creativity isn’t a strong point here. She finished only half of it, and our devoted waiter packed it all up for her with an extra bag of chips and salsa. We couldn’t decide if he was flirting or just being nice.

But everyone is nice at Abuelo’s, from the cheery hostesses to the observant busboys, which is probably another reason why this new restaurant is so popular. The night I dined with my friend Jeanne and her two teenage daughters, there was never an empty glass or unfilled metal bowl of chips on the table. Jeanne thought the place was gorgeous and the food fabulous. When her combination dinner, the Monterrey, arrived on an oversized platter (“It weighs 10 pounds with nothing on it,” the server told us), she was overwhelmed. “This could easily feed a family of six,” she said, taking inventory of the sour-cream-and-chicken enchilada, the avocado enchilada and the chicken ranchero and spinach versions, along with a taco and a cheese-filled chile relleno.

Twelve-year-old Alexandra was more critical: “There’s way too much melted cheese on the quesadilla,” she said, looking down at her plate, “and the refried beans have either been fried too many times or left out too long, so they’ve become an inedible paste.”

It was true: The beans were a bust. But I was thrilled to see her incredibly fussy older sister actually eating a beef enchilada without finding some ghastly flaw in its preparation. For my own meal, I enjoyed the fresh-tasting cilantro-lime soup (with fat chunks of chicken, pozole and lots of cilantro), but the pescado en hoja, a flaky hunk of tilapia, was drenched — rather than lightly glazed — with a honey-lime sauce that was too heavy-handed on the honey. It was so sweet that I didn’t need dessert.

“Not even our dessert nachos?” the waiter asked brightly. He proceeded to describe a jumble of cinnamon chips, caramel, praline ice cream and whipped topping. “Perhaps another time,” Jeanne said diplomatically, “and not after we’ve eaten too much. “

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All that overindulgence didn’t take too much bite out of my wallet, though, and that’s another reason for this restaurant’s popularity: The dinner-check average is about $15 a person. That’s definitely pricier than dinner at a Mexican restaurant on Southwest Boulevard, but at Abuelo’s, there’s the perception that you’ve dined at someplace fancy.

Sexy, no es. But sometimes being pretty is good enough.