Cacao Mexicatessen
Ξ August 11th, 2009 | → | ∇ 90041, Food |
I firmly believe that if I were to graph the relationship between a Mexican restaurant’s price and it’s quality it would look like an inverse bell curve. $5 in Highland Park should buy you 3 excellent tacos and a drink. $13 for a plate of enchiladas at a restaurant that has a margarita menu a yard long but no aguas frescas to be found is usually somewhere the food is going to be clean, safe, and bland. $50 for duck with mole poblano or snapper brushed with guajillo chile at Mexico City’s Aguila y Sol (or the soon-to-open Rosa Mexicano at L.A. Live) will lift the quality back up above El Cholo levels. If it seems like I’ve put a lot of thought into this, I have.
Eagle Rock’s new Cacao Mexicatessen tries to bridge this middling Mexican cuisine gap by bringing quality food to an informal environment at a slightly lower price than a sit-down restaurant. The result: Cacao’s cuisine has a little too much in common with the easy listening they blast over their speakers.
Cacao has a very nicely decorated interior with a potpourri of Mexican items for sale, including chapulines (crickets) with chile. Their large menu ranges from entire plates, to tacos, to soups, and while they don’t serve alcohol (they may in the future), they do have a full cafe to cater to your other addiction. While the presentation of the food is excellent, and the service is friendly, the flavors are unfortunately a bit too safe.
Shredded Chicken with Mole Poblano
On my first visit I tried the Mole Poblano with shredded chicken which was good but not great. The mole had a strong aftertaste of cloves, which isn’t what I usually want in the dish. Nevertheless, I sopped up the last of it with some delicious handmade tortillas.
Sope and Tacos
On my subsequent visit, I sampled the sope with flor de calabaza and the carnitas tacos. The homemade sope was nice and it’s good to have a restaurant with flor de calabaza on their menu (hopefully they’ll add huitlacoche soon). The carnitas tacos were also fine, but as with the sope, I was adding their homemade hotsauces to the meat hoping to give it a bit more flavor.
Abuelita's Enchilada
Cacao’s enchilada with red sauce was good but drew equally ambivalent noises from a friend who had no tangible complaints beyond “It just needs more flavor”. Again, it was a target of the homemade chipotle sauce.
Hongo de Portobello
The one dish that earned raves was ironically the least Mexican dish I’ve tasted there so far. A vegetable panini, that they call a torta, with portobello mushrooms and red pepper was excellent. (Incidentally, next time someone uses the word “panini” correct their Italian grammar and let them know that unless they’re talking about more than one sandwich, it should be called a “panino”. I nearly fought a server at the Cheesecake Factory over this. I hate that place.)
Ultimately, Cacao isn’t bad, it’s just safe Mexican food in an area with so many incredible choices from that part of the world. They should do fine with the north of Colorado crowd who don’t want to eat their meal off a paper plate. Maybe if they swap the Boy George out for some Vicente Fernandez, their recipes can follow suit.
