The Dangers of Margaritaville
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Recent years have seen a healthy flowering of new midscale Mexican restaurants in the city. Sueños, Crema, Mercadito — all are comfortable places that do something interesting with the cuisine, but I’m still waiting for a place that will really take the torch and run with it. I’ve gone to each of these restaurants hoping it might be the mythical El Dorado, a groundbreaker with the resonance and gravitas to inspire copycats in a cuisine every bit as interesting as Italian. It will happen sooner or later, but SoHo’s latest, Papatzul, isn’t it. Fine though the new restaurant may be, its merry proclivities get in the way.
In a cozy, skylit space, chef Thierry Amezcua, oversees a lineup of diverse, intense cooking, mostly from central Mexico. In a trio of sopes ($6.50), savory mushrooms, delicate summer squash, and tangy goat cheese are set on little rounds of soft, flavorful corn dough — like fresh corn tortillas but thicker and chewier. It’s terrific, a simple snack with fresh impact. Sweet shrimp, scallops, and hunks of fish are woven with avocado cream and tart tomato broth into a refreshing ceviche ($10) with deeper and more balanced flavor than most of its compatriots around the city. It’s a version of vuelve a la vida, a Mexican seafood cocktail whose vigor earns it the name “come back to life.” Steamed, sliced octopus ($10), flawlessly tender, mingles with avocado in a thin but potent tomato sauce, spiked with smoky chipotle.
The dishes, on the whole, are elegant and delicious, but the restaurant falls into what I call the “tequila trap.” Italian restaurants, like Italian mammas, focus primarily on feeding you. But too many Mexican restaurants seem conflicted about that cornerstone: They want you to eat, but they also want you to party. At Papatzul, while the kitchen prepares its complex, delicate, attention-deserving food, the servers foist on each table salty margaritas and massive preliminary orders of chips and guacamole that dull the senses and the appetite. The waitress’s description of the ceviche’s subtleties is drowned out by blaring music, accompanied by shouts from tables where customers are already a few pitchers to the wind. Diners who came looking for a refined experience can feel a little squeezed out.
But the food continues to hold up its end. Main courses exchange the starters’ lively zing for warmth, depth, and the kind of comfort that can be eaten with a spoon. The chef, who has worked at Savoy and Il Buco, stuffs a chile ($15) with thick, rich butternut squash. A salsa of tomato, almonds, and currants pools around it. Crisp tortillas form the stratified structure of a napoleon filled with savory beans and mild chunks of swordfish, and doused with spicy tomato sauce ($17), a fine edifice of contrasting textures and tastes.
A creamy, balanced mole sauce made with almonds envelops sweetly meaty duck enchiladas ($18), doused with cream and glowing with flavor. Budin al pasilla ($15) is the sort of dish you crave on a cold day: a piping-hot casserole of whole tortillas densely layered with a stew of black beans and shredded chicken, spiced with mild, flavorful dried chiles and drizzled with sour cream.
For dessert, along with customary fare like dulce de leche and flan, Papatzul offers a delicious cocktail of dark, sweet roasted figs and crème fraîche ice cream, all saturated in vivid hibiscus syrup ($8). It’s an appropriately delicate finish for the food.
More than 40 fine tequilas are poured by the glass, overshadowing a perfunctory wine list that’s a mere dozen bottles strong — when the cellar’s fully stocked, which it wasn’t when I was there. But the staff and the festive neighboring patrons make clear that cocktails are be the way to go here: fresh and simple margaritas ($9 glass/$27 pitcher) with an appealing tartness and a hazardous kick. There’s also a bang-up michelada ($7), the refreshing cocktail of beer amped with lime and hot sauce, and a mellower mojito ($11).
There they are, those big, strong drinks, the very nectar that buoys the popularity of so many Mexican restaurants, from $6 burrito bars all the way up the line. At Papatzul and elsewhere, the ubiquitous margarita feels like an underestimation of the customers, an easy pleaser that sells short the restaurant’s own potential. I’ll keep checking out the new ones, though, hoping for a place that offers just a little less fun.
Papatzul (55 Grand St. at West Broadway, 212-274-8225).