Barrio Cafe in Phoenix: Truly chingona Mexican food

My father-in-law and I hit up Phoenix’s Barrio Cafe last night. It’s one of his favorite restaurants, and my mother-in-law’s, too. The restaurant’s motto is “comida chigona,” which roughly translates to “f**ing good food.”

They were a little worried that it wouldn’t be authentic enough for my chilanga tastes, but I checked out the menu beforehand and it looked pretty creative: salads with queso fresco, roquefort, apples and toasted pecans; upscale tortas topped with goat cheese and chicken and caramelized onions; steak paired with blue cheese, longaniza sausage and caramelized shallots. (You can download the whole drool-worthy menu for yourself here.)

The authenticity question is tricky, because to be honest, you wouldn’t find this type of menu in DF. (Tortas with goat cheese? No one has gone there.) But the food isn’t the typical for the U.S., either. There aren’t any chips and salsa here, or nachos, or the gloppy Monterey Jack/Colby cheese melt that usually comes draped over enchiladas. The food at Barrio Cafe takes a traditional Mexican idea and amps it up with an American twist — just a small twist, really, so it still retains its Mexican roots.

Anyway. Mexican Food Philosophy 101 is now over, I’ll get onto the food.

Oh, but wait. Before I do that, I have to let you know that the chef, Silvana Salcido Esparza, picked a real Latino neighborhood for her restaurant. It’s in downtown Phoenix, across the street from a dollar store, down the road from an income tax store called “Tio Rico Te Ayuda” and near several dive-y Mexican joints with crumbling, paint-peeling signs. It is an upscale Mexican restaurant in a a lower income Mexican neighborhood, and you don’t see that very often.

Ok, now really onto the food.

Before you walk in, they’ve got a few cool murals in the parking lot to set the tone.

We started, at my father-in-law’s suggestion, with a few margaritas and some tableside guacamole. I ordered a jamaica margarita, which came with a few squirts of hibiscus flower tea. I could’ve used a wee bit more lime juice, but otherwise, it was a good, strong drink.

Our waiter rolled over a small stainless steel cart, and quickly mixed together the avocado, a few spoonfuls of diced onion, some cilantro, a pinch of salt. Then he added these small black pearly things, which in the dim light appeared to be black beans. I asked if that’s what they were, and he said no.

“They’re pomegranate seeds,” he said.

Pom seeds? In guac? Oh, dude. This is gettin’ good.

I’d never even thought about putting pomegranate seeds in guac before, but the taste was fabulous — the little jewels popped in your mouth and created this little burst of citrus, and just a smidge of sweetness. I loved it. And then my mind started running away with the possibilities…. mandarin oranges in guac…. kumquats in guac… other various sweet things in guac…

For the main dish, I chose the duck in sweet-and-sour tamarind chipotle sauce, at the suggestion of the waiter. My father-in-law got the chiles in nogada, which the menu described as a “roasted poblano pepper stuffed with chicken, onions, garlic, pecans, apples, pears and apricots, finished with a delicate almond sauce and pomegranates.” (Anyone swooning yet?)

My duck arrived as four sumptuous-looking slabs, sitting in a dark chocolate-looking sauce. FIL’s dish was two cushiony poblanos, sprinkled with sliced almonds, lying next to a white pool studded with pomegranate seeds.

Dug into the duck, and wow…. it was everything I wanted it to be. Tender but a little chewy — it still had bite. Seeped with gaminess. And the sauce — well really, the duck was just the vehicle here. The sauce was what you wanted to scrape onto your fork and lick off, because it was hot and acidy and sweet and smoky. It straddled a blurry line between Thai and Mexican flavors, which was awesome, because so much Mexican food has an Asian undercurrent, and not many people pick up on it.

I needed this sauce, to fill a hole in my being that I didn’t even know existed. So I scraped and licked some more. I mixed it with my mashed potatoes and ate those too. Soon it looked like I’d wiped the plate clean with a paper towel. (Apologize for the blurry pics, but the lighting was dim and I didn’t want to take my plate into the kitchen for a better shot.)

“Guess I liked it,” I told my father-in-law.

His chiles en nogada was even more decadent. A tumble of meat and dried fruit spilled out of the gash in his roasted chile, kind of like when you cut into a fresh piece of lasagna and all the yumminess flows out. This had that same mind-melting comfort to it. It was soft, and gooey, with these slithery strips of carbon-y roasted poblano. You could not have asked for anything more.

After tasting it, I wished we would have split each plate and shared. But I’d already finished my duck — inhaled it, really — so it was too late for that.

For dessert, I chose the Oaxacan chocolate cake, but our server told us they were out. He recommended the churros, saying one customer had gushed that they were “indescribably delicious.” Usually I’m not big on churros in restaurants — I’ve had some mediocre ones — but I gave in.

So, so glad I did. The churros arrived piping hot, their tops drizzled with cajeta. I cut into one with my fork and popped it in my mouth, and little molten lava spoonfuls of cajeta oozed out of the dough. Cajeta-filled churros, people. Cajeta filled churros.

I missed that precious detail on the menu (I’d thought they were plain old churros) and now, my mouth slicked with goats-milk caramel and cinnamon-sugar sand, I flashed back to being at kid at Disneyland, and how I used to get a churro on every visit. You could smell the churros from three rides over, and they always smelled so good, and that first bite always changed the day from good to fantastic.

I was having an eight-year-old Lesley moment. This was me, at Disneyland, biting into that first churro. I felt indescribably happy.

Somehow, my already full stomach finished the churros, and then a glass of 7 Leguas, which is my fave tequila in Mexico City. (The impressive tequila list, two full pages long, single-spaced, also had Chinaco.)

My father-in-law and I walked to the car, parked behind a nearby mortuary, full and happy. In the car, I tweeted that the food at Barrio Cafe really lived up to its motto. This was definitely chingona stuff.