A King Thing

El Rey's theatrics don't distract from Dionicio Jimenez's solid Mexican fare.

by Elisa Ludwig

Neal Santos PLATOS FUERTES: Chef Dionicio Jimenez's chile en nogada (left) and pork gorditas are among the winning dishes at El Rey, Stephen Starr's kitschy foray into homey Mexican food. The restaurant occupies the former Midtown IV Diner on Chestnut Street.

It's sort of the entrepreneurial equivalent to buying pre-marinated chicken cutlets, the Midtown coming steeped in its own historical juices. All it needed was Starr's legendary knack for visual theatrics. The overall structure has been left intact, including the blue and white sign outside, now cleverly amended to El Rey's more limited daily hours (14, not 24). Inside, the bar has been retrofitted with Lucite platform shoes, an espresso machine and premium tequilas. Bulbous Christmas lights, metallic car medallions and patron saint candles line the freshly reupholstered booths, while a once-mirrored wall is lacquered with vintage movie posters. In the Midtown's old lounge space is now The Ranstead Room, a dimly lit "speakeasy" with flocked bordello wallpaper, nudie paintings and fashionable cocktails mixed by a dapper man in a tie. (A small menu of snacks from El Rey's kitchen is also available.)

Brilliantly fusing past and present, El Rey is pure velvet-painting kitsch and Mexi-fetishism, in the can't-fail vein of El Vez, Distrito and El Camino Real. And the flea-market finds, loud music and rec-room hideaway vibe absolutely deliver the fantasy.

What's more hazy is the culinary concept behind El Rey, which self-identifies as a "homestyle" restaurant. The menu is broken into plates with prices in the single digits and others topping out in the mid-20s. On an early visit a server told us to expect the meal to be served family-style, and that the cheaper dishes would be smaller servings than the entrée-like especialidades.

"So it's basically small plates," my companion said. "Why don't they just call it small plates?"

Most of the plates, though certainly shareable and a good value, were, indeed, small. (Maybe it's the corrupting influence of Bucca di Beppo, but one pictures "family style" or "homestyle" as overflowing bowls with big serving spoons, and not a salad plate's worth of salad with a microgreen garnish.)

It was also hard to feel at home when the dishes we ordered came simultaneously, crowding the table and setting a breakneck snack-pace. The urge to hurriedly shovel guacamole wasn't helped by the rapid-fire intrusions of servers, constantly nudging us to clear dishes before we were done, walking off before orders were actually stated and generally rushing us like there was an order quota to fill.

That's a shame, as you might otherwise want some more time to linger over another guava margarita and order some more gorditas — the food here, as designed by Dionicio Jimenez, is very good, holding its own amid the distracting environs. Visitors to Jimenez's last place of employ, Xochitl, will recognize his signatures, like the chicken tinga tostada on a cracker-like fluted round of tortilla, the shredded meat braised in tomato, layered over black beans and topped with shredded lettuce and queso fresco. There's his chile en nogada, a large, glossy poblano stuffed with spiced ground beef, translucent slices of almond and jewel-like squares of dried fruit, lavished with a creamy walnut sauce and a smattering of popping pomegranate seeds.

Jimenez has a way with texture, delivering crunch just where you need it, like the thick tortilla chips nestled in the gently spiced blue crab ceviche with thin slices of very ripe avocado. Cool and crisp julienned chayote was pleasantly tangled up with the pink rings of pickled onions, romaine ribbons, avocado chunks and cohabitating kernels of corn. A warm corn salad, almost more of a soup, was a revelation, the corn floating in an epazote broth tinged with habanero butter with a sweet, almost vanilla-like finish.

Back to the aforementioned gorditas, griddle-kissed masa rounds supported the soft shreds of citrusy pork pibil. In the mix were more of those fantastic pickled onions, and some beans, too, but it's the creamy yolk of hard-boiled egg that lifted them to meal-stopper status. Another dish that killed was the short rib enchiladas, in which tender shreds of braised beef were rolled up into pliant tortillas and drizzled relentlessly with an almost-sweet tomato sauce, crema and Chihuahua cheese.

The los moles platter came with a pleasingly warm side basket of fresh tortillas and the rare opportunity to sample three types of mole side by side. There were pork ribs, the tender meat falling off the bone, in a pipian mole — an orange, pumpkin-seeded sauce that was as piquant as a curry. The poblano-style chicken mole was the sweetest, with a dominant note of chocolate and a swirl of sesame seeds. Only the lamb component of the three amigos disappointed; the thin slices of meat floating in mole negro were dry and gristly, refusing to soak up any of the sauce's deep-layered dried-chili complexity.

The tacos held promise but did not wow. The pork belly cubes in the carnita were a nice touch, as were their chipotle cream sauce, but the meat lacked punch. The halibut tacos, with cumin-dusted fish draped on three-bite tortillas with pickled onions, were fresh-tasting but equally unassertive.

Desserts are confined to a limited selection — churros and some homemade ice cream and sorbet. The brevity of that list is actually a relief after a highly stimulated meal. Though their goat cheese caramel (a thick, tangy riff on cajeta) was ridiculously delicious, the crinkly fried strips of dough were more than a bit saggy in the middle. The ice creams, Mexican chocolate and mango jalapeño, were uniformly dense and creamy and wonderful — only the spice in both cases was too subtle to truly enhance the dominant flavor.

For a Starr restaurant, the beverages here are also pretty narrowly curated: Seven bottled and canned beers, five draft beers, a handful of wines and just five specialty cocktails (a more typically Mexican-restaurant lineup than what's available in the Ranstead Room). A nice selection of tequilas and some non-alcoholic choices like Mexican sodas and agua frescas round out the options. It's nice to have a drink list that doesn't rival the menu for reading time. In some cases — and maybe especially in a room with this much personality, in a restaurant with so many intense flavors on offer — less really is more.

(editorial@citypaper.net)