Restaurants

Agave Grill

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Good thing, then, that on our first visit, Laura and I were shown to a table on the patio that — with its large, held-over-from-Ocotillo fire pit, commanding view of the Greenwood Village greenery and ashtrays if you know who to ask — is one of the great patios of the suburbs. Here, all my qualms about the room and floor staff (most of whom were young, exceedingly chipper and plastered with gee-whiz-ain't-it-great-to-be-out-at-a-restaurant smiles) were swept away on a wave of chips and excellent salsa (the tomatillo is the best), cold beers, sweet-potato flautas and tortilla soup. Clearly, Clevenger had managed to reconcile, both within himself and on his board, those competing urges toward Southwestern traditionalism, American modernism and Old World classicism far better than the actual, physical space of Agave had. While I could plainly see the bones of past failures poking through the thin skin of slapdash re-concepting, the menu was entirely self-possessed and presented with solid, unwavering confidence.

Which, of course, should've immediately triggered in me the worry that it was going to change again, and soon.

Which, of course, it did.

About three weeks ago, Clevenger and Martinez put Agave through a mid-season menu overhaul, altering or outright dumping about two-thirds of the opening board. While the result could have been a return to the mixed Chihuahua-meets-Lyon Old World/New World fusion of the Cherry Creek Mel's during Clevenger's days there, he surprised me again by further refining the kitchen's output so that his new menu, far from aping the doomed nouvelle Mexican trends of five years ago, went even thinner on the classical conceits until they became a near-invisible presence that existed only in the hands of Clevenger and his cooks.

The cauliflower-and-jalapeño soup, for example, was a perfectly traditional cream soup, built up in the French style from its constituent parts, touched with a lace of smoked paprika oil (hardly a standard ingredient in any abuela's kitchen — not that cauliflower is one, either) and topped with shrimp painted in tamarind juice and roughly grilled. At first blush, it was beautiful, restrained, smart and completely appropriate to the menu — even if by third or fourth blush it seemed more Indian (dot-on-the-head Indian, not hey-welcome-to-our-casino Indian) than Southwestern. A beet salad with goat cheese, fennel and arugula is more or less the definition of California cuisine; I'm pretty sure the Bolinas revolutionaries have a picture of a beet-and-goat-cheese salad on their flag. Yet the sweet corn that crusted the goat cheese and a tangerine-chile vinaigrette planted this firmly on the Agave lineup, with a decidedly Southwestern bass note and high note that colored all the California in between.

On this visit, I was well served in a room where I was the youngest customer by twenty years, easy. Still, the moneyed and aged neighbors who filled the place seemed to be enjoying their smooshed-to-order guacamole and cheese flautas (which had replaced the sweet-potato flautas) fancied up with a mushroom salsa, charred scallions and black truffles that smelled like the sweat of the earth. Who but a classically influenced chef is going to add deliberately charred greens to a dish? In your run-of-the-mill Southwestern restaurant, charred scallions would just be burnt onions and cause for mutiny. And who but a fella just back from the City of Light would do a green-chile béarnaise on a steak, or use Swiss chard, a strawberry glaze and celeriac purée spiked with mezcal on a nice, fat pork chop?

For our final Masters-free meal at Agave, Laura and I are seated in the back of the main room, where the bistro-not-cantina vibe is strongest. We devour chile-marinated rock shrimp wrapped up inside mini black-bean gorditas, an absolutely gorgeous and unbelievably delicious pork tamale (the pig braised in achiote before being wrapped in light, sweet masa dough) and deconstructed beef tacos made with cubed, marinated Kobe on a plate of jicama slaw, tortillas and a half-dozen sauces. Then comes Clevenger's low-country-meets-Tex-Mex version of chicken and waffles: perfectly golden-brown, seared free-range chicken breasts, the skin crisp, the meat impossibly juicy, reclining against a quartered pecan waffle made with a rice batter and spiked with herbs, the whole thing sitting in a tequila-maple "sauce" that isn't even close to syrup (and probably isn't supposed to be) and tastes burnt. A plate of chicken and waffles needs the sweetness of syrup to make it work; this doesn't have it.

Then, as we get ready to leave, we spot Clevenger and try to look inconspicuous. His food has already told us everything we need to know, and anyway, he has work to do: performing his French prep with his Southwestern ingredients, melding New American with the flavors of the Old World. Clevenger is an explorer, an adventurer. He is a guy uniquely qualified to cut this trail and lead his customers into a whole New World of flavor than what has come before.

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