Since Colorado was settled long after the three Southwestern states, its contribution to the cuisine has been minimal. Still, you'd think Denver's proximity to them would mean we'd have more than a handful of Southwestern eateries to choose from.
At least we can add one more to the short list: the ten-month-old Saguaro Grill and Cantina, in the unlikely location of a Ramada Inn on Colfax--which may not be so unlikely now that the hotel and the surrounding area are undergoing major renovations.
"I wanted to lease the kitchen but was told that I'd have to not only do three meals a day, but also open a lounge," says part-owner and chef Tomas Vallejo, who leases the restaurant with partner Myron Manthe. "So I'm not getting much sleep right now." But Vallejo is used to the hours, since the Florida native started working in his parents' restaurants--which at one time totaled a dozen--at the age of ten. "It was a good experience for me," he says. "I owned my first, very own restaurant when I was seventeen." This is Vallejo's seventh venture, which he started after shooting the breeze over margaritas with Manthe, who was working as a manager for an Olive Garden. "We decided to start our catering company a year and a half ago," Vallejo explains, "and the restaurant kind of grew from that."
Now they're serving margaritas of their own. First, though, the pair had to put considerable time and money into cleaning up the restaurant side of the hotel. "This part had been closed for two years," Vallejo says. "It was a big job. Plus, we had to re-landscape the patio and pool area." They filled the dining area with Southwestern art and cast it in the steel blue, dustbowl brown and sunset orange of a sand painting. Then Vallejo created a menu that focuses on American Indian influences--corn, beans and tomatoes--with a little of California's input (Monterey Jack cheese and Anaheim chiles) and a couple of Tex-Mex items such as fajitas.
The corn items stand especially tall. On our first visit, a variety of appetizers and margaritas set the tone for a semi-business get-together, and two of the three starters we chose were corn-oriented. The Albuquerque corn cakes ($6.49) were sweet and filling, topped with sour cream and two kinds of salsa--one a tomatillo-based, jalapeno-sparked verde and the other a well-melded mix of tomatoes, onions, cumin and coriander set off by balsamic vinegar, a nice nouvelle sort of touch. Avocado slices rounded out the dish, which not only tasted great, but had that colorful Southwestern appeal. So did the Santa Fe egg rolls ($6.99), which looked like little canoes made of rice-paper skins and were filled with spicy chicken, corn, soft-cooked black beans and Monterey Jack; we dipped each skiff into pools of avocado-kissed cream sauce or smoky pureed tomato salsa.
Our third munchie was a little harder to digest, visually and literally. The poblano whiskey shrimp and black-bean pancake ($6.99) featured a plate-sized flapjack that looked like it belonged at breakfast rather than dinner. The bean-studded cake was slightly sweet and would have been at home drenched in Aunt Jemima, but it was so dry that it was tough to swallow even with swigs of Saguaro's "original" margarita made with Cointreau, tequila and fresh lime juice ($4.75). There were only four medium hickory-grilled shrimp atop the vast pancake, and while the cream sauce--laced with whiskey and stung with poblano--added some moisture, it wasn't enough to help get that batter down.
The place was empty except for our table and one other, which made me wonder if having a whole meal there would be a bust. On a return trip, however, everything came out kicking. We started with a bowl of the smoked-chicken corn chowder ($3.99), an elaborately flavored concoction that Vallejo says he can't make enough of (see Mouthing Off for the recipe). It was easy to see why: I could have eaten nothing else but this soup, with its rich, hearty texture, vibrant colors and an intense sweet-corn-and-smoky-chicken taste underscored by garlic and chipotles. Our other soup, a black bean ($2.99), suffered only by comparison--there was a lot to like about this thick, velvety mixture that benefited from garlic, sizable portions of molten Monterey Jack and Vallejo's zesty tomato salsa.
In fact, many of the portions at Saguaro were Texas-sized, but none more so than the beef fajitas ($10.99), Saguaro's main nod to that state. Here the traditional pounded, marinated skirt steak was grilled with bell peppers, onions and mushrooms and served with the usual tortilla fillers of lettuce, tomatoes and sour cream. Plenty of garlic in the marinade and fast, high-heat cooking gave the meat that caramelized edge that, when it's done right, makes the flavor of fajitas so simple but satisfying; the vegetables, too, had been caramelized on the grill.
