Dirty Love

Sean Yontz is a survivor, a success story in an industry that does not take kindly to failure. He worked in the shadow of Richard Sandoval at Tamayo when modern Mexican and Nuevo Latino were all the rage, then set off on his own and wound up taking some serious hits with his super-high-end, nouvelle Mexi-French Vega — a restaurant that opened big and then died slowly, a little bit every night.

And when it finally went down, it went loudly — with Yontz cursing fine dining to anyone who would listen. Denver didn’t like white tablecloths and Denver didn’t want white tablecloths, he said. And he swore to God and Escoffier that he would never, ever make that same mistake again.

And he didn’t. When Yontz came back on the scene, it was with a passion for places without tablecloths, for honest food inspired by the way real people actually eat. He opened the kitchen at Mezcal (along with his buddy and almost-partner, owner Jesse Morreale) to rave reviews. He consulted quietly around town for some very big names, turning borderline kitchens into profitable operations. He got involved in the menu at Sketch (also a Morreale joint) and is on the hook for the All-Inn (Morreale’s hotel). But four months ago, he took all the tough lessons he’d learned and struck out on his own again, this time in Belmar, his second attempt at having his own place and doing things his own way.

The restaurant is called Chama, and with it, Sean Yontz has become Denver’s poster boy for failing upward.

Although I know Sean Yontz, it’s not like we’re BFF or anything. We don’t hang out on the weekends and kick it downtown. But we do keep the same sort of schedule, tend to haunt the same kind of places, and I use Mezcal — where Yontz is still a consultant — as an occasional home-base location for those two activities most important to journalists: interviews and curing hangovers. After a few years of doing this job in Denver, it would be tough not to have crossed paths with Yontz now and then. We’ve shared a few beers. We talk on the phone. And he and his guys have cooked for me (both knowingly and not so) more times than I can count. That’s why I can say that I think Yontz is one of Denver’s big-time movers in the city’s transformation from played-out, high-end excess to serious food-world respectability. I can say it because I do know the guy — because I’ve been watching him for years — and because with Chama, I believe he’s finally proven his genius.

Despite what Gourmet magazine, the Food Network and a glut of celebrity cookbooks would have us believe, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make a great taco. What it takes are some good carnitas or asada, decent tortillas, a little shredded cabbage, a few diced tommies, cheese, and the will to leave it at that — which Yontz has. It also helps if a cook has actually had the real thing before, walked the streets of Mexico eating street food, collapsed onto a bar stool at the end of a long night in Juarez and turned his last American dollars into a plate of tacos al pastor. And Yontz has done that, too.

The tacos and burritos and sides of calabacitas and beans at Chama might not be brilliant, but they’re right. All the little details are perfect. The ceviche would only taste more authentic if it were served in a waxy Dixie cup. The coctél de camarones is charged with an electric dose of jalapeño, cooled out by smooth chunks of avocado and a great tomato juice rather than cocktail sauce. And the hostess stand doesn’t stock mints for customers to pick up at the end of their meal, but a basket of Canel’s chewing gum — the kind of Mexican Chiclets that little girls on the border sell to tourists for pocket change.

Still, Yontz’s true genius lies in his approach to the restaurant business. After crashing and burning at Vega, he lost his taste for fine dining, but developed a respect for restaurants that truck money in gross amounts. Right down the street from Chama is P.F. Chang’s China Bistro. Yontz likes P.F. Chang’s. Not necessarily for the food, but for the fact that P.F. Chang’s turns some serious numbers. Before he thought of opening Chama, he asked me why an independent restaurateur couldn’t do the same thing, only better — why a single owner with a single location couldn’t use a chain restaurant’s tricks to get a piece of that action.

I didn’t have a good answer, except that he wasn’t the first guy to try — and that others had failed miserably. But Yontz went on to open Chama right in sight of a P.F. Chang’s (a move akin to setting up a Democracy Now booth in the middle of Tiananmen Square), across the street from a Johnny Rocket’s, next door to a Lucky Strike Lanes and more or less in the lap of Belmar’s Century 16 multiplex. He kept his prices on the floor (the menu tops out at $19, but more than three-quarters of the dishes come in at under $10), built a restaurant in the round, with excellent flow and tables crammed in every which way, outfitted a great bar with a killer tequila list longer than the menu, staffed the place with some serious mercenary talent and then set about making his fortune.

He started with breakfast. Food costs are lower at breakfast — eggs and potatoes and pancake batter are cheap — and profit margins a little thicker. Since Yontz and his guys were there anyway, prepping for lunch and dinner, all they had to do was unlock the doors, throw a body on the hot line and start serving chorizo breakfast burritos, enchiladas con huevos with rice and beans, huevos rancheros, really good menudo (done whole-stomach style, using not only the lighter honeycomb tripe, but also the darker, more tender, kind of furry parts) in an excellent red-chile broth with lots of hominy, and Mexican toast that’s just like French toast only better, because it’s made of Mexican sweet bread, deep-fried and covered in piloncillo syrup.

The piloncillo comes straight from Mexico, and it doesn’t come easy. Yontz didn’t follow the chain formula completely at Chama, skipping the part about buying the worst, cheapest ingredients on the market and hoping no one will notice. His chiles are also from Mexico — and that’s a trick, too. In really good years, a lot of Mexican chile farmers withhold their product from American markets (or charge murderous prices for it), forcing many restaurateurs to purchase “Mexican” chiles that are actually grown, frozen and packed in China. But Yontz has a good relationship with a grower in Mexico, and he buys the stuff a thousand pounds at a time (the orders are split between Chama and Mezcal). He gets his cheese the same way, as well as his spices. Everything on the menu is made fresh, in-house, from the best possible ingredients, ingredients that diners can actually taste because they’re not drowned in blankets of cheese or what-have-you.

Obviously, Chama’s cuisine is Mexican, but it’s too traditional to be “nuevo,” too mixed up and American and New Mexican to be called “traditional.” It’s not spicy enough or Texas-y enough to be borderland, it’s not Tex-Mex (thank Christ), and it doesn’t involve enough frisée or oddly shaped plates to be fusion. Though Yontz got some of his recipes from family, this isn’t abuelita Mexican, either. It’s comforting, sure, but there aren’t many abuelitas making margaritas that pack the kind of punch that Chama’s do. Yontz labels Chama’s food “contemporary Mexican,” but I don’t think that’s right, either, so I’m calling it “dirty Mexican” — denoting an everything-in-the-pot, all-night-diner kind of cooking where even the very good and the very balanced can come off looking like they were thrown together on the fly.

On the low end, this is the sort of food you’d get from the best neighborhood taco stand you can imagine, only on nice plates. On the high end, it’s beautifully mixed up poblano hash browns made with fat chunks of roasted poblano with all of their seeds stripped away so that they taste like fruit. It’s a mole sauce slathered over half a hacked-up chicken that comes on gentle and smooth and chocolatey and finishes with a wicked kick of heat, or the tamal al puerco, a dish that could have been ripped right off the menu of any of those white-tablecloth Nuevo Latino restaurants where Yontz made his bones: spicy, shredded pork, jacketed in masa and topped with a sweet tomatillo salsa, silky slips of avocado and a lace of thick Mexican crema.

Chama’s delicious green chile tastes like Chinese lobster sauce shotgunned with a spread of roasted green chiles. It’s a thick and almost translucent sauce, slow-cooked, thickened with just a touch of cornstarch, vaguely New Mexican but unlike any other green chile in this verde-soaked city. Yontz picked this one up from his family, and it’s on the menu because he likes it, because he’s been cooking it forever, and because when you use it to slick down a giant, loosely-wrapped burrito, you can still taste what’s inside the burrito. The kitchen does sopes just like the ones at Mezcal — crisped masa bases filled with steak or chicken al carbón, black-bean paste, lettuce, salsa roja and crema — and sopapillas just like the ones at Casa Bonita, only here served with cinnamon ice cream and canela. The ribeye tampiqueña served with a bit of nearly everything in the house (mole enchilada, guac, cilantro rice, refried beans and a tortilla) is like a dinner made of great leftovers. And the churros y chocolate — homemade doughnuts crusted in table sugar, made for dunking in the mug of hot chocolate they’re served with — are an excellent way to end any meal.

Not everything at Chama works. Yontz couldn’t keep his creative hands off the fish tacos, which suffer under spicy shredded cabbage and red-onion escabeche instead of plain cabbage and a lime. And the chuletas de puerco a la Chama — a knot of baby backs served over black beans with Mexican coleslaw and jalapeño barbecue sauce — should be great but aren’t. The barbecue sauce is overwhelmingly sharp and the coleslaw just plain wrong. The ribs themselves are fatty, but not in a good way; greasy, but not in a good way; cooked past the point of tenderness and on into that realm where the meat falls off the bone at the least provocation. It tastes like pork jelly.

Through all my meals at Chama, the servers have been excellent, as casual as the space, as educated as the cooks, seemingly incapable of saying no to a customer’s request, no matter how ridiculous — half-bowls of soup, barbecue to go, a dinner made up entirely of side dishes. And it’s not like I was getting special treatment. I know Yontz, but I also know him well enough to show up at his restaurant when I’m sure he’s not there. The best compliment I can give his crew is that when el jefe isn’t in the house, his guys cook as though he were, offering the boss’s dirty Mexican to all comers and turning tables like they were on fire. It isn’t like Chang is in the house at P.F.’s every night, right?

Yontz built this place — from the kitchen to the preps list to the menu — so that it could run without him standing post, rolling burritos every night. Sometimes you have to trust that your crew knows its business and let them go — even when it’s your reputation hanging in the balance.