Sentimental Dining

[February 16th, 2005] Joe Esparaza no longer runs day-to-day operations but still stops by his restaurant regularly and keeps an eye on it via webcam.

"Texas transplants already call every week to find out when Esparza is cooking beef tongue Tex-Mex style," wrote Jim Dixon when he first reviewed Esparza's ("Yellow Rose of Tex-Mex," WW, Aug. 23, 1990). a reconsideration "Why did Olivia Newton-John record 'Let's Get Physical'?" my

15-year-old daughter asked as MTV's Real World/Road Rules Challenge played on the TV. For an answer, the best I could come up with was this: The song was a product of its time, and for that reason, people liked it.

This sentimental leniency is also granted to restaurants, places that mean the world to us because they're where we had a first date, or a first gimlet, or saw Benicio Del Toro eating French fries. All these things happened to me at Musso & Frank's over the 17 years I frequented the place. That I feel an outsized affection for this venerable Hollywood establishment annoys my husband, a Portland native, because "the food there sucks," he says. Does it? I hadn't noticed, and anyway, who cares?

By these lights, Esparza's Tex Mex Cafe means nothing to me. Shortly after moving to Portland last summer, friends introduced me to the place on a night when it was 98 degrees outside and the lights inside were off. Still, everything looked soiled, my enchilada tasted lackluster and my margarita unremarkable. What I did find enchanting was an oil painting of a movie cowboy over our table, though when I asked the waitress the price, she seemed neither amenable nor amused.

"I'm inclined to like Esparza's," says longtime WW food critic Jim Dixon, who has met me here on a sort of "convince me" expedition. Dixon, whom I've never met before, is at the bar when I arrive, sitting beneath a hundred wooden marionettes and drinking one of those blah-tasting margaritas.

"I reviewed this place when it opened 15 years ago," he says, as we follow a server to an empty table, of which, even on a Wednesday, there are few. "There was no Mexican food in Portland back then, other than your basic combo plate covered in cheese."

Not that owner and Dallas native Joe Esparza ever intended to serve authentic Mexican food; instead, his menu was inspired by his mother Herlinda's cooking. Dixon fills me in on this background while we split an order of nopalitos fried crisp in cornmeal batter ($3.85), an earthy starter tarted up by the lemony succulence of the cactus pad.

While I can appreciate how cutting-edge carne asada with mashed potatoes might have tasted back in 1990, now Esparza's is part of a neighborly row of cozy restaurants and wine bars that have transformed Northeast 28th Avenue into a dinner destination. I ask Dixon if he thinks the people who fill the tables here every night are dining on memories. "You mean like they do at RingSide?" he asks, as he orders the smoked barbecue brisket special ($11.15) after a quick glance at the 100-item menu. Me, I can't decide among the chile verde pork ($12.15), the "dirty bird" chicken mole ($11.65), the selection of esoteric flesh (how much ostrich, I wonder, must they serve to merit keeping it on hand?), and finally decide on the Annie Oakley ($12.15) because it sounds cute. Oh, and a starter of shrimp and hominy posole ($3.55), which turns out to be two tablespoons of green chili-cumin broth barely wetting a cup crammed with hominy, yellow corn and bay shrimp that taste like freezer frost.

"But they do catch these shrimp off the coast," Dixon says, while agreeing the soup tastes "a little off." By this time, the cantina is packed. Hank Williams is on the jukebox, and Dixon and I start really talking: about where we grew up and went to school and the plans we made and what actually happened. About terminally ill children and friends, and where one goes—the desert, the sea—when the going proves unbearable. And 45 minutes later I look up and see the dangling marionettes, and the watchful painted cowboys, and the tables filled with people leaning toward one another, and remember that I am in a restaurant in Portland, my newly claimed hometown.

I also notice that the Annie Oakley has a homey goodness. The dish is made of four thick slices of terrifically moist pork and a pile of mashed potatoes covered in a pale gravy, looking like an illustration from a 1950s cookbook. Though I could do without the ladleful of bland cowboy beans, the fried tomato topped with a plop of guacamole is a nice touch. But it's the transportive quality of the place that's winning me over, I tell Dixon.

"I knew it would," he says, and offers me a forkful of the brisket, the shredded meat as lustrous as melted chocolate in its slippery, smoky-sweet tomato sauce.

"How is everything?" asks supervisor Pablo Flores, who mentions he's been at Esparza's since it opened. Dixon says he's been writing about the place just about as long. "I made Joe who he is," Dixon jokes.

"Everybody here made this place what it is," says Flores, acknowledging 15 years' worth of diners with a sweep of his hand.