TASTE: Weird Burrito Science

Café Olé rises above the fast-food morass

Scott Dickensheets

"Give this place a good review," my wife said. "They serve Fresca."


Sometimes, it's the little things.


Other times, it's the somewhat larger things. Take the shredded chicken burrito at Café Olé, for example. It's large, yes. Still, it takes more than heaps of juicy, slow-roasted chicken, mild salsa, beans and lettuce to make a good burrito. It takes a tortilla sturdy enough to handle a payload like that. "Crap!" my son barked, mid-chomp through his first bite, as the burrito collapsed around his hands. So he wiped his fingers and reached for a fork, at which time his burrito became, oh, I don't know, a burrito salad. Something non-burrito, at any rate. The hand-to-mouth nature of burrito-eating seems essential to me—it connects the food to its humble peasant origins, reminds us that raised pinkies and salad forks haven't always been essential to eating.


You could say, well, an overloaded burrito—which is a good thing, obviously—naturally runs the risk of tearing its tortilla. To which I would reply, it happened to my beef taco, too. I sense a pattern.


Luckily, flaws in tortilla engineering were the only real low notes in our visit to Café Olé, a cozy strip-mall space wedged between a 7-Eleven and a water store. It's a family affair, Olé is, begun by entrepreneur Alan Stewart, his wife Kay, and their son Brent Jensen, using recipes worked out in their kitchen.


It shares some traits with other restaurants in its class, those casual, Americanized Mexican places that claim they're distinguished by an emphasis on fresh ingredients, handmade tortillas and careful preparation. You order at a counter and watch the kids make your meal. You dip salsas of various temperatures from a salsa bar.


But there are key differences, too. Fresca, for one. And ambience. In contrast to the bouncing gleam of, say Baja Fresh, where the vibe doesn't encourage you to linger over conversation, Olé achieves a warm, dimly lit vibe. The earthy tile, beams and tall-backed wooden chairs make more of a genuine gesture to sense of place—a stylized Mexican hacienda—than is common for joints in this price range.


Even deconstructed, the burrito tasted great, the mild sauce adding dimensions of taste without degrees of heat. And it was too much for a teenage boy to finish, so calculate your own likely fill-rate from that.


I sampled a forkful of my wife's chicken salad. Then a second. And a third. There was something about the interplay between chunks of chicken and the tortilla strips; I nearly got a fork in the back of my hand when I went for a fourth. Tip: Mixing the oil and vinegar dressing with the ranch gives you the tang of the first with the richness of the second.


The chicken enchilada? Fine; perhaps a bit over-cheesed, but you got a problem with that? I don't. The pork tamale? OK, the porkiness could have been more, let's say ... assertive. Toss another pepper in the marinade, señor.


Chips were a big hit—baked rather than fried, they were crisp, not brittle, and ...


Oh, come on; let's be up-front here. It'd be hard for a reasonably skilled cook to mess this stuff up. There's a reason Mexican food is one of the great cuisines—its virtue is simplicity, the way it acknowledges the truism that unless food is really bad, it's usually pretty good. The cooks at Café Olé are at the very least reasonably skilled. The food is pretty good. And they serve Fresca. Honey, there's your good review.


(The owners plan to open a second outlet, on Rancho at Craig, in April.)

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