Palenque

A small Mexican restaurant in Somerville serves sauces with big taste

300 Beacon Street, Somerville, 491-1004
Open for lunch, Mon - Fri, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.;
for dinner, Mon - Sat, 4:30 to 10 p.m.
AE, Disc, DC, MC, Visa
One step from street level
No liquor

by Stephen Heuser

Mexico may be a long way from New England, both culturally and geographically, but its cuisines have done a good job of insinuating themselves into our menus -- just think how universal burritos and fajitas and salsa have become. Still, good new Mexican restaurants have appeared in Boston pretty sporadically. This is partly because the food depends on ingredients (such as chili peppers) that have to be imported much of the year, and on some ingredients (such as avocados) that don't grow in New England at all. At its best, way beyond hard-shell tacos and hot sauce, Mexican food is crisp and fresh, with sauces that are tangy and complex instead of just hot -- more deep than macho, as it were.

To anyone who doubts that complexity does exist in Mexican cooking, I can now point toward Palenque, a tiny corner operation near Porter Square serving mole sauces and reassuringly chunky guacamole in the space where the barbecue joint Jimmy Mac's once dispensed pulled-pork sandwiches and sweet-potato pie.

Opened late last November, Palenque -- named for an ancient Mayan city in the state of Chiapas -- tries to present Mexican flavors untainted by the usual Texan or Californian influence. The restaurant seats about 25 people under a ceiling that looks like a deep-blue night sky; the service is cheery, and much of the cooking is exemplary. Though the menu oversells a couple of the dishes, the flavors are generally strong, the ingredients sharp-tasting, and the sauces -- especially the mole -- a tonic for anyone bored with the conventional red sauce and salsa verde.

A meal at Palenque begins in the usual way, with a plate of tortilla chips and a bowl of tomato salsa. The chips are the kind you find in a store, but the salsa is made fresh, with cilantro and a little chili powder. And the guacamole ($4), served over torn iceberg lettuce, doesn't have that puréed texture common in restaurant guacamole: the chunks of avocado in the mix suggest it may be blended in the traditional way, with a stone mortar and pestle.

Palenque's two green salads aren't anything exceptional. The one interesting ingredient -- marinated cactus in the ensalada Palenque ($3.50) -- has a taste reminiscent of canned string beans. Queso fundido ($4.50), a blend of melted white cheeses with a bit of ground chorizo, is tasty, if a little light on the sausage.

But the appetizer of carnitas is one of those dishes that remind you how good Mexican cooking can be. "Carnitas" is chopped pork, and here it's served in a dish of orange-flavored mole. Mole (pronounced mole-ay) simply means mixture in Spanish, but in Mexican cooking it almost invariably refers to a rich brown sauce flavored with unsweetened chocolate and thickened with ground nuts. It's difficult to describe to the first-timer: the sauce depends on the bitter rather than the sweet component of chocolate, giving even a plain mole an astonishing depth of flavor. In the case of the carnitas, the taste starts off with the bitterness of the chocolate and the spice of chipotles (smoked jalapeño peppers), then finishes with a half-sweet taste almost like candied orange.

Much the same mole is used in the entree of puerco en adobo ($15), a big piece of pork loin covered with the same brown sauce. All the entrees at Palenque, incidentally, arrive in classic Mexican-restaurant style, on large oval plates with the meat in the center, flanked by a big pool of refried beans on one side and a pile of fairly dry tomato rice on the other. The rice isn't anything out of the ordinary, but the beans here have a richness that suggests they're either fried in flavorful pork lard (the traditional Mexican cooking fat) or very carefully seasoned to give a fuller taste than you'd find at your average burrito joint.

In Oaxaca, the Mexican region best known for its mole, cooks use no fewer than seven varieties of the sauce. Palenque uses two, as far as I can tell; one is the orange-inflected version, and the other is plainer, grainy in texture, and a deep reddish-brown. This is the version that's poured over pieces of braised chicken breast in the mole poblano ($12).

Not every sauce at Palenque is so far out of the ordinary. The red sauce that comes over the pollo mexicano ($12), for instance, is a straightforward sauce of stewed tomato, flavored with green olives and capers and mushrooms, that wouldn't taste out of place at a North End trattoria. And the salsa that comes over the fajita -- which, incidentally, is just a plate of grilled chicken meat in sauce, and not the marvelous sizzling thing that the fajita has become at more New-Mex restaurants -- tastes like a thicker version of the salsa that arrived with the tortilla chips.

But the salsa verde is another standout. Its chief flavor components are tomatillo and cilantro, which give it a combination of sour-tangy (the tomatillo) and pungent (the cilantro) that makes for a lot of flavor without heaviness. This is the sauce used on the pollo al cilantro ($12), and also on a shrimp dish called the camarones al cilantro.

We were a little disappointed with that dish one night; the shrimp supply had run low, so the plate -- which, at $15, is as pricy as anything on the menu -- arrived with only six or seven shrimp. The kitchen tried to make up for it by including a piece of grilled fish on the plate, but that still counts as a restaurant faux pas: if you haven't got the food, at least offer the diner the opportunity to choose another dish.

The dessert selection is slim but surprisingly good. There are two items: chocolate cake and flan ($3 each). The cake was a little cylinder of chocolate, wider and flatter than a cupcake, served with a nice caramel-rum sauce marbled with more chocolate, and a handful of fresh berries laid around the plate. The flan was cut square, with caramel sauce and a wonderful spicy taste.

The coffee, too, was a surprise: "Mexican coffee," which I'd never had before. It was black coffee sweetened slightly and infused with cinnamon and cloves. Palenque doesn't have a liquor license yet, but nobody minds if you bring some beer (a large party eating near us one Saturday night brought their own case). The liquor store down the block on Beacon Street carries a fine selection, including my favorite Mexican beer: Negra Modelo, which sells for $6.49 a six-pack. It's dark, roughly the color of Coke, and has a sweetish and slightly more authoritative flavor than most Mexican beers. It's light but substantial -- not unlike the food at Palenque.