Olé Mexican Grill

Nu-Mex for the New Cantabrigians

by Stephen Heuser

11 Springfield Street (Inman Square), Cambridge (617) 492-4495 Open for lunch Mon-Fri, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., and for dinner Tues-Thurs and Sun, 5:30-10 p.m., and Fri and Sat, 5:30-11 p.m. Closed Mon. Full bar Cash only Ramp access from parking lot

Salsa ain't rocket science. Anyone reading this column can make a pretty good fresh salsa with a half-dozen ingredients from Star Market and about 10 minutes' worth of chopping. So it's always been a mystery to me why Mexican restaurants in New England so consistently bungle the job. Even good local Mexican places, adventurous ones whose cooking I respect, ladle out the same bland, soupy tomato stuff to go with tortilla chips at the beginning of the meal.

When everyone else is bungling the job it becomes that much easier to look good by comparison, which is what Olé Mexican Grill does by offering not only a nice version of the salsa I'm talking about (which, to be technical, is called salsa cruda, or sometimes pico de gallo) but also a sharp and tangy salsa verde, a yummy tart green sauce of tomatillo and cilantro.

Olé opened a month ago in the building just off Inman Square that previously housed Café Soho, a well-intentioned if slightly out-of-focus New American bistro that never quite drew enough people to stay in business. Years before that it was Ding Ho, a Chinese restaurant and comedy club that helped launch Denis Leary and Steve Sweeney and a bunch of other Boston comedians who would not, by and large, even recognize the earnest-hip Cambridge crowd that now populates the place. And I do mean crowd: either people are dying for decent Mexican food in this part of town or the original Olé Mexican Grill, in Arlington, has an unusually powerful word-of-mouth reputation, because most new restaurants aren't quite this full in their fourth week of operation.

There are two good reasons for the crowd to be there. For one, the promise of those salsas carries through most of the meal, which means the food is a very vivid version of Mexican cooking (mainly from Oaxaca and Veracruz, according to the menu) in which fresh things are fresh and fried things are crunchy and the enchiladas are not, as they can often be, ruinously oversauced. For another, the margaritas ($4.50) are globular and teeteringly full.

Olé, like most Mexican restaurants, operates with a fairly basic palette of flavors and sauces, which combine in one way or another to make up most of the dishes on the menu. One sauce new to me was "avocado sauce," which I initially figured would be guacamole but which turned out to be thinner than that: avocado mixed with a tangy green sauce similar to the salsa verde at the beginning of the meal. We got this over a plate of taquitos ($5.75), little rolled tacos filled with chicken and potatoes and fried until crisp, then snipped in half like spring rolls and topped with the avocado sauce and sour cream. That pretty much pushed all my buttons: a little starch, a little spice, a little crunch, and an excellent new sauce.

One other appetizer did very nicely as a sort of miniaturized entrée: the tinga poblanas ($5.75), crispy little corn tortillas with a haystack of shredded pork on a layer of guacamole. In the middle of the plate, as there had been with the taquitos, was a little salad of lettuce, marinated cactus strips, and chopped tomato and onion.

Not everything was perfect: queso fundido ($5.95, $6.25 with ground sausage on top), basically a heavy ramekin of melted cheese, tasted good but was a little too stringy to eat easily. And sopa Azteca ($2.95), a mixed-vegetable soup from Oaxaca, was a spicy but otherwise unappealing stew of vegetables with no detectable taste of epazote, the unusual dusky-cool herb promised on the menu. On the other hand, the tortilla soup ($3.95) was a pretty vigorous version of what can often be a boring dish: strips of tortilla along with chunks of chicken, cactus strips, and diced avocado in a spicy tomato broth.

Olé also distinguishes itself by paying some attention to presentation. The taquitos, for instance, came arranged in a plus-sign design, each pair of half-taquitos forming one arm of the +, with salsa and a little salad in the middle. Entrées are assembled in the standard manner -- oval plate with meat in the middle, beans on one side, and rice on the other -- but the beans might be refried beans, or whole black beans with a scattering of tangy crumbled cheese.

The latter are the beans that came with Olé's pollo con mole (a/k/a "broiled chicken breast with chocolate mole sauce," $11.95). To Oaxacans, mole can be any of several complex sauces, but in America it's usually the kind of deep reddish-brown sauce served here, flavored with unsweetened chocolate and thickened with ground nuts. The chicken breast was shredded to the point where it could be fully saturated with the mole; the sauce, lightly bitter and lightly alive with chili heat, was scattered with sesame seeds.

These kinds of small touches are what make Olé feel less like your typical Tex-Mex party place and more like a restaurant that's rethinking traditional Mexican idioms for a more flavor- and freshness-conscious clientele. You can see it in the chiles rellenos de queso ($10.95), large mild chili peppers stuffed with cheese, battered, and fried. Olé's version uses an unconventionally light batter to produce a fried pepper that's more reminiscent of tempura than of the usual floppy fried chili. With each cut, the mild orange "Chihuahua cheese" leaked alluringly out of the dark-green pepper.

Conchita pibil ($11.50), shredded pork marinated in orange juice and chili powder, was lively and not nearly as strange as it sounds; enchiladas plaseras ($10.25) were three rolled-up cheese enchiladas arranged handsomely and topped with red-chili sauce and sour cream. A giant cheese burrito ($7.75) was filled, California-style, with rice and beans and that excellent pico de gallo, then topped with a few spoonfuls of salsa verde.

There may be Mexican restaurants that can outdo Olé in a few specifics -- I remember eating excellent and complex mole down the street at the tiny Palenque, for instance -- but Olé does a smart job with the whole package. The food is consistent and sharp, and the room is a spacious and well-polished temple to New Mexitude. There are painted tiles bordering the tables, Aztec masks on the walls, and framed sepia photographs of the kind of dusty Mexican towns that the people who actually eat in Olé Mexican Grill would probably never be caught dead in. Service is well-meaning if a bit erratic; we ran into serious delays with appetizers on two of three nights, but that kind of thing gets better with time. The cash-only policy means you have to come forearmed.

The bar serves, as I mentioned, a spiffy and enormous margarita, in addition to a number of wines, a full list of Mexican beers (my favorite, Negra Modelo, is available but not yet listed), and sangria by the glass, carafe, and pitcher. The sangria was tasty when we tried it, but it doesn't seem to be available every night. Don't take the list of cold drinks too literally, either; the "hibiscus-flower drink" was never in, though we did once get a neat, tangy tamarind soda in its place.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.