Denveater

Old Blinking Light 5-Course South American Wine Dinner, 1/26, 6pm, $65 per

Yet another prix-fixe menu from Old Blinking Light catches my eye—& not just for the typos! It's those bright, refreshing, tart flavors the whole meal's awash in that almost have me wishing I wasn't going to be  in New York next Tuesday. Not quite, of course, but almost. Anyway, if you go, raise a glass of carménère to me.

 

Sorta-Samba Room

I don't do the samba, but I know it's an Afro-Brazilian dance. I've done the Samba Room only once, but once was enough to know it's no Afro-Brazilian disco of authentic delights. It's more like some office holiday party of attempts at smooth South American–fusion moves. You know? Like some diligent corporate lackey came up with a festive theme & went all out decorating the lunchroom & sending a link to step-by-step instructional videos on You Tube, but it's still just the lunchroom, & every other coworker watched the rumba video instead, & the fun only ever starts when everyone gets loaded. 

That probably sounds like an insult, & it is, but only insofar as the phrase "corporate lackey" signifies. Ethnoculinary authenticity being the bugaboo that it is in a postpostmodern, multi-if-not-postcultural, globally-thinking-locally-acting (or at least collectively pretending to) society like ours, there's much to be said for home-grown, even small regional chain–grown, approaches to the cuisines of the world. But when a menu is shaped less by some passionate restaurateur's personal experience & extensive research than by the P & L statements & memos with the word "branding" in the subject line & etc. his or her hired feasibility-study guns shoot off—as appeared to mine both eye & palate to be the case—then there's still much to be said, but not as nicely.

Consider the fact that it references just about every place in the world but Brazil & its African relations: Colombia, Peru, Cuba, Argentina, Japan, France, Maryland, New Orleans, even Hawaii in the form of "island sweet rolls." Where's the ximxim, the vatapá, the moqueca & so on to which the name de jure if not de facto alludes?

& for that matter, where's the salt?

Why, right there, in the shaker just behind your 4-foot gladiolus of ceviche & plantain chips, you might point out.



& right you are; in fact, I used that very shaker to season the visibly peppered but noticeably undersalted signature app, "made using the freshest available seafood & shellfish," aka tuna. Hey, nada wrong with atún, other than the Spanish getting the letters backwards; it's just that the implication of the description (oh, why can't words just mean what we want them to mean when we want them to mean it?) is that we can expect an assortment of finfish & crustaceans. Still, lush chunks of mango & crisp bits of red pepper & celery, plus trace amounts of jalapeno, melded in swell fashion with the cubes of tuna—firm yet juicy, being so thoroughly marinated they could function as their own lime wedges—& in short it was really quite good beyond its misrepresentation by the menu & want for salt, the latter exacerbated by a heavy sprinkling of sugar on the plantain chips that was not merely unnecessary but in fact distracting, except perhaps to American restaurant franchise consultants acting on the assumption that their consumer base will demand bananalike sweetness from bananalike objects.

Likewise undersalted was the avocado-lime dressing on the house version of a Cobb; though nice & creamy, it thus couldn't quite stabilize the jumble of chopped smoked turkey, mango, tomato & egg with manchego, blue cheese & black beans. Though not exactly bland, it didn't pop as it otherwise might have. 

Whether or not my companion's vaguely Asian-influenced pile of greens with wonton strips & ginger-mustard dressing was equally bereft of flavor enhancement, it was, she assured me, no model study in textures, the grilled chicken being as "dry & tough" & the strips as underfried as they look.

 

Less in disarray was the interior design, balanced appealingly between Latin vibrancy & urban gleam. I'd be down with happy hour at the bar sometime, but the odds I'd pair my pisco sours with arepas or empanadas on the potentially buzzkilling dare that they'd be made of sturdier stuff soulwise than the above are pretty small.

The best thing about Aji

is that I was there with Jane & Shena, which meant I could pretend I was having lunch in the jungle. I swung a vine from Denver to the restaurant in Boulder in a loincloth & sneakers, yodeling "Ajiajiajiajiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!"

On an Aji-calibrated scale from solid to middling rather than awesome to cruddy, the second-best thing was something I didn't order: the chocolate flan, which we agreed seemed less like a custard than a mousse, both denser & more airy—it wasn't at that in-between stage most custards occupy between the liquid & the solid state, the awkward young adult or maybe the Crispin Glover of desserts, sort of bouncing around from hard-to-identify flavor & texture to hard-to-identify flavor & texture. This, instead, was a swatch of dark-chocolate suede you could confidently purchase a whole bolt of to drape your tummy in & make it look so elegant.

The third- and fourth-best things I didn't order either—in fact I didn't even taste them, but I could tell just by looking: Jane's ground-beef-stuffed & pomegranate-seed-sprinkled poblano with walnut sauce

& Shena's torta piled with braised rib meat, cabbage, & fried potato strings, accompanied by sweet-potato fries:

Wait, somewhere better than the second-best thing was the thing about how Shena went to a poetry reading by a guy with Tourette's. Suppose he were a master of, say, alliteration? How would you know?

I have to go think about that. To be continued...

***

The fifth-best thing, also known as the second-worst thing, was my posole: it seemed to me a bit thin, a bit soupy, for something that in my experience should be a chunky stew, hominy-heavy & liquid-light—never mind something that supposedly contained not only pork loin but also chorizo & smoked bacon, of which the latter alone really made its presence known:

The last-best thing was the calamari, which just couldn't get it together. What did it want to be, fried or sauteed? A bar snack or a salad?

As with the seaweed salad I suffered at Aji's sibling Leaf, the general effect was one of not only militant invasion by but mission creep on the part of the overpowering forces of mizuna. Even the pancetta took it lying down:

If that pancetta wasn't raw & uncut, & I don't at all mean like fine porn but exactly like sad cold pork product, instead of sliced up & pan-fried with the squid, then I'm a monkey's uncle. & seeing how I was hanging out with the queens of the wild kingdom, how do you know I'm not?

"Little nosh" and "pork rinds" don't really belong in the same sentence

but "pork rinds" and "holy crap!" do. We recently hit Limón for happy (in the haze of a drunken) hour. But heaven knows we were miserable afterward, a) because we ate too much of this

and b) because there's no such thing as too much of this (as this close-up reveals

—or not; odd how closely chicharrones resemble cucarachas fritas, at least as seen in this photo I stole from here),

*

so by the time we polished off the last piece we were practically in tears. Well, make that when I polished off the last piece I practically started crying, and The Director, not getting the last piece, died a little inside & may have wished me a little dead too. I could see it in his black haunted eyes.

Really, they're damned good—crackly & chewy yet plenty moist, & paired, alongside flawless, lightly herb-sprinkled fries, with the most unusual salsa I may ever have tasted. Actually salsa's their word, not mine—I'd call it a veritable grain salad, composed as it is of hominy with pieces of mango and aji amarillo chile, as well as cilantro and what I'm pretty sure was mint (perhaps huacataya, the Peruvian black mint that used to crop up from time to time in the dishes of one of my dearest old Boston haunts, an Italian-Peruvian charmer called Taranta, if you're ever in Boston go there & say hi to José for me, & be sure to order the yuca gnocchi with green lamb ragú?).

Only now, as I count down the hours to dinner at Deluxe, is the pain of my chicharroneless loneliness subsiding.

*Not that I personally wouldn't hit these.