I always thought the point of a restaurant was the food. Saint Añejo may prove me wrong.
Chris Hyndman's newest outpost in the M Street empire is a Mexican joint that feels more inspired by Day of the Dead than the bright colors and Spanish-tile clichés of most places. From the skulls to the color schemes to the fuzzy wallpaper, at times I felt like I was sitting in a Mötley Crüe video.
It's a beautiful, funky space, built around a gorgeous poured-concrete bar that dominates the restaurant. The tequila list is impressive, and the service is friendly. But in five meals at Saint Añejo, I never found that one blow-me-away dish. The things I liked the best were generally the simplest — like a side dish of roasted peppers or smoked chicken tacos — but almost uniformly, when the dishes got more complicated, there were problems, usually at the conceptual level.
To wit: the wagyu.
The most expensive entrée on the menu is a $24 chili-rubbed wagyu skirt steak. For the uninitiated, wagyu beef is a high-end breed, Japanese in origin, that is noted for its exceptional marbling (read: fat). This isn't two-days-to-expiration stew meat from Kroger. At Saint Añejo, the wagyu is served over rice and beans with tortillas and all the fixings normally associated with fajitas. It's the moral equivalent of bringing a Mercedes to a dirt track. Yeah, it will get the job done, but you didn't buy it to go slumming, you bought it to do 130 on the autobahn.
I took a plain bite, and itwas great, a perfectly cooked piece of slightly fatty beef that melted on my palate. Then I built three different tacos trying to make it work: one with everything, one with just a little bit of salsa and sour cream, and a final one with just the tortilla and beef. Every one of them was inferior to the beef alone, so why do the dish? Why not use less expensive beef (without the status symbol label) and sell it for half the price?
We ran into similar problems with the shrimp adobo ($20). Nominally a grilled shrimp dish, what we got was a couple skewers of overdone shrimp with a sugary dipping sauce (supposedly agave-habanero, but this was all sweet and no heat). On the plate with it were coconut sweet potatoes and a toasted kale salad, both of which outshone the headliner.
Whatever you think about adobo, either as a marinade or as a rub, it was nonexistent on the huge shrimp. Adobo is supposed to impart some combination of paprika, cumin and/or chili, but this was undetectable. What we were left with was plain shrimp in sugar. Not good.
And the enchiladas ... oy. If all you want is cheese and sauce, order the enchiladas. I was curious about how the duck confit enchiladas ($14.50) would taste. Turns out they taste like Christmas, with a mole sauce suffused with cinnamon that completely overwhelmed the duck, the cheese and everything else in the perfect little ceramic dish they were cooked and served in. Awful.
It was the same with the short rib version ($14.50). If you're going to go to the trouble of cooking good short ribs — and somebody is, because the pieces I fished out were great on their own — don't cover them in a quarter-inch of cheese and expect anybody to taste the meat. Ditto on the smoked chicken version (also $14.50).
Saint Añejo is supposed to be a cantina, which by most standards is a bar with food. But here, they've gone for a full-blown Mexican menu and missed — which is a shame, because everything else about the place is very agreeable. All of the spatial details that you would want in a good bar have been agonized over: There's ample room to move around, the booths are comfortable and can handle up to six, and the bar stools are among the most comfortable in town. The service we got bordered on spectacular, especially when we wanted some advice on the 120-item tequila menu. The general manager asked us what we generally drink and made some great suggestions, enough to dispel college memories of the liquor as merely a drunkenness delivery device. Particularly in the aged tequilas, there are excellent things to sip and enjoy, but if your taste runs toward margaritas, we'd suggest the blood orange. It's a little sour, but quite delicious.
If this menu were a fourth of its current size of 50 or so items, and each were memorable, we'd be talking about a world-beating place. A corollary to this is Big Star in Chicago, the cantina in heavyweight chef Paul Kahan's restaurant group. Big Star's entire menu is six different tacos and six other items plus a couple of variations on chips and salsa, and the emphasis on quality over quantity is noticeable — every dish sings. The minute someone opens that place in Nashville — with a ruthlessly edited and well-executed menu, a fantastic bar with well-considered lists of beer and liquor, a great space for hanging out — it will be a license to print money. Saint Añejo feels like it's only halfway there, but its Gulch location and sleek interior may be enough.
As it is, there's nothing for the menu to hang its hat on. If anything shone, it was the tacos, arriving on long planks with the main ingredient placed simply on tortillas. We tried the shrimp ($5.50, good), smoked chicken ($4, better) and conchinita pibil ($4.50, best) at one sitting, and the mahi mahi ($5.50, great) and lobster ($8.50, skip it) at another. A corn and black bean salad ($9.50) was a pleasant surprise, but the ceviche we tried — a chili tuna with bits of avocado and leeks ($13) — came off more like a tuna tartare. It was very good tuna and tasty, but not really what you think of as ceviche.
Desserts were a mixed bag. The guava flan was an unexpected hit (words I never thought I'd say) but the churros just flat-out stank. They were too light, almost airy inside, and had a dulce de leche sauce that was so thick it became a game to see if we could extract the churro from the caramel. If the same churros had a Mexican hot chocolate for dipping — think Oaxaca, not Starbucks — they could be redeemed.
Five trips later, though, I still don't know what I'd order again. Maybe the short-rib taco ($4.50) paired with the jalapeño relleno taco ($5), which has a bacon aioli. Maybe a beer. Catch the second half of a game with some friends. I want to go back and hang out there, but I'd like to fill up on more than chips and salsa.
Saint Añejo is open daily from 11 a.m. to 1:30 a.m.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
