We hadn't been seated in Monte Alban's spacious dining room for more than a few seconds when our waitress started flirting with my 4-year-old dining companion, complimenting his eyes, cooing at him in Spanish, and generally turning the intractable kid into putty in her hands. Forty minutes later, well fed, watered, and on our way out the door with a mash note to my "lindo baby" in hand, my head was spinning. With the dining room packed and a line forming at the door, how in the world had Monte Alban's staff managed to move us through so quickly without making us feel at all rushed? That takes real talent.
Part of what makes it possible to move huge numbers of people through this very popular Tex-Mex restaurant on Ridge Road is the food. Everything from the beans to the meat is pre-made so that all that a busy cook has to do is assemble whatever combination of tortilla, filling, cheese, and sauce is needed, slide it under the broiler for a few moments, garnish with shredded lettuce and chopped tomato, and send it on its way. All the staples of Tex-Mex food are here: refried beans, Spanish rice, fajitas, ground beef as the default filling in everything, and nacho cheese (available atop quesadillas for 50 cents extra). It's not real Mexican food - for that you need to head east to Sodus, or visit Monterrey Taco at the Public Market on Saturday. But for what it is, Monte Alban is well done and satisfying.
But, as my 4-year-old observed before diving into a virgin mango daiquiri with whipped cream and a cherry ($3.75), "I like this restaurant, but Daddy's not happy." Monte Alban is good, but compared to other Mexican food available close at hand, it doesn't really measure up.
The ingredients are fresh. The chicken and pork are slow roasted to bring out every bit of flavor. The beef used in the fajitas and the chile colorada is a tender and quite flavorful cut of steak. Even the shrimp taste fresh. The avocados, served as both guacamole and as a garnish to some dishes, are perfectly ripe. And the lettuce, even though it is clearly shredded iceberg, is crisp and bright, rather than limp. The refried beans, while they could use a bit of a kick in terms of flavor, are smooth-textured with a good balance of fat to give them a nice round mouth-feel. On the downside, the tomatoes were pink, hard, and inedible. The Spanish rice was similarly disappointing: flavorless, barely pink grains studded with frozen vegetables - cubes of carrot, corn, peas, and green beans.
All meals start with chips and salsa. The chips are fried in-house and liberally salted. The salsa is deep red, smooth, and cold, without much in the way of depth: no appreciable onion or garlic, no fresh herbs, and only the barest hint of heat. The chips, however, give you plenty of time to digest Monte Alban's voluminous menu: five pages long with the first devoted to variations on nachos and salads, the second to 26 different combination plates and fajitas, the third embracing "Especialidades de San Miguel" as well as enchiladas and quesadillas, and the fourth outlining seafood, chicken, pork, and beef platters with a Tex-Mex twist.
A regular-sized cheese dip ($2.95) makes a nice accompaniment to the chips and salsa, and its thin texture and lack of unnatural orange color suggests that it might be made from scratch. Similarly, guacamole ($2.50) had a nice texture and cool flavor, but little or no zip. At our waitress' suggestion we decided to try the chicken mole ($7.50) and the Pancho's special ($9.75), which she assured us is one of the most popular dishes on the menu. Mole, a thick sauce made with a combination of nuts, raisins, guajillo peppers, and unsweetened chocolate, is usually deep brown in color and full of complex flavor. This sauce was red and tasted mostly of tomatoes with just the tiniest hint of any sort of chilis at all. It was quite good, but it wasn't like any mole that I have ever tasted. Pancho's special was equally tasty, but lacked depth: grilled chicken and shrimp topped with a generous handful of cheese and then passed under the broiler.
On another visit, we decided to stick to the traditional staples of the Tex-Mex menu. We ordered a No. 16 combination plate - one chalupa, one chile relleno, and one enchilada served with rice and beans ($7.50) - and a Santarita plate. All three of the selections on the No. 16 came with ground beef filling and were largely indistinguishable from each other. The enchilada tasted very similar to the chile relleno, which would have tasted just like the chalupa had that not been topped with shredded lettuce and tomato. The enchilada was well cooked, the tortilla soft enough to bend easily but not so soft as to collapse under the weight of sauce and cheese. The chile relleno had a nice cornmeal crust and was clearly assembled and fried with great care by the cooks working in the kitchen.
The Santarita plate ($8.99) offered both chile verde and chile colorada on a single plate. This was easily the most successful dish we tried. Large bits of roasted pork were simmered low and slow in a savory green sauce of tomatillos and poblano peppers, along with a fair amount of garlic and crushed red pepper. The meat absorbed the citrus zip and fire of the salsa, and its own fat rounded out the flavors. On the other side of the plate, the chile colorada brought a nice, smoky, and slightly warm bite to chunks of well-cooked steak in a sauce that contained no tomato at all despite its rich red hue. The quesadilla that accompanied the dish was crispy outside and delightfully chewy within, a nice sop for the remaining sauce once you pushed aside the tomatoes.
Monte Alban is not the best Mexican in the area, but it may be the most family-friendly. Tell ‘em "lindo baby" sent you.
Monte Alban
845 E Ridge Rd
697-0615, montealban-mexicangrill.com
Monday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Friday-Saturday 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sunday noon-9 p.m.