In the broad spectrum of restaurants, Dorado, Jon Swan's nearly 2-year-old restaurant on Park Avenue, defies easy categorization. It is neither great nor awful. The service is efficient and friendly. The drinks are well made and reasonably priced. And the food is entirely adequate. What makes Dorado such a puzzle is its owner: Swan, who is also the head cook (he does not describe himself as a chef), is so disarmingly interested in his customers, enlisting their aid and advice in his restaurant's evolution, that he may, by force of will, one day make Dorado a top-notch restaurant.

If you have ever eaten at any one of the numerous restaurants that seem to cluster along beaches in sunnier and warmer climes, you've eaten at Dorado or something like it. It could be called the Happy Shrimp, the Lazy Gator, or any number of combinations of animal plus adjective that restaurant owners seem to love. Like those restaurants, where you are paying a premium for the privilege of eating your meal with your toes curling in the sand, at Dorado you are paying for location: near the intersection of Park Ave and Berkeley Street, the restaurant's outdoor seating is about as fine a place to see and be seen as could be found along Park Ave. The menu is a mix of Tex-Mex and Cali-Mex elements that are reasonably well executed, but not terribly exciting. On both of my visits, I left feeling like the food was adequate but instantly forgettable - with a few exceptions that we'll get to in a moment or two.

One of the things that Dorado has going for it is a very skilled bartender who knows how to make a mean margarita, a strong and tangy caipirinha, and an even better mojito. Score a table outside, order one of bartender Nate Nickens' creations, and you really won't care much about the food after you've finished your first drink. The weather is hot, the place is very pleasant (even if you find yourself sitting inside under the restaurant's cloud-painted ceiling), and you've presumably got no other place you need to be.

Start with a plate of guacamole, black bean salsa, and red salsa along with a basket of chips (not house-made, because Swan does not have a deep-fryer; $5). The guacamole is very nice: good, creamy texture, just a touch of lime, and maybe some cilantro to balance the buttery avocado. The other two salsas are also good. The chorizo con queso ($7), though, is a reminder why restaurant owners often default to processed cheese for such dishes. Thick and starting to break, the cheese sauce could easily have been sliced by the end of our meal, and it was not appreciably spicy despite being full of chunks of sausage.

Dorado's tacos are good, if a bit uneven. The mahi-mahi variety my companion ordered were tasty - flour tortillas stuffed with simply grilled fish along with guacamole and a bit of cheese ($10). The carne asada tacos were less good, the meat a bit rubbery and suspiciously grey ($11). Enchiladas here are "wet" burritos, flour tortillas stuffed with meat and topped with a red sauce that Swan makes himself ($10). The chicken inside our enchilada was well-cooked shredded white meat, and the sauce had a pleasant savor to it. The mesclun mix on both plates was a little odd, but dressed well.

The star on the table at all times was the hot sauce that Swan makes himself (it is so popular that the restaurant now bottles and sells it). Fiery red and so full of spices that it is almost grainy, this is more of a barbecue sauce than a pure hot sauce like Tabasco. It is smoky, spicy, and infinitely satisfying - good with everything and even better to take home.

My request for the chicken mole ($13) occasioned a visit from the chef. Swan came out of the kitchen and told me that due to a mistake on the part of a prep cook, the mole sauce was too spicy to serve. I opted for the flat-iron steak ($14) as a replacement, but asked him if I could taste the offending sauce. He returned moments later with a ramekin full of very pungent dark red mole. I dipped a pinky in it, and tasted. It was fiery and intense, but with a really good flavor - not unlike the hot sauce, but with a bit more complexity and kick.

Working on a hunch, I asked him to send out a bit of it with my steak. Swan uses hanger steak for his flat-iron steaks, grills them and serves them with a bit of chimichurri sauce, rice, and beans. The steak alone was quite good, tender and juicy, but a quick dunk in that mole sauce brought it surging to life, the fat and fire playing incredibly well together. I polished both steak and sauce off, declined dessert, and called for the check.

A few minutes later, Swan returned to my table, sat down, and started to talk food with me. (At that time he was not aware that I was a food writer, or that I was reviewing his restaurant for this newspaper.) Swan, who later confessed that he had not had any formal training in the kitchen and had never worked a restaurant line until the night his restaurant opened, was genuinely interested in what I thought of the sauce. He also wanted to know what I thought he could do with it. We talked about using it as a braising liquid for a chile colorado, a slow-roasted chili that contains only meat, no beans. We started talking about where his recipes came from --friends, his family, other cooks, customers. At some point we moved on to ingredients and Swan told me that with the exception of the tortilla chips, he makes everything from scratch, and has from the very beginning, when he was working alone in the kitchen with occasional help from family and friends.

And that's when I realized that Swan's restaurant, despite its current shortcomings, has the potential to be if not great, then certainly very good. Any restaurateur who is so passionately and genuinely interested in food and in what his customers want, and who makes his customers collaborators in improving his business, is almost certain to succeed in the long run.

To find Dorado in City Newspaper's online Restaurant Guide - including a map, user reviews, and more - click here.

Dorado

690 Park Ave

244-8560, doradoparkave.com

Mon-Thu 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m., Fri-Sat 11:30 a.m.-midnight, Sun 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m.