FAYETTEVILLE — Great atmosphere. Very cozy and warm. Small and intimate. Candles on the walls and tables. Loved the Moroccan-influenced décor. Excellent food. Generous portions. Good beer and wine selection.
These are just some of the comments from our Syracuse foodie friends who joined us for an astonishing dining experience at La Cena. It's located in the back of a house tucked away on East Genesee Street, the main thoroughfare running through this suburb just east of Syracuse. A little hard to find, but well worth the effort.
Is it Mexican? Is it Spanish? Our waiter said, "We call it 'creative Latin.' That lets us get away with just about anything."
It's a one-page menu with a half-dozen starters, a similar number of entrées and a handful of salads: ginger-curry mussels, crispy shrimp, tostadas and quesadillas, homemade soups, trendy salads like beet, pecan and pear, paella, chicken mole, crispy catfish, spicy pasta and enchiladas. Delicious desserts, too.
A couple of tasty white rum mojitos, a couple glasses of a soft and smooth Red Mud Cabernet from South Australia, a bottle of sparkling water for the table and we were ready to dine.
The mussels appetizer ($10) was fabulous — lots of them in a sauce of fish stock, sweet curry, subtle ginger, chopped tomatoes and fresh cilantro. The Mexican and Eastern influences worked together.
Grilled — almost charred — flour tortillas topped the dish and proved perfect for soaking up that great, slightly sweet broth. If that's by design, then the chef at La Cena is a genius.
Crispy shrimp ($10), six of them, lightly dusted with a mildly spiced flour and fried, were tasty and, as the menu says, crispy. A dunk in the citrus jalapeño mayo that accompanied was a perfect pairing.
The least exciting appetizer was the quesadilla with spinach ($7). Not due to poor preparation, though. It was pretty bland — a tortilla with mild cheeses and mild spinach. But the tortilla was grilled, adding that elusive smokiness, and the accompanying sour cream and mild fresh salsa jazzed it up a bit for us.
Other quesadilla fillings that might have been more exciting are seasoned tofu, grilled chicken or grilled shrimp for a slight additional charge.
Now here's the killer appetizer: La Sopa ("The Soup," as translated for us by our waiter). It's homemade and changes frequently. This was our lucky day. The cream of mushroom ($5) was as good as it gets.
Get that taste of Campbell's out of your mouth and mind. This was made with hearty, meaty mushrooms, probably criminis (commonly called baby bellas), sliced and sautéed in butter, then incorporated into a thick, real cream stock.
We passed it around the table for sampling, but there weren't enough spoons to go around. So several of us attacked it with a fork — it was that thick.
We were totally impressed with the beet, pecan and pear salad with Maytag blue cheese and mustard cider dressing ($10). An unusual combination that integrated and complemented perfectly, with the Maytag blue bringin' it all home, baby.
Paella de mariscos ($21) is at the top of the entrée list. It's a traditional Spanish dish loaded with shrimp, clams, mussels, calamari and spicy sausage slow-cooked in saffron calasparra rice with snap peas and chunks of sweet red pepper.
From across the table came, "Byfar, the best paella I've ever had." And we all agreed. The shellfish were cooked minimally, but enough, as they should be. Calamari was especially good. The rice and broth were rich, full of natural seafood flavor.
It was served oven-to-table in the customary paella pan, a large, shallow, flat pan that looks like a wok run over by a truck. This could easily be a meal for two.
The chef will gladly prepare the paella vegetarian/vegan for $17.
Back to Mexico for chicken mole ($19). OK, it's not what it looks like. Two syllables, emphasis on the "e." It's half a chicken, bones and all, slow-cooked in this sauce called "mole." Rhymes with "olay."
They say a good Mexican/Spanish/Latin restaurant can and should be judged by its mole sauce. If that's true, it's good news for La Cena. Its mole was complex, as it should be, the flavors of raisin, cinnamon and clove hitting first, followed by more subtle background flavors. The finish held a very slight amount of heat that was not noticeable until the other flavors had left the palate.
I didn't make that up. My friend did.
The chicken came with rice and black beans with a nice firm texture in their hearty cooking liquid. These were the real deal, not typical mass-market canned beans, to be sure.
Crispy catfish ($17) is peanut-oil deep-fried and served with chipotle mayonnaise, corn on the cob, black beans and cabbage slaw. The mild fish had a very crispy coating, nicely complemented by the mayo. The cabbage salad was a pleasant surprise, with red peppers throughout. And for being a little past the corn-on-the-cob season, the corn was certainly not thrown on the plate as an afterthought. It was good.
Another surprise dish of the evening, along with the mussels, was spicy pasta with grilled chicken ($17). Buttery and cheesy, the grilled flavor of the bite-sized pieces of dark chicken meat and the heat of the spices balanced the richness of the sauce beautifully. It was served over penne rather than the fusilli indicated in the menu.
Ordinarily we probably would have skipped desserts, but every seat in the restaurant was now occupied, surprising for a Wednesday night. Service, which started out great, was now slowing down as waiters lugged food from kitchen to table, unfortunately leaving some of us looking at uncleared dishes for quite some time.
We didn't care. It was a night out. And it gave us time to make room for a wonderful sampling of desserts.
Grand Marnier chocolate mousse: Not the silky-smooth mousse you'd expect; actually, heavy and dense, strong in chocolate flavor, light on the Grand Marnier. Very enjoyable.
Vanilla crème brûlée: An interestingly thick layer crust of caramelized sugar revealed a custard underneath that was good, but not quite as laden with heavy cream as we're used to.
Angel food cake with mango sauce and strawberries: Yet another pleasant surprise. This cake was baked so it developed a hearty, chewy, sugary outer crust with the inside retaining the light, springy texture associated with angel food cake. The mango sauce was tart and sweet; the strawberries added a colorful, festive look. Unusually good.
Flourless Kahlúa torte: Deep. Rich. Dark. Heavy. Fudgy. Sinful. Topped off with plump, fresh raspberries with barely noticeable seeds and real whipped cream. Yummy.
Desserts, priced at $6 each, were a perfect end to an evening of overindulgent eating.
The tab for four, before cocktails and wine, came to $141.
La Cena has been open for about two years. The menu has evolved from North African/Mediterranean to a more Latino influence. It's owned by the same folks who own Alto Cinco, a trendy Mexican restaurant in Syracuse.
Our friends dine out a lot in the Syracuse area. Le Cena is now on their "revisit it soon" short list.
Mine too.
You can contact Walter E. Siebel via e-mail: wsiebel@wdt.net.
La Cena
105 E. Genesee St.
Fayetteville
637-3388
Mexican, Spanish and "creative Latin" cuisine
Dinner served 5:30 to 10 p.m. (or later) Tuesday through Sunday
APPETIZER PICKS: Mussels in ginger curry broth with fresh cilantro and tomato
SOUP PICK: Cream of mushroom
SALAD PICK: Beet, pecan and pear with Maytag blue cheese and mustard cider dressing
ENTRÉE PICKS: Seafood paella, chicken mole
DESSERT PICKS: Angel food cake with mango sauce and raspberries; flourless Kahlúa torte, Grand Marnier chocolate mousse
Rating: 4 and one-half forks
