Aguazul, a new and overtly Insta-ready restaurant on Loop 410, presents coastal Mexican seafood as its focus, with an emphasis on the states of Sinaloa and Nayarit.
To me, this meant I could ignore its superfluous — or at least too tangential — menu categories such as burgers, pasta, pizza, enchiladas, quesadillas, fajitas and sushi.
Selective elimination made my job as a reviewer much easier, but the remainder was still daunting. The menu includes platters, torres and aguachiles along with ceviches of several seafoods. It also features molcajetes — both calientes and frios — alongside oysters baked, fried and raw, plus a flotilla of seafood soups.
The online “full carta” clocks in at an astonishing 37 pages.
To provide an antidote to the tsunami of seafood that was to follow, the Mexican Baby Corn seemed like a good and advantageously priced starter. Canned baby corn is more often associated with Asian cuisine, and its imposed ethnicity here is determined by a little queso fresco and a sauce blending mayo and chipotle. Some Japanese togarashi flakes add an international accent to what was a pleasant appetizer I didn’t need to repeat.
The Pulpo Con Tripa taco plate — call it a surf-and-turf combination — will set you back $17, and it arrives looking promising with colorful marinated onion and more chipotle mayo sauce, all served on decent corn tortillas. Looking on the bright side, it’s a good thing the sauce prevailed, as both the octopus and tripa were merely chewy with little flavor of their own.
Moving on, the Shrimp Aguachiles Divorciados arrived quicker than a Vegas unhitching. This option — there are 15 in the aguachiles category alone — features two somewhat separated and different marinades. Risking marital incompatibility, I decided to match up maracuya (passion fruit) and salsa negra, a Sinaloan specialty that features soy sauce and blackened chiles.
Bam! The passion fruit sauce was floral, fruity and utterly entrancing, though it did tend to dominate the shrimp. Meanwhile, the negra may have favored soy and Maggi over the requisite blackened chiles, but it, too, was proudly assertive, gleefully running rampant over the shellfish.
Another salsa negra accompanied the Bluefin Tuna Tiradito. A little chile oil gave this variation a slightly different profile, and sesame seeds added toasty sparkle. The bolder tuna should have had a fighting chance over the salsa, but the alpha partner was, again, la negra.
Hoping for a look at the kitchen’s fried seafood prowess in a single package, the composite torre category exerted its siren song. La Isla fit the bill perfectly with its chicharrón de pescado, calamari rings, fried oysters and chipotle shrimp. The reveal, with the friendly server slipping the cylindrical mold off the tower with a flourish, was suitably dramatic. But, bedded in a sea foam-like froth of tiny rice wisps and a moat of queso, the visual presentation was disappointing.
It was a dud in the taste department too. And the cylinder that surrounds the stack of ingredients does them no favor; all of the coatings just get somewhat sweaty while waiting for the big reveal. Usually chewy chicharron de pescado capped the construction in the form of shreds that presented almost as deeply fried onion, but they were at least a textural contrast to the bland fried oysters and calamari. The chipotle shrimp possessed enough pizzazz for me to be tempted to order them on their own.
The tab for all of the above, including tip and one cerveza, was just shy of $125 — a figure that’s not hard to achieve these days.
But since price is always a factor, it may be worth considering lunch at Aguazul and its $14.99 specials. If my lunch choice — the Un Poquito de Todo Charola — was at all typical, the unpopulated dining room should have been doing the aquatic version of a land office business.
Four items occupy the platter: a small fish soup, a cup of shrimp ceviche, a ribeye taco, and a wildly colorful Corazon Margarita. Fish, potato, celery and carrot bobbed about in the soup’s broth, which was rusty in color and whispering of dried chiles and herbs. Uncharacteristically, the Aguazul shrimp ceviche was finely chopped, but to its advantage, there was un poquito de todo, including green chiles, in each satisfying bite.
It seems almost heretical to admit it, but, despite a blistered but tough flour tortilla, the rogue ribeye taco was just fine, especially after adding a little salsa left over from the chips.
That leaves the Margarita. Stiffly frozen as it is to start, you might want to think of it as dessert. After all, it’s orangey tart-sweet and spiked by chamoy. I hate to admit that I liked it.
And that in a bigger glass it would make a great Instagram prop.
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