From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published April 4, 2008 Baru Bistro & Tapas 3$ Uptown: 3700 Magazine No reservations. 895-2225. Lunch and dinner Tues.-Sat. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. www.barubistro.com No part of New Orleans has more interesting restaurants than the entirety of Magazine Street. It emerged from the storm with its restaurants largely unscathed, and got right to work. Its popularity attracted many new restaurants. And new cuisines. Baru Bistro and Tapas is a brilliant case in point. Owner-chef Edgar Caro came here from Cartagena, Colombia, and cooks his native food. Colombian cookery is a mix of South American, Central American, and Western Caribbean ingredients and methods, and it's very good--as I learned during a visit to Cartagena just last fall. It surprised me not only with its goodness but also its sophistication. Baru (the name of a beachy island off the Colombian coast) represents it faithfully and well. The restaurant is in a colorful, mostly-lavender corner building where a small grocery store operated for many decades. The interior is gaudier than the exterior, in tones of bright greens and yellows. Most of the tables are along two pillow-softened banquettes of minimal comfort. A half-dozen or so tables on the sidewalk under the balcony are popular, and sometimes fill before the dining room does. When the waiter offers a drink, you learn that Baru is another victim of the weird liquor-license laws in New Orleans, and hasn't obtained its alcohol-service franchise yet. If you want wine, you must bring it yourself, and pay the reasonable ten-dollar corkage charge. The waiter does have drinks to sell, though. They are Caribbean fruit juices, and we made do with them on all our visits. The acidity and the flavor of, say, passionfruit juice really does compete with the food-matching abilities of wine. So well, in fact, that I think I'd at least begin a meal with one of these drinks, even if I brought some wine. Baru's entire menu fits on the front and back of half a standard sheet of paper. It has two departments: tapas and entrees. The tapas are well beyond the size of bar snacks, which is what I think of when the word tapas is used. In fact, most are so ample that splitting is almost essential. For example, this thing called mazorca is a pile of roasted fresh corn cut off the cob, and tossed with a soft, fresh white cheese and a drizzle of what the menu just calls "pink sauce." All this is atop a nest of shoestring fried potatoes. You ever hear of anything like that? Me, either--but it's certainly tasty enough. Also big enough for two is the parrillada appetizer. That's a fan of slices of either chicken or beef, marinated enough for the flavor to have been altered, grilled hard and fast, sent out with chimichurri. The latter is a mix of minced cilantro, mint, and other greens in a bit of oil, served universally in South America with grilled meats. A good first course if seafood is coming later. Can't have a South American restaurant without ceviche. Baru's is tart with lime juice, crunchy with red onions. Why they make it with the flavorless tilapia fish, I don't know, but it manages to be good anyway. Better is the tuna tartare with avocado. In looks and flavor it almost seems to have come from a sushi bar. A special tapas one night brought a small red snapper fillet, set atop a tamal made of mashed plantains, to make a classy little plate. So was the corn bunuelo, which was sort of like a double-sized hush puppy with a sour cream sauced tinged with enough green onion to give it a pale green color. A pair of thin crab cakes made with claw meat had a full flavor not only from the seasonings but the crabmeat, too. (Claw is the cheapest crabmeat, but has the most assertive flavor.) For all their fine seafood, Colombians eat a lot of meat, and there's plenty of it here. A dish that comes as close as any to defining this cuisine is carne asada. That means just "grilled meat," such a generic expression that it's no surprise that no two dishes bearing that name resemble each other much. I had Baru's version on a night when my palate yearned for a thick, prime sirloin. Baru's marinated, grilled skirt steak was cut thicker and grilled rarer than I'm accustomed to seeing it. It came with a garnish of caramelized onions scattered with chunks of chorizo. And cilantro-flavored potato wedges and chimichurri on the side. It was as large a piece of beef as the sirloin I had on my mind, and had at least as much flavor. Best dish in the house. Patacon con todo translates as something like "a chip with everything." The "chip" is a whole plantain, squashed down and grilled until crispy on the outside, topped with slices of grilled steak, chicken, and chorizo, with white cheese melted over the whole thing. This is a terrific, filling entree, with a mild spice and restraint in the cheese component. Another night I had another big plate with a number of smaller items, none connected with any other. The focus was on a thick pork chop, orange with seasoning but only lightly peppery, tender and enjoyable. Over here was a cup of red beans with a juicy sauce. Over there, morsels of ground beef covered with a fried egg. A disk the size of those crab cakes was a tortilla made of fresh corn. And, of course, there was rice. A good and very hearty meal. The desserts are homemade--hard to believe, given the minuscule kitchen. The passionfruit sorbet was marvelous. It's yellow, but tastes like Hawaiian Punch, because passionfruit flavors the latter. Tres leches--the familiar nearly-wet yellow cake with a topping made with the three milks of the name--is also good. (I have yet to encounter tres leches that was anything less than marvelous.) The clientele here is young and hip. I've noticed an unusually large number of couples who vibrated on the first-date frequency. Lots of regulars, who have learned that if you want a table you'd better get there by sevenish, especially on the weekends. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2008 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.