From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published June 23, 2006 Coyoacan 3$ Lee Circle Area: 1432 St. Charles Ave. 525-9996. Lunch Tues.-Fri.; Dinner Tues.-Sat. AE, DC, DS, MC, V. Chef Guillermo "Bill" Peters, like most of us, has come a long way since the hurricane. In late September I got a message from him saying that his double restaurant at the corner of St. Charles and Melpomene restaurant had come to an end. But, like most of us, he got a fresh perspective on the opportunities. A few months later, Coyoacan/Taqueros was back open, Bill was spending a lot of nights in the upstairs dining rooms, and business was as peppy as he and his minuscule regrouped staff could handle. His daughter even joined him in the operation, handling every imaginable job. In the original concept, you could eat casual but non-Americanized Mexican food downstairs (Taqueros) at moderate prices. Or you could hike to the similar but better-dressed room upstairs (Coyoacan), choose top-shelf tequilas by the shot from a cart of rare ones, and dine on the most ambitious Mexican food ever served in New Orleans, with entree prices in the twenties and thirties. Now you get Taqueros at lunch and Coyoacan at dinner. Bill Peters is dogmatic on the idea that Mexican food, when prepared with ingredients equal to those found in the best restaurants, would result in one of the best restaurants. Before the storm, it was a losing battle. Not enough people got their heads around the idea of gourmet Mexican food. New Orleans has never been a good environment for Mexican restaurants to begin with, let alone something as innovative as this, carrying a premium price tag. But the food was always great. I was very sorry to see Bill's first note to me. Then, ecstatic about his change of heart. Coyoacan was open early enough after the storm to benefit from the oversupply of local diners eager to get away from their troubled homes and into the undersupply of restaurants. The place served as many of them as it could, Bill worked all the time (which, to hear him talk, is nothing new), and Coyoacan returned to health. That he was open for lunch in a place and time that had few lunch options also helped. The counter-intuitive decision to offer the upscale menu has, among its motivations, one that wouldn't have occurred to me. But if you've been near Lee Circle lately, you might guess it. That's where temporary workers--many of them transients from Latin America--wait for jobs every morning. "We don't serve tacos," Bill says. "If we say we're a taqueria, we'd get a lot of customers who don't understand what we're really trying to do here." In other words, the same reason Galatoire's doesn't serve hamburgers and hot dogs on Bourbon Street. Most people who dine at Coyoacan for the first time would do well to forget that the place is Mexican. Unless they're well acquainted with the food in the best restaurants in and around Mexico City. Bill Peters's food bears no resemblance to the melted-cheese-choked platters most of us expect when we eat Mexican food. At lunchtime, entrees are just $10 and fly a little lower to the ground. They are still unusual enough to captivate the palate. A recent lunch of albondigas, for example. Those are the Mexican equivalent of meatballs, and not all that different from the spaghetti kind--except for the sauce, which is tomato based (let's note that tomatoes are native to Mexico, not to Italy) and chilpotle pepper (smoked jalapenos). The waiter brought a little dish of whole chilpotles to goose the sauce up a bit more--a welcome flavor about which more later. Also on the menu is roasted pork loin with a sauce of the piquant little green, tomato-like fruits called tomatillos. And carnitas, a crustier kind of roast pork with enough external seasoning to stand on its own. All those these, and the rest of the lunch entrees, come out with rice and black (not refried) beans. At dinner they let out all the stops. The tables are draped with hand-made Mexican tablecloths and set with matching napkins. The tequila cart is gone, but the tequilas are still there, in a long list that also includes an imaginative assortment of margaritas made with freshly-squeezed juices. Start with the guacamole, made fresh to order (that makes an enormous difference in freshness). And an order of pico de gallo, the chunky salad of aromatic vegetables with lime juice. Both of those are cool and good this time of year. On the other hand, the queso fundido is very hot (in both senses of the word, made of melted cheeses and the spicy chorizo sausage. You scoop it with tortillas and eat too much of it. Soups are very well made, the house standard being a tortilla soup with chicken. Among the entrees, a few dishes with top-end price tags remain (the generous filet mignon with pasilla chile and cream sauce at $34 tops the list), but most entrees are in the high teens--certainly in line with what you'd pay for comparable ingredients in other kinds of bistros. (What's Spanish for "bistro"? That's what this is.) Two stand out in my mind. The first is the chile relleno de mixiote--stuffed with shredded lamb, surrounded by cool things like avocado and fresh fruit mixed with chile peppers. It is unlike anything I've ever had before, has a pepper level that will test the tolerance of even the most ardent lover of spicy food (that's me), and is one exciting plate of food. I also very much like the straightforward chicken with mole poblano. The sauce is the famous dark-brown concoction of bitter chocolate, chile pepper, and a million other ingredients. It's one of the highest achievements of the Mexican cuisine, and Bill's version is so good you'll use every morsel of chicken and every scarp of tortilla to get it all up. I think of getting this almost every time I eat at Coyoacan. That expensive steak is very good, as is the chilpotle-peppered version. They prepare grilled fish with a choice of sauces. The vegetarian dish is made with nopalitos--the pads of cactus, which I find have a flavor somewhere in the eggplant part of the spectrum. Bill has apologized for the service staff on every visit, but I witnessed nothing disturbing. The wine list includes lots of good bottles, although those margaritas are hard to pass up. It's great to have this unique restaurant back. Click here to return to today's edition. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2006 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.