El Matate is off to an excellent start

A food critic or restaurant reviewer, I am not. But, what the heck, following are some thoughts about El Matate, Crookston’s new “authentic” Mexican restaurant.
   

My family gave the El Matate crew a few weeks to get their feet wet before venturing out for supper last Friday.
   

The owners, if you read online customer reviews of their other restaurants, are known for fast service, reasonable prices, and good Mexican food. And that’s what you’ll find at El Matate.
   

It was getting to be a busy Friday supper rush, but we were seated immediately and had ordered drinks and had chips and salsa on our table in about 20 seconds. A couple of our kids’ friends had told them that the chips were “soggy.” They were not, but they were warm and you had a sense that they were possibly being prepared on site, and not dumped from a plastic bag. As for the salsa, no matter the Mexican restaurant, I always ask for the spicier stuff, but at El Matate, I didn’t; I simply selected the bottle of sauce on our table that looked the hottest (there were three) and added a bunch to the house salsa. My concoction made my tongue throb, my eyes water and my nose run, so all was good. And their house salsa? It’s mellow, tastes good, and the cilantro really “pops,” as home decorators on Home and Garden TV are so apt to say.   
   

El Matate has several Mexican beers to choose from, and if you’re like my wife and want a margarita on the rocks and not blended and slushy, you can get that, too. Our boys had pink lemonade, and the reviews were rave.
   

Our youngest ordered a “Mexican” burger with fries, and insisted upon his first bite that it had Mexican seasonings on it. After sampling the burger, his trio of family members were not convinced. Our oldest had seafood tacos but expected a bunch of cheese and not all that lettuce and tomato, so he picked out all the seafood and ate it, but left the rest. So I gave him some big chunks of shrimp from inside my “tequila burrito” and he said it was the best shrimp he’d ever eaten.
   

It was a great burrito, and I loved that it was the only thing on my plate. No pile of lettuce and tomato, no rice and no refried beans to distract me. When you’re staring down a foot-long burrito and you have limited stomach capacity, side dishes are nothing but a nuisance. The burrito was described as coming with “cheese sauce.” The dynamite white sauce smothering it needs to be called something more profound than that. Also, I was still blowing on my fork on about my tenth bite because it was so hot. That fact alone might warrant a five-star review.
   

My wife, she ordered #33. I don’t know how you pronounce it, but our female server sure rolled her “R’s” beautifully when she pronounced it for her. The item listed above it on the menu, #32, featured the same entree, but with beef. But #33, our server said, features their “specialty” pork, and my wife was sold.
   

It was some meal, some big meal. When our server came out with five plates, we all got one, but my wife got two, and she couldn’t help but think of starving people in Haiti and her gluttonous ways.
   

Me? It reminded me of the five-pound live Maine lobster I ordered in Miami once. It came out on a silver platter about as big as a couch, and tourists from other tables came over to take a picture of me with my giant crustacean.
   

The pork was indeed “special.” My wife ate about half of it and boxed up the rest.
   

By the time we left, people were waiting to be seated. And, for Crookston at least, the weird thing is that just about everyone who came through the doors while we were there were at least acquaintances, and most were friends. Before, if you wanted a similar Mexican dining experience, you’d drive to Paradiso in Grand Forks, and be surrounded by strangers. Maybe, as you’re gorging on 512 tostada chips and a 16-inch burrito, that’s precisely how you want it. But, with El Matate, you can save the gas, and an hour on the road. And, El Matate’s food is superior to Paradiso’s.
   

OK, now some tips for the El Matate crew, and they don’t come just from me, but from others who have visited the place:
    •    First, congratulations on getting a credit card reader. That was a big, initial complaint.
    •    Dim the lights a bit in the evening. Sure, we dig our fellow Crookstonites, but we don’t want to be feel as though we’re on display.
    •    Mount a couple of flat screen TVs, maybe one to attract more people to the small bar area.
    •    Get some heat in the bathrooms, at least the guys’. That classic “Seinfeld” episode about  swimming pools and the phenomenon known as “shrinkage?” Extreme cold can have a similar effect.
   

That's nit-picky stuff, though. It's the food that counts, and El Matate more than delivers.