Could Siete Mares be the vindication of the formal Mexican restaurant?
Traditionally, there have been two crucial bedrock rules of dining in San Diego. First, if you want good food from non-English speaking countries, you’d probably be better off finding it in places where English is rarely, if ever, spoken. Second, formal Mexican restaurants, the ones that require sitting down and tipping and paying more than six dollars, will invariably disappoint you. I was fairly certain of the first rule. I was damn sure of the second.
English is rarely spoken at Siete Mares, a small Mexican restaurant in Barrio Logan that specializes in seafood, so it fulfills the first requirement, and then some. Driving into Barrio Logan from the Gaslamp Quarter is like stepping from Disneyland into Darfur. Alright, I exaggerate, but the point still stands. You’ll find no gleaming BMW’s or suits with Bluetooth headsets here. Good sign.
What isn’t a good sign, however, is the fact that it is a sit-down, formal Mexican restaurant. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that this restaurant is on the same level as an El Torito. It isn’t. In fact, it’s fantastic. The restaurant itself carries much of the same feel as the surrounding neighborhood. It’s not particularly new or even “nice” by most standards. There’s no air conditioning, the tables are worn, and halfway through the meal, the power shut off for five minutes. The chips and salsa come in a container that looks like it belongs in your grandmother’s cupboard, a rather awkward yellow plastic thing. But the salsa is fantastic, and that should be enough.
The whole menu is much of the same dynamic as the salsa bowl – worn, conspicuously suspect, but full of genuinely delicious items. There are whole fish preparations a plenty, and a litany of different seafoods to choose from. And judging from the fish tacos and camarones a la diabla, they all are excellent. The fish tacos themselves avoid the usual San Diego fish taco pitfalls of being an extra greasy fish patty that has apparently been used as a sweat rag by the Gorton’s Fisherman, covered in barely edible mayonnaise and wilted cabbage. That is to say, all of the ingredients are there – the fish, the white sauce, the fixings – they are all just better. It is, in a way, indescribable, much in the way that you can tell that Isla Fisher probably is that hot in person, and Megan Fox probably isn’t. And then there’s the shrimp. Delicious doesn’t even begin to describe these things. Usually, shrimp cooked in a restaurant are overdone and rubbery, like shreds off of a Goodyear that have been scraped off of the tarmac at Daytona, dusted off, and put on your plate with a vat of garlic butter. This is not the case at Siete Mares. Here, the shrimp are like little ambassadors of spicy goodness, from the land of Delicious. If the movie Bedazzled is correct, and Elizabeth Hurley is in fact the devil (and she may be), then this is what I would imagine it would taste like to make it to first base with her on a good day… when she’s wearing her sexy boots. In fact, if I were to die tomorrow, I may request that my body be buried in a vat of that sauce, so that I may charm my way into the halls of Valhalla using flavor alone as my bargaining chip.
As far as I’m concerned, I can call myself a disciple of Siete Mares. I’m completely sold. I don’t care that it violates the second rule. As far as I know, the second rule is as distant a memory as colloquial use of the term “swell,” McCarthyism, or even tuberculosis being called the consumption. For me, the deal is done.
But I can’t call this review complete. Because there’s a third bedrock rule; if you go to a place, and everyone is ordering the exact same thing, you should probably do the same. I clearly violated this one, because when I was at Siete Mares, every single person in the restaurant had ordered the soup, their storied specialty. And now I feel like I can only confidently say that I don’t know the full depths of goodness that reside at Siete Mares, but what I’ve tasted, I’ve liked.
Chef Jordan Cherry
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