Coyote Grill

Cheap isn't everything

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Coyote Grill One Kendall Place (Kendall Square), Cambridge Open Mon-Wed, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Thurs-Sat, 11:30 a.m.-midnight; and Sun, noon-midnight AE, MC, Visa Full bar (617) 225-0888 Sidewalk-level access

Have you noticed lately how so-called restaurant critics never write anything critical? Well, we're going to fix that problem right here. The Coyote Grill sets a very high standard for itself by taking the name used in Santa Fe and Washington, DC, by the fine chef Mark Miller for his Coyote Cafés. But this varmint lacks the class of those other coyotes. The food is admirably cheap and the room is kinda fun, but the flavors just didn't get me howling at the moon. More like growling at the keyboard.

The place does smell good: it has an aroma of wood smoke that reminds me of Disney's wilderness lodge in Orlando. (There the wood smoke comes from a carefully located smoking plant that smokes turkey drumsticks for the whole park.) It does evoke the Old West, but the effect dissipates rapidly. Iced tea ($1.75) is about as bad as I've ever had. It's thin, and without sweetening it tastes like cardboard. Salsa and chips would be okay if the salsa had cilantro in it and came in a container larger than the plastic cup provided, which looks as if somebody from an airline commissary designed it.

Chili con carne ($3.95) is the familiar New England style: spaghetti sauce and kidney beans where a Texan would use pinto beans, if any, and keep it less sweet by avoiding cooked onion, green pepper, and most or all of the tomato sauce. That said, it had chunks of tender beef, it was moderately spicy, and if they'd add more cumin, people would like it.

"Camarones al fruta de ajo" ($10.95) sounds odd in Spanish, and is even odder on the plate. The four jumbo shrimp were grilled reasonably well, but what lay beneath them was collards and raisins and some other fruit. The shrimp were good, but the rest was almost inedible. That goes for the whole enchilada, so to speak, on "Hop Sing's Spring Rolls." Imagine an egg roll as big as a burrito, filled with a mishmash of stuff, sliced once and laid out on some "cowboy spaghetti" -- sweet-and-sour hot sauce on cold spaghetti, no thank you. Underneath that, and spreading across the vast plate, was a layer of black beans flavored with a lot of cumin. I couldn't taste the hoisin sauce the menu mentioned, but it was just as well -- cumin and hoisin sauce might not be so good together.

Speaking of enchiladas, "our famous enchilada" ($8.95) reminds me of Nadeau's law: "Never eat anything famous." New restaurants don't have anything truly famous yet, and even if they've guessed right on future fame, the diner still has to guess again: famous for what? I'm guessing size here, or value, as this is another burro-size roll, based on some kind of reddish flour tortilla. But the serious guessing is about what's inside. Chicken and cheese, mainly, and possibly cinnamon, although that might be in the rice underneath (which is supposed to be smoked). The cinnamon really is distracting. There is a thin spill of red chipotle sauce on top, not enough to taste. There is also some guacamole and a thin green salsa, likewise too thin to taste without scraping it off to get an adequate sample.

Enchilada actually means, more or less, "wrap," and so we tried a Rio Grande pollo wrap ($7.95). Here the flavor is mostly mayonnaise and the raw-flour taste of the green tortilla it's wrapped in. Take one apart and you can see chicken, salad, and guacamole. One of the odd things about Coyote generally is the lack of chili-pepper flavors; a canned pepper served whole with the Rio Grande turned out to be one of those low-voltage jalapeños. The platter also had coleslaw and the cold sweet noodles from Hop Sing's Spring Rolls.

Chicken fajitas ($10.95) are an advanced example of how ethnic foods lose their character over time. "Fajita" means belt or girdle; it originally applied to skirt steak, which was cheap and made a quick grilled meal-in-a-tortilla for Mexican-American workers around San Antonio. Like a lot of food around San Antonio, the fajitas were marinated with cumin. But the dish has become a nationwide restaurant specialty, and we now have: strips of chicken, without seasoning, baked or poached and served on a hot cast-iron "sizzling platter" with green pepper, tomato, and onion. The three warm flour tortillas (nicely kept in a plastic crock) are the best part of the dish. Even with the salsa and sour cream accompaniments, it hardly tastes Mexican or Mexican-American at all. The hot sauce ("Cajun Power" brand) on the table helps a little.

As the cumin had all gone into the beans under the spring roll, and the fruit and cinnamon for dessert had ended up under the shrimp and in the famous enchilada, respectively, I began to feel as though Coyote had sent away for the Mexican food kit, but tried to assemble it without the directions. Maybe the directions were in Spanish?

Desserts (all $3.95) show a lack of energy that might be conceptual, but might also have been Monday-night syndrome. Raspberry cheesecake was served without the sauce and tasted old and cranky. The substitute chocolate and whipped cream were no real help. (Whipped cream on cheesecake?) The brownie sundae was edible, but the brownie wasn't very chocolatey, there wasn't much chocolate sauce, and the vanilla ice cream wasn't special either. The best of the desserts was rice pudding, served in a neatly molded mound with caramel sauce. The sauce was gritty with candied sugar, but the flavors were good together.

Service on a slow night was quite good, except for a long pause before dessert with used dishes left on the table. (I've been noticing this problem a lot lately.) The room has its good features, such as the terra-cotta wall lamps at each booth, but the pop soundtrack has no theme. And you definitely don't want to have "Hotel California" playing while diners are waiting for their checks. The metaphor of being trapped in an irrational place is not the one to evoke here.

Robert Nadeau can be reached atrobtnadeau@aol.com.

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