Chevy's Fresh Mex: When Good Ingredients Go Bad
Written: Jan 01 '01 (Updated Sep 25 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fine chips, edible burritos
Cons: Awful margaritas, coma inducing combos.
The Bottom Line: Beautiful poo
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| Mr.Eyore's Full Review: Chevys Fresh Mex |
As poverty begins to rear its ugly head, I find myself reviewing more and more Mexican restaurants. Please don't hold it against me.
So it's Chevy's, right, that advertises itself as "The Fresh Mex"? It's true. They use pretty fresh ingredients. They make their tortillas right there in a big chiti-chiti-bang-bang lookin' machine thing. They fry their chips on site. They have fresh, cold salsa and guacamole with real avocado and sour cream that's not in danger of dripping off the side of the lettuce cup, and shrimps and tender chickens and ... and ... and ... it just doesn't work. In fact, it doesn't even come close.
Chevy's food is truly awful, but it's difficult to explain why that is. If rule numbers one, two and three for any restaurant are Use fresh ingredients, use fresh ingredients and use fresh ingredients, then by all accounts, Chevy's deserves at least a couple of stars. Why, then, do they only earn the one that I'm contractually obligated to give them?
"I'll Have a Pitcher of the Abomination Margarita Please"
A pitcher of Chevy's' house margarita, unblended, costs $21.50. It's made with standard Jose Cuervo and pre-made, overly sweet, margarita mix. In it's defense, the pitcher serves enough for almost six 8 ounce mugs, with ice, but you'll struggle to drink two of them. But I get the sense they make the house margarita so bad because they really want you to buy their specialty margaritas: the blue things and the peach flavored thing and the rest of the dozen or so alcoholic drinks made to make the alcohol disappear ? the colorful slurpies for which the restaurant charges up to $9.00 a glass. It's nasty, embarrassing stuff.
Children's Food For Grown-Ups
I tried to construct a syllogism to irrefutably prove that it is just plain wrong for a place that serves alcohol to also use ground beef, rather than steak, in their tacos. In the end, I had to resort to symbolic logic, and relied heavily on universals, potentialities and the metaphysics of modality. Seemed a little more than a bad Mexican restaurant deserved, though I know epinionators would have understood anyway.
Then I tried a sonnet, but fell quickly into limerick, and couldn't get past: "There once was a man from Nantucket, ate Chevy's then yanked in a bucket."
So instead I decided, not to deride it, and to rip up the poem and chuck it. I don't really need poems and symbolic logic to explain that grown-ups don't like kiddie food. Browned ground beef in an inch-high corn-canoe is kiddie food. And it's not even good kiddie food. It's flavorless, dry and only Mexican in the most generous sense of that term. A complete waste.
Nor are their beans quite right. With the black beans, Chevy's appears to be going after the classic smokiness of San Diego style black bean and chicken soup, but they achieve it, not with bacon, but by dropping in a few dashes of liquid smoke, I'm guessing. The result is barely palatable. Their refried beans are an unearthly orange too frightening to be tasted, and a consistency too chunkily odd to be described without being scatological.
The guacamole should be perfectly delicious ? or at least serviceable ? given that it's made from fresh avocado and left thick and chunky. But it's a waste of space. Chevy's seems not to have grasped that guacamole is more than simply mushed avocado. Theirs has not a hint of lime, cilantro, onion or garlic. And it may just be my own pet peeve, but I hate places that serve guacamole on a bed of lettuce. It always seems like a cheap way of making it look like you're getting more guac than you're getting, and you always lose a good portion of your portion in the folds and crevices of cold, sometimes shredded, ice berg.
Chevy's does serve a few dishes that are edible, even good, but it's hard to recommend them, given the outrageous prices you end up paying. For instance, they serve four different gourmet burritos, with fillings ranging from carnitas with corn and pepper relish to asparagus and portobello mushrooms. But they cost $8.99, and this is a sit-down restaurant, so throw in another buck-fitty for tip. So that's $10.50, for a burrito. Come on. You can get two, sometimes three great burritos for the same price at 20 different taquerias in San Francisco. It's certainly not worth a special trip to Chevy's just to be overcharged for one of these.
The restaurant is generous with their chips and salsa and they keep ?em both flowing at a good rate. The chips are frequently nice and warm and greasy, and the salsa has the pleasing texture of homemade product ground in a molcahete (a Mexican mortar and pestle with thick interior ridges).
The grilled fajitas are always going to be your best bet. Typically served with grilled onions and peppers, beans, rice and all the fixin's, these run from $11.99 to $14.99. You have a choice among three different chicken fajitas, two veggie choices, salmon, shrimp, carnitas or steak. The shrimp fajitas are probably the best of the lot., given their simple presentation and tasty spices, but at 15 bucks for a half dozen shrimp, it's just not good enough for a special trip. The steak fajita is a little more filling, and they use a nice salty skirt steak. At $12.99, it may be the most reasonable dish on the menu.
For gods sake, stay the hell away from the combos though. The only thing worse than a single weak dish is a sampling of six or seven different kinds of nasty. And these combos suck you in. You'll try the taco, and find that it doesn't measure up to Taco Bell standards. So you'll move on to a chicken enchilada, and discover a tube of nothingness that defies explanation. So you'll take a bite of the utterly worthless tamale, which lacks both corn and pork flavor. Before you know it, you've had a few bites of everything on the plate, been satisfied with nothing and you'll feel like you are with child. Ten, 11, 12 and 15 bucks are all too much to spend on a food coma.
Finally, Chevy's doesn't serve fried ice cream.
Service
I have never found the service at Chevy's anything but friendly, attentive and professional. I have eaten at perhaps five different Chevy's in San Francisco and Los Angeles, The waiters are always quick with chip and salsa refills. They never seem to dawdle, and they manage to sing happy birthday to people, when required, with good humor, if you like that sort of thing.
The staffs I've come across have all been exceptional in their ability to get the lunch crowd in, serviced and tallied in the 45 minutes or so that most people can get away from work. That's no small task and they are to be commended for it.
Decor
Each of the Chevy's I've been to has the same basic interior theme. It's basic, comfortable franchise-family-restaurant fare, with a nominal Mexican twist. Booths and tables are typically comfortable. It's all every bit as inviting as an Applebee's or Olive Garden.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Mr.Eyore
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Reviews written: 129
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About Me:
I come for the pervasive sense of elitist self-importance and semi-witty expressions of faux camaraderie
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