Food Feature: Pinch hit

Costa del Sol is a suburban success story. When it first opened four years ago, it consisted of 16 tables and two televisions tuned to Spanish-language soap operas in one small scruffy room. Today, it is four times that size. The rooms are painted vibrant yellow and rich sapphire, the tabletops have been finished to a glorious shine and, believe it or not, there is a no-smoking section. That’s significant for a Hispanic restaurant.

And Costa del Sol is a true Hispanic restaurant, not some marketer’s stab at a hot new franchising concept. This is a family-operated amalgam of interesting Mexican and Salvadoran food with equally interesting cultural and language differences. (I have yet to see another female diner, for instance.)

It used to be that all of Costa del Sol’s varied dishes — and then some — were available from morning to night, even with the late (or is that early?) hours the restaurant kept. But in the intervening years since the restaurant’s debut, the reality of operating in the suburbs — even suburbs with a burgeoning Hispanic population — has necessitated a marked change. Now at lunch, it is Mexican all the way. And, yes, some of the choices are what Americans expect to see when they open a menu in a Mexican restaurant: beef and chicken fajitas.

Although Costa del Sol’s wonderful fish and shellfish dishes don’t come out to play until evening, the initially ordinary-sounding lunch dishes are a revelation all their own. Like the Parrilla Chicken, grilled chicken breast, for example. This doesn’t look promising — just a flattened, oddly shaped half breast served with the usual rice, tortillas and so on. But we could tell this was going to be good from a distance of 20 paces — by the aroma. A delightfully fresh, grilled scent preceded the plate’s appearance. As soon as its tantalizing perfume wafted in our direction, we knew the kitchen was in good hands. The smell was the kind of evidence I expect in an establishment of larger ambitions.

Credit part of this dish’s success to its preparation. That odd shape I mentioned is caused by pounding the chicken breast to a uniform thickness of roughly five-eighths of an inch, which allows the whole thing to cook at the same rate. That means no dry patches. The chicken remains moist.

Costa del Sol’s food is full of such small but telling touches. The care taken with what could be considered mundane staples of a quick-lunch menu — almost entirely chicken and various cuts of steak — is even more important when the kitchen turns its attention to the Salvadoran seafood specialties in the evening.

There’s so much fresh lobster on the menu it’s hard to believe that there are any crustaceans left in the ocean. Ditto for the shrimp (and sometimes oysters and scallops) in the piquant ceviches, and the ketchup-sweet and pepper-hot seafood cocktails. Trout and catfish are available unadorned or bathed in a variety of sauces: garlic, tomato and a spicy specialty of the house among them.

Technically, paella is no longer on the menu. In reality, however, it is. In place of the traditional preparation, Costa del Sol offers Arroz con Marisco. OK, there’s no saffron. No chicken or sausage, either, although purists turn their noses up at their inclusion anyway. Instead, there is a healthy dose of creamy, richly flavored rice flecked with green pepper and a boat-load of shellfish: baby octopus, whole shrimp in their shells (that means heads on) and whole tiny crabs, their bodies no larger than a silver dollar. Eating this is a messy but worthwhile endeavor.??