It's In There

All mixed up: Mixto serves up heaping portions of sarzuelas de mariscos and salsa blanca. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Mixto puts it all together.

by Patrick Rapa

Paella is delectable chaos. Robust but daunting. Heartier than your average beef stew and tons more diverse. The answer to the question, “What happens when a lobster, some clams, a few mussels, a chicken and a sausage accidentally swim into a blender?”

Done right, paella can be a filling and complex dining experience, a meal that satisfies most aspects of the carnivorous palette. Done wrong, it can be a heaping, mushy, one-flavor disaster.

Mixto is more than up to the challenge.

Four City Paper staffers sat down to the paella valenciana at the stylish and spacious but friendly Pine Street Latin fusion hotspot and were overwhelmed by the immensity and intricacy of the platter. It looked as if a great battle between sea and land creatures had just taken place on ricey quicksand. Here sit two clams spilling yellow spices and rice from their final grimace. There you see a lobster claw reaching hopefully upward from the abyss. His tail is barely visible in another hemisphere of the dish.

"Despite the horrified looks of the squeamish among us, the paella excelled on every level," says Howard Altman. "The shellfish were cooked just right and the rice, covered in saffron and infused with the essence of the seafood and sausage, was outstanding."

If you find the idea of sausage and chicken bedding down with mollusks and crustaceans a palatable image, you'll enjoy Mixto's oversized paella. They say it was built for two, but it easily could have fed us all.

That is if we hadn't ordered seemingly every other damn thing on the menu.

"The ceviche de camarones appetizer was yummy as hell, and fresh fresh fresh," declares Nancy Armstrong. "Tomato-y, with only a slightly citrus tang." Juliet Fletcher agrees, calling the crispy shrimp dish a "delicate balance of freshness and spice, two elements that I think of as total opposites, but which apparently agreed to cooperate with each other on an ad hoc basis."

The sopa de pollo and sopa de frijoles negros were polar opposites -- the former light and subtle, the latter thick as thieves and just spicy enough. The plato mixto, which features representatives of most of the restaurant's other appetizers (light and tasty chicken pockets, various fried things, the always malleable plantain), was another popular starter.

Mixto, it seems, knows more than a few ways to skin a plantain, and most of them are successful. A more popular version of the aggrandized banana is the sweet plantain, a soft, cakelike delicacy you can also choose as an accompaniment to most entrees. "They're a dessert masquerading as a side," declares Fletcher. Next to pork, plantains may be the hardest food to avoid in Mixto's repertoire, but careful ordering will help you tiptoe around both if you so desire.

Generally, the sides and appetizers fared better than the main dishes. "My arroz con pollo -- Columbian style, rather than Cuban, which apparently just means Œno pork' -- was good but not great," says Armstrong. "What I really loved was the cassava, especially the thin yogurt-like dipping sauce, which was tangy and a little vinegar-y."

Fletcher was similarly non-plussed by her montuno: "The pork was too dry, perhaps owing to the thin slicing." The pollo empanizado, essentially a slender, fried chicken cutlet, was also satisfying but nothing to write here about.

Altman was particularly impressed with the skirt steak dish, churrasco Argentino. "Though our waiter warned that the requested medium-rare might be hard to deliver given the thinness of the cut combined with its being served on a hot metal platter, it arrived in pink perfection, accompanied by the traditional Argentine garlic dipping sauce."

The portions at Mixto are fairly large and most entrees come with multiple sides, but if you crave a sweet closer, Altman suggests the flan. "It's a sweet, thick dollop of caramel-covered yumminess, well-appointed with a delicious cup of café con leche." Of course if you have room for dessert, you didn't order the paella.