Picosa

Address
65 SE Main St., Mpls., 612-746-3970, picosarestaurant.com

The Scene
Picosa sits in the old Sophia space, perched on Main down by the Mississippi near St. Anthony Falls, a lovely block for a restaurant. The huge space has a large bar area, a room for private dining, and a spacious patio overlooking the green and the river. The eatery is self-proclaimed “Nuevo Latino,” but aside from a few potted plants, some salsa-riffic music, and the barhoppers sipping mojitos, there is nothing vaguely Latin from a design standpoint happening at all. Nor does a single stick of furniture or a staff uniform or the table décor and art indicate that anything has changed about the restaurant—except the name—since Sophia’s demise.

Our Take
Lindell Mendoza, who ran Sofitel’s restaurants for years, has set out on his own with a big room and menu, but a staff of inexperienced servers, hosts, and cooks. How he brings them along will determine the future of Picosa. The food is Latino lite, but I’m not sure—based on the success of Chino Latino, Masa, and a dozen or so smaller operations with more honest cuisine—if his genre choice is due to misplaced estimates of local tastes or his kitchen’s talent level.

The Indian fry bread in the dinner basket was delightful, especially dunked in the quintet of salsas and sauces that accompanies almost every dish. The octopus salad was oddly served on a pile of baby greens, the octopus tough and poorly cleaned and cooked. Quite a few dishes are geared to the bar crowd. Calamari gets the jalapeño-and-garlic treatment with decent results; there are several appetizers that come in shot glasses and a Picosa burger with guac and salsa. Rock shrimp and oysters are both served with the usual suspects—lime, avocado, tomatoes, and so forth. In an attempt to mollify the upscale diner, there are dishes such as plantain-crusted sea bass. Desserts were disappointing, the best of the bunch being a chocolate–and–ancho chili pie that was clunky, but good.

Choose or Lose
It’s hard to serve two masters in a kitchen. Mendoza has talent; he showed it at Sofitel, but there he had the safety net of big budgets, corporate training programs, and a more experienced caliber of employee. Restaurants that try to be all things to all people rarely succeed, and despite the pressure of filling a large room each night, restaurateurs are always better off choosing one style. A burger bar with mojitos and a college-age staff works, and an upscale Latino cookery staffed by line cooks who understand the ingredients would succeed too, but attempting both simultaneously is muy loco.