Exit Barrio Café, enter this excellent new Guanajuato-style restaurant on fabled Calle 16.
By Nikki Buchanan | Photography by Melissa Valladares
If your Spanish is passable, you probably know that Cielo Rojo – the name of the handsome new 16th Street Mexican restaurant owned by Jose and Maria Maldonado of Mariscos Playa Hermosa fame – means “red sky.” It’s likely an allusion to Arizona’s stunning landscapes (a beautifully rendered, black-and-white desert mural supports this theory) and to a famous song popular in the Central Mexican state of Guanajuato, which is the Maldonados’ home turf.
Their restaurant celebrates the cooking of their homeland, offering a handful of dishes seldom, if ever, found in Phoenix. But this is no folksy greasy spoon. Modern and faintly upscale, Cielo Rojo offers the requisite craft cocktails (nine of 15 contain tequila or mezcal), as well as brightly colored chips and a rotating selection of salsas, one of them decidedly zippy.
Although the menu features plenty of animal-proteins – chicken mole, branzino, steak, et al. – pork predominates, just as it does in pork-producing Guanajuato. In fact, the restaurant’s guacamole may be ordered with salt-flecked chunks of chicharrón, an excellent variation that’s crisp and buttery all at once.
A starter of carne apache – raw ground beef, acidulated in lime juice with onion, jalapeño and cilantro – is a tart, compelling cross between ceviche and a crumbly, poor man’s steak tartare. Served with crispy tostada disks for scooping, it’s classic Mexican snack food. Meanwhile, camarones gigantes (charcoal-grilled jumbo shrimp) arrive whole, to be shelled and dunked in scorching salsa macha and sweet, mustard-tinged cilantro-lime aioli. Tiradito de jurel (essentially spicy aguachile verde with firm, silky mackerel, red onions, tomatoes and cucumber) is also bright and tangy, an elevated, easy-to-love looker.
Tamale masa is fashioned into thick, oval corn tortillas called largas (a Salvatierra specialty), which are topped with meat, vegetables or both. Chile negro largas contains whole beans, queso fresco and chopped pork ribs bathed in spicy chile negro, a rich, complex chile sauce bearing resemblance to mole. Comfort food with a kick.
As for the entrées, the prices may seem high, but many of them are so generously portioned they feed two, especially when appetizers are involved. One such dish is tender carnitas (24-hour marinated pork shoulder), served with rice, whole beans, encurtido (pickled veggies) and cueritos (slippery strips of vinegar-pickled, deliciously fatty pig skin I still dream about).
Fans of the form are surely aware of the recent demise of the great Barrio Café up the street, but Cielo Rojo lessens the sting a bit. It’s a great, regionally distinctive addition to the Calle 16 food corridor – so for them, it’s surely nothing but blue skies from now on.
Cielo Rojo
Cuisine: Mexican
Contact: 1919 N. 16th St., Phoenix, 602-358-7882, cielorojo.restaurant
Hours: Su, Tu-Th 11 a.m.-9 p.m., F-Sa 11 a.m.-10 p.m.
Highlights: Guacamole con chicharrón ($15); tiradito de jurel ($18); chile negro largas ($12); carnitas ($25)
