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Cabrito, by Wikipedia

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Gabriele Stabile for The New York Times: TORTILLAS PLUS Cabrito’s namesake figurehead.

Gabriele Stabile for The New York Times: A choice of margaritas.

VISITED on its best nights and judged by its best dishes, Cabrito is the Mexican restaurant so many of us dreamed about for so long.

It has just enough sophistication and upscale trappings, manifest in the quality of its cocktails and length of its tequila and mezcal list, to be the plausible cynosure of a fun night out, not just a grubby refueling station where the price of dauntless, authentic flavors is a spartan atmosphere. You don’t, in other words, find yourself wanting to eat fast and hurry out the door.

And yet it’s not really upscale, with little of the vagueness and few of the generic touches that too often accompany an ambitious ethnic restaurant showcasing cooking that’s neither European nor Japanese. For the most part it doesn’t pull its punches, some of them fierier than you’re accustomed to. The deep pool of red chili sauce in which the short ribs come is ablaze with guajillo and chile de arbol, and it’s spectacular.

Cabrito doesn’t lean too hard and too frequently on avocado and doesn’t take the position that enough sour cream can solve any problem, redeem any sin. It sweats the quality of the tortillas (house-made and usually warm), the chorizo (also house-made and juicy), the cilantro (vibrant and abundant) and the toasted pumpkin seeds.

Try the shrimp and tamarind ceviche, and marvel at the way those pumpkin seeds, or pepitas, lend the perfect degree of saltiness and the perfect little crunch to a mix of ingredients — including red onion, pineapple, avocado and serrano chilies — with an expert balance of sweet, sour, sharp and soft notes. The kitchen is paying attention and taking care.

Much of the time, that is. There’s a qualification in the first sentence up top and a digression right here because Cabrito is afflicted by an inconsistency that’s puzzling, even maddening, in the sense that you don’t want anything challenging the exhilaration you can so easily and rightly feel about this special place.

There are dishes that don’t seem, by nature, to rise to the caliber of others, and dishes that aren’t dependable from one visit to the next.

Take the namesake dish: the slow-roasted baby goat, hunks and strands of which can be tucked into a tortilla with the restaurant’s intense, riveting salsa borracha, a jammy amalgam of onions, pasilla chilies, tequila and sour orange juice. I’ve had the goat when it was dry and unappealingly gristly, when it was moist and blessedly fatty and when it was somewhere in between. And I know from the reports of others that this unpredictability is par for the Cabrito — and cabrito — course.

The service, too, can’t be trusted. At times Cabrito seems woefully understaffed, and you could wind up with a crimp in your neck from all your craning, twisting and swiveling to figure out what’s what and who might be able to help you.

At other times, though, the restaurant operates with an efficiency and authority that defy the chaos in the pleasant but cramped room, which has imported Mexican tiles along one wall and, along the other, a bar that seems to go on forever. The bar’s reach and prominence assert the importance of alcohol — and the lack of ceremony — at the very core of Cabrito’s identity.

Cabrito, which opened last May, is owned by Zak Pelaccio and the other folks who masterminded the Fatty Crab, which is the restaurant where Cabrito’s chef, David Schuttenberg, last worked.

That genealogy shows in the menu he has put together. It owes as much to the urban-glutton tropes of the moment — to the sensibilities of the most self-consciously unpretentious of this city’s gastronomes — as it does to Puebla and other areas of Mexico.

There’s a street-food focus in the front-and-center placement of tacos and pizza-esque huaraches, which are available with skirt steak (good), crumbled chorizo (better) and the corn fungus huitlacoche (best). Servers at upscale Mexican restaurants are constantly chattering about the trufflelike properties of huitlacoche, but I usually can’t detect them. At Cabrito I could: it was like ingesting some vegetal pheromone.

There’s pork and more pork, fatty and fattier, and there are kinds and cuts of meat beyond the most overexposed and familiar ones. The baby goat isn’t the best example. One taco comes with braised beef tongue, which is sliced thin, seared and folded into one of Cabrito’s thick but tender tortillas, which taste of the corn in them, along with a salsa of avocado, tomatillos, jalapeño, garlic and cilantro. It shouldn’t be missed.

The beverage selection has a distinct, felicitous personality: more than three dozen tequilas; a half dozen mezcals; soft drinks made with tropical fruits like mandarin and guava; and fresh watermelon juice, used in several of the well-mixed cocktails.

That there’s almost nothing in the way of wine is understandable and forgivable. Wine isn’t really what this food or setting calls for.

Less easily overlooked is the number and variety of desserts. There’s one and only one, churros with chocolate sauce, and that sauce is thin and dull. The short shrift Cabrito gives to this last act of a meal has an advantage for the restaurant: diners leave — and the tables turn — more quickly. But it ends the evening on a disappointing note for any diner with a sweet tooth.

There are additional disappointments. In a restaurant with porky preoccupations, well exercised in the carnitas, why are the braised spareribs in the pozole so repeatedly dry? Why are citrus notes almost absent from the guacamole?

You wonder, but then you take another bite of the rajas con crema — roasted, sliced poblano chilies in a luscious milky bath — and you don’t care about anything else. It’s as satisfying a Mexican dish as any around town, and it makes clear that Cabrito is a whole lot more than the bar-with-food it is sometimes cast as (and sometimes pretends, with strategic coyness, to be).

In a city with no surfeit of bold Mexican food but plenty of ways to spend more money with less satisfaction, Cabrito deserves recognition even beyond what it has already received.

Cabrito:

50 Carmine Street (Bedford Street); (212) 929-5050. cabritonyc.com

ATMOSPHERE A pink goat outside, imported tiles along one wall and a bar with hand-painted flourishes along the other gussy up an otherwise plain but festive setting.

SOUND LEVEL Roaring when crowded.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Rajas con crema; tongue and tomatillo, chicken liver and chorizo tacos; skirt steak, chorizo and huitlacoche huaraches; shrimp and tamarind ceviche; carnitas; short ribs in red chili; chicken with plantain-coconut fried rice.

WINE LIST Only one red, one white and one sparkling, but dozens of tequila and mezcal options, plus cocktails using fresh juices.

PRICE RANGE Dinner appetizers and tacos, $5 to $12; sandwiches and huaraches, $12 to $15; entrees, $14 to $24; dessert, $7.

HOURS Dinner from 4 to 11 p.m. Sunday and Monday and to midnight Tuesday through Saturday. Lunch or brunch from noon to 4 p.m. seven days a week.

RESERVATIONS Call at least two days ahead for prime dinner times.

CREDIT CARDS All major cards.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Entrance and cramped dining area on street level; restrooms not accessible.

WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Bush War on Roquefort Raises a Stink in France

Departing Officials Set Duty at 300%

Ewes on 2,100 farms produce the milk used in Roquefort. They graze in a carefully defined oval area across the Larzac Plain and in nearby hills and valleys. (By Bob Edme -- Associated Press)

Bernard Roques checks on Roquefort maturing in a cellar in the village of the same name, where the economy is built around the product. (Bob Edme/AP)

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 29, 2009; A01

ROQUEFORT-SUR-SOULZON This seems an unlikely spot to fight a trade war.

A village of 600 souls in a remote part of southern France, Roquefort clings precariously to the side of Combalou Rock, a promontory overlooking a deep valley where sheep graze in the shadow of limestone cliffs that were sheared off by a seismic jolt in prehistoric times.

But the primal shake also carved out aerated underground crevasses that give a unique economic value to this jagged landscape about 65 miles northwest of Montpellier. They make possible a gastronomical wonder that has delighted gourmets for centuries: Roquefort cheese. And now, in an era of globalized competition for trade, the smelly delicacy and its little home town have become ground zero for the warriors of export-import in Washington.

The United States, it turns out, has declared war on Roquefort cheese.

In its final days, the Bush administration imposed a 300 percent duty on Roquefort, in effect closing off the U.S. market. Americans, it declared, will no longer get to taste the creamy concoction that, in its authentic, most glorious form, comes with an odor of wet sheep and veins of blue mold that go perfectly with rye bread and coarse red wine.

The measure, announced Jan. 13 by U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab as she headed out the door, was designed as retaliation for a European Union ban on imports of U.S. beef containing hormones. Tit for tat, and all perfectly legal under World Trade Organization rules, U.S. officials explained.

Besides, they said, Roquefort is only one of dozens of European luxury products that were attacked with high tariffs. The list includes, among other things, French truffles, Irish oatmeal, Italian sparkling water and "fatty livers of ducks and geese," which apparently is how Washington trade bureaucrats say foie gras.

But the cheese producers and sheep farmers around Roquefort do not see it that way. Only Roquefort got hit with such a high duty that it amounts to a ban, they complain. In their view, this unfairly undermines not only the economy of Roquefort, which depends entirely on cheese, but also the well-being of the 4,500 people who herd special ewes on 2,100 farms producing milk for Roquefort in a carefully defined oval grazing area across the Larzac Plain and up and down nearby hills and valleys.

"This measure is completely out of proportion," said Robert Glandières, a sheep farmer who heads the Regional Federation of Ewe Raisers' Unions. "It's a little bit of a provocation."

If so, it would not be the first provocation in the history of the Roquefort war. The United States first imposed unusual 100 percent tariffs on Roquefort in 1999, when the dispute with the European Union over hormoned-up beef first got nasty. In reaction, a local peasant rabble-rouser named José Bové rose up, decrying unnatural foods, industrial agriculture and disrespect for traditional ways. Even before he led a group in tearing up a local McDonald's, it was clear the United States was his main target.

Bové was convicted of a crime for his gesture. But many French people agreed with his sentiments, none more so than the people of the Roquefort region. For them, the preservation of culinary tradition is a way of life -- and a livelihood.

Several years later, then-President Jacques Chirac added to the irritation in Washington with his criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was the time of "freedom fries" in the United States and of disdain for things French, including Roquefort.

Since then, President Nicolas Sarkozy has tried to put U.S.-French relations back on a more friendly footing. But Glandières said residual irritation may have been at work in the U.S. trade representative's office when the decision was made to triple the tax on Roquefort. He also acknowledged that the French government, with its own beef industry to promote, did nothing to help, having led the charge against U.S. beef in Europe.

Despite the ill feelings, Roquefort producers went out of their way to preserve a place in the U.S. market even after the 100 percent tax was imposed. Milk producers and cheesemakers alike took revenue cuts to keep prices down for U.S.-bound exports.

As a result, by some measures U.S. sales rose slightly despite the punitive duty. Glandières said frustration about that among U.S. officials might also have played a role in the new tariff rate. "From what we hear, the Americans couldn't stand to see Roquefort was still on the supermarket shelves in the United States," he said.

The proportion of Roquefort exported to the United States remained small, however, amounting last year to only 450 tons out of 19,000 produced and 3,700 in total exports. Spain, with purchases of 1,000 tons, was by far the largest foreign customer.

In any case, Glandières said, the days of attacks on McDonald's are over, and the only recourse now is diplomacy. A McDonald's sign beckons unmolested just outside the headquarters of Glandières' federation in Millau, the region's main town.

In that spirit, Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier recently called the tariff rate "unjustified" but said he hoped to open a new dialogue with the United States. A delegation of local elected officials went to the U.S. Embassy in Paris last week to present their case politely.

Underlying the hopes for improvement is an impression widely shared by people in France that President Obama's administration, free of baggage from the dispute over Iraq, will prove more sympathetic to France -- and in this case to the traditional cheesemakers of Roquefort. But Glandières noted that Obama has a lot to deal with. "I don't think Roquefort will be the first thing on his mind," he said.

Aside from the commercial dispute, however, Roquefort's cheese producers and sheep raisers have expressed wonder that their little town and its exquisite gastronomical tradition could get caught up in a 21st-century trade conflict that seems so distant from their pastoral lives. In some ways, their dilemma has become a symbol for many communities in France where globalization seems to intrude on long-cherished traditions.

Local legend says Roquefort got its start in Roman times when a young shepherd guarding his flock nearby happened on a beautiful girl. Smitten and determined to follow her, the youth stowed his knapsack, containing cheese and rye bread, in a little cave created by one of the crevasses that run through the hills of the region. On his return some time later, he found the bread had turned moldy and passed the spores to the cheese, which was veined with blue. Desperately hungry, he ate the cheese anyway -- and Roquefort cheese was born.

However Roquefort got its start, the people of this village have been making it for a long time. They were granted a monopoly on producing the cheese by King Charles VI in 1411. In 1666, the parliament in Toulouse granted Roquefort a "controlled designation of origin," which made it illegal for other communities to claim they were producing it. A decree from the prime minister in 2001 reviewed in excruciating detail how Roquefort must be produced to retain its distinction, including boundaries for the ewes' grazing grounds.

"There are conditions here that are natural and unique," said Martin Bonnet as he led a tour of the Papillon company's caves, honeycombed under Roquefort's main street.

© 2009 The Washington Post Company