SOUTHWESTERN HOSPITALITY: Café Dominic

[Rob DeWalt]

By Nouf Al-Qasimi for The New Mexican

Café Dominic
320 S. Guadalupe St., 982-4743
7 a.m.-10 p.m. daily
No alcohol
Breakfast served until 3 p.m.
Free wireless Internet
Noise level: quiet and comfortable
Handicapped-accessible
Local checks, credit cards

The Short Order
Café Dominic is a plain, clean, and comfortable environment with counter service and an attentive staff. Once you've navigated the crowded menu, which offers a mix of classic American and inspired regional fare, enjoy some free Wi-Fi with your meal. Skip dessert in favor of a few extra bites of lunch from the café's amply portioned dishes. Recommended: pancakes and the Cobb salad.

Saint Dominic was a starving ascetic. The minimalism he so fervently embraced appears to have inspired a thing or two at Café Dominic on Guadalupe Street. The appeal of the place begins with its utter absence of pretension, but to a first-time visitor I can imagine its initial charms being quickly offset by the mind-numbing illegibility of its menu, which looks like a child's rendition of a corporate flowchart. The menu is as broad as that of a diner off 42nd Street in New York City; if you don't already have some idea of what direction your appetite is headed before wandering into the café, you may find yourself wishing for a compass.
The café has three distinct seating areas, the main one being simultaneously the warmest and the least private, with exposed brick walls and a pleasant conviviality. But it is the café's other spaces, though more pedestrian, that have the winning combination of cross breezes, booths, and fewer patrons on an average day.
While the café was named not after Dominic of Osma, patron saint of astronomers, but after its owner, Dominic Romero, I've started thinking that Romero himself could be a saint -- of flapjacks. I could eat his blue-corn piñon pancakes with butter and real maple syrup every weekend. They were fantastic; nubbly, perfectly seasoned, light and fluffy. After inhaling a short stack of them, I sailed home feeling merry, half-wishing I'd eaten two more. The Trattoria Focaccia was very good -- two slices of Sage Bakehouse's best slathered with pesto and then grilled with tomatoes, cheese, and eggs cooked to order.
During the same visit, the "incredible" in Dominic's Incredible Fruit Quesadilla proved to be all too literal a description, as in: it's incredible that this is on the menu. The quesadilla arrived with its halves disparate and disheveled, a blob of sour cream alongside them. The gummy cheddar cooled in the wake of my cherished cross breezes, causing whole grapes and large chunks of strawberry and pineapple to slowly tumble out in a weird, wet fashion.
At lunch, Dominic's pesto is also good on the grilled cheese sandwich with tomatoes on sourdough, which was tasty, if excessively buttery. A side of bland fries was ignored, and the coleslaw was milky and monochromatic.
Dominic's Sopa Azteca is also wonderful, and as restorative and delicious as any Sopa de Lima I've had in the Yucatán: chicken broth made plummy with tomatoes and then bulked up with potatoes, carrots, squash, poblanos, corn, onion, and cilantro, all topped with fresh avocado and crisp, colorful tortilla strips. And the salmon fillet, which is listed on the menu at $16.99, often runs as a special at a bargain $9.99. It's a perfectly cooked piece of wild Alaskan king salmon served with slabs of chewy garlic toast, a massive garden salad that would be plenty for lunch on its own, black beans, and Spanish rice. The accompanying jalapeño aioli was bland -- the salmon called for a spirited showering from the saltshaker, and nothing more.
The taco salad ordered with "grilled fajita" shrimp was ill conceived. We were presented with a stale tortilla shell stacked with undressed greens, beans suspended in a web of melted cheese, and translucent, undercooked shrimp.
Skip dessert, or don't say I didn't warn you. On the first visit, I tried to find out about the contents and origin of three small chocolate cakes enrobed in caramel sauce, but nobody on staff had any idea what they might be, despite being certain that they were "available only for today, and not going to be here again for another three months." With such a cruel and cryptic sentence, I had no choice but to order a slice of cake, which tasted like it was the doomed love child of Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker. However, upon noticing that I had left the cake uneaten, my cash was returned, unprompted, with a smile and the explanation, "We weren't very helpful, so you shouldn't have to pay for that." I half-expected Ashton Kutcher to run in with a camera crew and tell me I had been punk'd.
The off-street parking is nice, but it's the surreally pleasant, friendly, and attentive service at Café Dominic that raises the rating an entire chile. I only wish the food were similarly consistent and superb. Ordering well is important here. As it turns out, judging Café Dominic by its cluttered menu is like judging a book by its cover. But while it may not often disappoint, it rarely exceeds expectations. <25C0>

Check, please
Lunch for two at Café Dominic:
Salmon t $ 9.95
Grilled cheese & pesto sandwich $ 7.95
Cup of Azteca soup $ 2.95
Two coffees $ 4.50
TOTAL $ 25.35
(before tax and tip)

Breakfast for two at Café Dominic:
Fruit quesadilla $ 10.50
Short stack blue-corn pancakes $ 6.75
Taco salad with grilled fajita shrimp $ 10.95
Coffee $ 2.25
Iced tea $ 2.50
TOTAL $ 32.95
(before tax and tip)

[Cindy Fallsen]

Sound like a great place, when we get our Short Term Health Insurance in place, we would love to come to the South West. It is exciting to plan out the eating itinerary ahead of time. We need to get our Augusta Hotels lined up, buy our airline tickets, and we will be on our way. Thanks for the information.