Newest Senor Tequila fast, busy

LITTLE ROCK — Central Arkansas' Senor Tequila mini-chain now has six outlets.

The newest, on Cantrell Road west of Interstate 430, is a bit more luxurious than its five cousins, with plenty of wood in the decor and at least half the seating in comfy booths along the larger leg of the L-shaped restaurant.

We recommend sitting in one of those booths if you can, because they'll insulate you against the noise and the bustle that you'll experience sitting on the shorter part of the L.

We did get a booth on our first visit. On our second, we got stuck at the table from "L."

It was a bad place to be, at the crux, next to two large and fairly raucous parties and right where busy and over-laden waiters emerged from the kitchen, shouting in Spanish for help with heavy, super-hot plates of food that - had there been a sudden gust of gravity - we would have been wearing.

It's also where people cluster while waiting to be seated and where the line to pay at the register begins.

Since this Senor Tequila is at least as popular as its fellows (two in west Little Rock, one in Midtown, one in Maumelle and the original on Camp Robinson Road in North Little Rock), you can imagine how many people were, at one point or another, infringing on our personal space.

We should have followed Intrepid Companion's original inclination to sit on the patio.

Back in quieter booth land, where most of the volume comes from the heavy-on-the mariachi musical soundtrack, there's thick padding on the dark-wood bench parts of the booth, maybe just a little high off the floor if you're 5-foot-5 or shorter. The Formica-like table tops make it easier for the busser to wipe up cheese-dip spills. There are coat hooks on the dividers, a nice touch.

The menu is the same as that for the five other Senor Tequilas, a fairly authentic collection of familiar Mexican items - enchiladas, burritos, quesadillas - plus the usual list of house specialties and, in Senor Tequila's case, nearly a dozen seafood dishes.

Speed is the name of the game at this Senor Tequila. Within seconds of your seating, somebody will be at the table with a basket of crisp, salt-free tortilla chips, a small carafe of zippy red salsa and a personal "calderito" (to coin a word for a small caldron) for each member of the party to pour it into.

When it comes to delivering your order, the kitchen apparently prides itself on getting the food to your table as quickly as possible. If you order an appetizer, count on it and your entree arriving, if not simultaneously, right on top of each other.

With the mild white cheese dip ($3.25) on our first visit, it wasn't a big deal. It took up hardly any room and we could either alternate it with our entree or eat it for dessert.

On the second occasion, we had barely started on our De Tocho Morocho ($7.75) appetizer sampler - a simple cheese quesadilla, two stubby but tasty beef taquitos, a quartet of pungent red-sauced hot wings, bean nachos (an untidy smear of refried beans and a little melted cheese unevenly spread over a fistful of chips), pico de gallo, sour cream and a salty, chunky but otherwise uninteresting guacamole - before our multiplate entrees arrived.

Even with just two people at a four-top, that caused an extreme case of table congestion, to the point where we considered putting our chip basket on an empty chair because there was no other place for it.

(We had a minor service problem with the appetizer - it came out without the pico de gallo, guac or sour cream, all of which we had to request. We also had to ask for small side plates, which you'd think would have been automatic.)

We'd recommend any of our three entree choices. The Burrito Canelo ($6.95) is a large four tortilla wrapped around a generous portion of carnitas (marinated pork chunks), a little dry at one end but nicely moist in the middle. It comes topped with "the house salsa verde," green not so much from tomatillos but from plentiful cilantro, perked up, surprisingly, with red pepper flakes.

The spillover sauce helped enliven part of the grimly soupy lake of cheese-topped refried beans and the moreflavorful-than-usual Mexican rice, chunked up with corn, lima and green beans.

Camarones a la Diabla ($8.95), shrimp sauteed with garlic in "our own recipe of red sauce," wasn't as spicy as we expected from the name. ("Diablo" is Spanish for devil.) Intrepid Companion compared it to barbecue sauce, but it was tasty even if some of the shrimp were overcooked.

Plenty of chorizo spice distinguishes the delicious Senor Tequila Fajitas ($11.75) fromthe regular fajitas ($8.75) and Fajitas Sergio ($10.75) - that and the pork short ribs that come on the sizzling platter with marinated chicken, beef, shrimp, onions, tomatoes and bell peppers. It's probably best to fish the ribs out and eat them separately; we found that out the hard way, after wrapping one in a flour tortilla with everything else and having to spit out bone and gristle fragments.

Entrees come with the soupy beans, rice and flour tortillas; with our fajitas we also got guac (actually more guac than we got with our Tocho Morocho plate), pico and sour cream.

Tiny print under the "Especialidades Senor Tequila" header indicates "all cooking done with vegetable oil only," a plus. Elsewhere on the menu is the announcement, "Take-out orders, 35 cents extra."

Aside from the appetizer problem and the difficulty in fitting too many plates on the table, service was generally pretty good until we needed our check. On both visits we had trouble tracking down our waiter for that.

Weekend, Pages 31, 39 on 08/06/2009