RESTAURANT REVIEW + PHOTOS: Rebuilt Hacienda in Little Rock working out kinks

What had been billed as a brief, three-week closure for renovations turned into a six-month total reconstruction — from the ground up — for La Hacienda on Cantrell Road.

It doesn't look particularly bigger from the outside or the inside, but the kitchen and bar areas have expanded. And the rebuilt structure has one major plus: The original building, a former Pizza Hut, had gotten kind of shabby in the nearly two decades since La Hacienda moved in (from a previous nearby location on Rebsamen Park Road) at the juncture of 1997 and 1998.

The new building has a hacienda-style roof structure, bringing the Little Rock location more into line physically with the Hot Springs original. Stylized haciendas are also engraved into the backs and bottoms of the bright-with-new-polyurethane booths (some of which have "Arkansas Razorbacks" engravings instead). The aisles are wider, but are now filled with big granite-topped four-person tables, so the overall feeling is actually more claustrophobic, especially as the restaurant fills up.

(During this honeymoon period, as customers past and present excited about the reopening flood in, the restaurant fills up quickly. So does its parking lot, which may possibly have fewer spaces than it used to have. Showing up early on a weeknight to avoid that, however, came at the cost of having as fellow diners several families with small and rather noisy children.)

Bright cloth napkins give a bit of color to the mostly brownish decor; the brown-painted new walls sport framed awards the restaurant has received from local publications' "best of" promotions and, as before, depictions of Mexican churches, cathedrals and shrines.

The extended soft opening-slash-shakedown cruise lets the grizzled staff veterans show young, new staff the ropes. So there is always a member of the wait/bus staff within easy hail, and all of them are eager to make sure drink glasses are filled and needs addressed.

But not all is yet well. Some of the itchy glitches will doubtlessly work themselves out (after all, that's what a soft-opening period is for); others may be already institutionalized. For example, our waiter, no doubt influenced by our discussing ordering a margarita, brought Intrepid Companion a margarita instead of the beer she ordered (we only got charged for the beer), and never brought the shrimp cocktail we requested (but never charged us for it). And it wasn't one of the newbies, it was the most grizzled of the veterans.

Longtime customers may notice immediately that while chips and salsa arrive on the table within a very brief period after they sit down, now they just get two salsas -- the zippy and chunky red and the vibrant and mouth-tingling green. (And how much of either depends on the size of the party.) The chips are fresh, salt-free and, early on a weekday evening, were still warm.

But if you're looking for the third, warm salsa with onions that used to accompany them, you'll now have to ask for it. It's now less spicy and a lot sweeter than we remember it to have been, to the point where we probably won't ask for it again.

The menu is pretty much the same as it used to be, however, some things, where the prices are now covered with little white stickers, appear to have dropped off. Something we didn't recall: white cheese dip and guacamole (both $5 small, $8 large) are listed as side items, not appetizers, so it took a little searching through the menu to find them. Our tasty small queso was plenty for two.

We're a little ambivalent about the Queso Fundido appetizer ($7.95 for two, $8.49 for four), a thin layer of cheese/flour mixture on a red-brown skillet-like plate, one corner topped with some crumbled chorizo with another topped with a few fresh jalapeno slices. Localizing the chorizo meant the dish was much less greasy than we've had elsewhere (no orange-colored oil running onto plate and fingers), but it also didn't add much flavor. The cheese peeled right up off the plate, so we didn't have to scrape or waste any of it, and that also made it easier to wrap in the accompanying flour tortillas, but it did mean we had to cut it with a knife to keep from pulling the whole kit and kaboodle up at once.

At first our waiter gave Intrepid Companion an argument over whether or not we could substitute on one of the combo meals ($8.95-$8.99), then finally decided that it was OK if it was something else within the combo-sphere. So we had the kitchen drop a bean tostada in place of the tamale on the No. 5 combo, opposite two chicken enchiladas (beef and cheese are also options), plus the still-uninteresting Mexican rice and the trademark dry-somewhat granular refried beans. The beans are one of our favorite reasons to visit La Hacienda and the offshoot restaurants (including Cotija's downtown and La Casa Real on North Little Rock's Park Hill) run by other branches of the Alvarez family. We enjoyed the enchiladas; the substitute tostada was, alas, merely ordinary.

We enjoyed revisiting the Alambre al Queso ($13.99), which La Hacienda's menu still tags as the "cheese lover's delight," grilled fajita beef (or chicken) mixed with green peppers and onions and topped with melted cheese.

For some reason, we had never previously ordered the Pollo With Mole Poblano ($12.99), but we're glad we've found it -- roughly half a chicken (two very meaty leg quarters), possibly marinated, and artfully plated in a plentiful, pleasantly flavorful and reasonably mild ancho mole sauce (possibly as "rich" as the menu promised, but definitely not "thick"), plus beans, rice and a sort of green salad topped, delightfully, with a sliced fresh avocado.

Our unplanned margarita was actually a little stronger than we might have liked, at least at that early hour. La Hacienda still serves that bright orange citrus punch in which we've always overindulged.

Service, the glitches we mentioned aside, was generally pretty good, and even when the restaurant was busy, food came out of the kitchen quickly.

Weekend on 07/20/2017