Barrio in Birmingham

(Credit: Susan Tusa/Detroit Free Press)

Name a cuisine and it's a pretty safe bet you can find it in Birmingham's bustling downtown restaurant scene. But there was one glaring absence until last week: Mexican chow. That changed with the opening of Barrio on Hamilton Row adjacent to the Palladium cineplex.

With an upscale menu appropriate to its location, Barrio isn't Taco Bell, isn't Tex-Mex and isn't the taquerias of southwest Detroit.

Dishes range from varied takes on guacamole, salsa and ceviche to eight types of tacos to intriguing entrées. The room décor complements the menu. Items from previous tenants City Cellar and Quattro have been retained, while features such as garage-door windows that open up the restaurant to the outdoors have been added. Low-rider bicycles and a Detroit Bros. motorcycle known as the Goat grace the space. Guests are greeted by a floor-to-ceiling history of tequila as they walk to the hostess stand. But the most important element is the food.

Barrio chef Hammond Lawton says he strives to pull from all the flavors of Mexico.

"From the Yucatan, we use mango, tropical fruits; we use habaneros that are not as common in Texas," says Lawton, a 10-year Michigan transplant who hails from Houston.

"Texas, I typically think of jalapeños, fajitas, things of that nature," he continues. "Growing up, I spent a lot of time traveling to Mexico for vacations and road trips. We would spend time down in the colonial cities of Mexico, down in the Yucatan on the Pacific side, on the gulf coast. So in designing this menu, I tried to get inspired from all those different areas."

The opportunity to be executive chef at a top-notch restaurant has been a long time coming for Lawton, 37. He did a stint as sous chef at Forte and then spent six years as a private chef for a local family. He knew Eric Doelle, owner of Chen Chow and the Hamilton Room, from his college days at the University of Arizona.

"This opportunity came along and knowing the owners as childhood friends, they knew that this was what my particular taste was in cooking. It was an opportunity that was too good to pass up," Lawton says.

Why is the restaurant called Barrio?
Barrio is Spanish for neighborhood. ... We wanted a place that was very neighborhood-oriented. We want to be a neighborhood hot spot.

Earlier in the evening, we're getting the families. and at night, it picks up a little. But you're welcome in flip-flops and shorts and you'd feel just as comfortable in a great cocktail dress before going downstairs to the Hamilton Room.

Any special equipment in the kitchen?
We do a lot of stuff in our brick oven. The brick oven was here; it was already in the building. I believe City Cellar put it in. But when we started developing this place, I suggested leaving it. It's fun to do all the quesos in it, and we roast our chicken in it and we bake our enchiladas to order in there. It's kind of cool. We usually crank it up to almost 800 degrees at dinner. It makes things fast; it gets that beautiful broiled look to it.

What do you say to people that have had that bad tequila drinking experience -- you know, the one that turned them off of tequila forever? A lot of people tell that tale.
With all of the signature cocktails that we have, I think once you get people to try it, they'll have a different perception of tequila. Most of the people we've encountered who've had bad tequila experiences have usually had bad tequila. I know my personal experience, whether it be crummy vodka or crummy tequila, you go overboard and you don't care what it looks like -- you're washing it down with so much salt and lime anyway that it doesn't make much difference. We want people to come in and eat tacos and hang out and have tequila.

What's your favorite menu item?
My favorite thing on the entire menu is the conchinita pibil enchiladas. It's a slow-roasted pork. It's got spice to it; it's got sweetness to it. We cook it for about six hours at very, very low temperature until it's just falling apart. We roll it in a red chile sauce. We've been fortunate enough to source an amazing variety of dried red chiles. We serve it with a spicy corn sauce and a little avocado-tomatillo salsa.

I'm also a big fan of the oyster tostadito. It's a little bit reminiscent of the gulf coast where I grew up, but we've decided to coat it with masa and deep-fry it and we serve it on this great corn chip, like a little mini tostada.

Why is now the right time for a Mexican restaurant in Birmingham?
Mexican food is really starting to pop and become a hot trend across the country. It's hard for me to say that because I grew up in an area where there was Mexican food at every corner, from high-end to family-oriented to the little hole-in-the-wall taquerias that we used to frequent a lot, after hours at 2:30 in the morning.

So this opportunity kind of presented itself and we thought it would be a lot of fun. It's casual, it's inexpensive, and just a lot of fun. It's a real lively atmosphere, especially once you crank up the music and get the lights down low. You can see from the low-rider bikes that we don't take ourselves too seriously. We take the quality of the food seriously, the cocktails seriously, the service seriously, but we want to be approachable and have a lot of fun in the process of doing it. So here we are.