Maria Maria La Cantina

Margaritas, Mexican food and the mojo of Carlos Santana

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This might surprise you, but Austin has quite a few Mexican restaurants. Most of them get by without celebrity affiliations. But few generate the kind of curiosity associated with guitar god Carlos Santana's venture in the Warehouse District.

Maria Maria La Cantina, perched between stylish neighbors Kenichi and Cuba Libre, is a sultry cavern of a place, tricked out with an arboreal lounge ringed with upholstered seating, livened with mural-sized paintings and flicker-perfect LED candles in the walls and on tree-branch sculptures. And let's not forget the music. Latin-flecked pop of all stripes, including the Gipsy Kings. Hope you like the name "Maria" set to music.

This is the fourth Maria Maria in a chain, with two restaurants in California and one in Arizona. Former Fonda San Miguel chef Roberto Santibañez developed the menu, which embraces Americanized Mexican staples and steers them back toward their roots: Fajitas get a touch of tangy, white Cotija cheese, burritos get a blanket of crunchy-sweet jicama slaw and skirt steak gets a handful of sliced cactus.

The menu is a sort of mission for Santana, who said during a visit to Austin in November, "There are Mexicans who think Taco Bell is Mexican."

What version of the real Mexico the place hopes to capture is up for debate. But the signs that Mexican food here is a long way from Taco Bell - or standard Tex-Mex, for that matter - show up in the chicken and mole casserole ($14), layered with tender shredded chicken, sweetened with blackberry mole and baked with cheese. It's sensual, filling and funky, much like the enlightening side dish of fried plantain chunks with Cotija cheese ($6). And the menu expresses Mexico's ocean side with a big bowl of fresh, chunky guacamole studded with crab and shrimp ($15).

Staying in sight of the ocean, the surf and turf of grilled skirt steak and shrimp ($22) featured a bountiful strip of meat with a nice char, topped with three large, fresh-tasting shrimp and Cotija cheese. The skirt steak - by nature a challenging cut for all but the strongest-jawed - was served on top of a flat stack of corn tortillas with a smoky sauce of guajillo chiles and tomatillo. The menu called this stack "enchiladas" without mentioning that they weren't the rolled, filled kind we've come to expect. I would have liked something more substantial to help me feel better about paying north of $20 for a plate that came with no other sides. At Maria Maria, you can't take the rice and beans for granted. You can, however, take them as side dishes for $2 each.

Up to that point, I had enjoyed the musicality of Santana's place, helped in part by a signature margarita sweetened with agave nectar and a waiter who guided us through the menu and highlighted a reasonable child's plate with two tacos (grilled chicken and skirt steak) and rice and beans for $7.50. But when $7.50 starts to look reasonable for a kid's plate at a Mexican restaurant in Austin, something is out of balance. Among the off-balance price points at Maria Maria, the most obvious was a dish of three tacos featuring lightly fried fish on housemade corn tortillas for $14, plus $3 to add shrimp. So that's $17 for three undistinguished tacos with no rice and beans.

Throw in sautéed spinach with mushrooms and jalapeños ($6), flan with a watery berry compote ($7) and a few soft drinks, and the bill came in around $100 for our party of four (note, one of us was 4 years old), not including alcohol. Whatever calm I felt in that musical setting was thrown off by that number, because I expected a Latin symphony at that price, and I got a catchy pop song instead. At Maria Maria, if you want to dance to the music, be prepared to pay the Grammy-winning piper.