Maria Bonita: Holy mole! It's all in the sauce

Maria Bonita
256 E. Main St.
Ventura
652-0247
$7.50 - $16.95

There’s a small, bright yellow storefront on Main Street in Ventura that’s probably caught your eye — its daffodil facade with red and green signage make it practically pulse.

The interior of Maria Bonita is like a Mexican Alice in Wonderland. Its long, shotgun shape is a psychedelic daydream of vibrant, electric, complementary colors. Peyote-inspired paintings (for sale by local artists) canvas the walls: floating eyeballs, beating hearts and Rubenesque, cartoony nudes beg you to suspend reality, at least for one dinner.

The menu is an eclectic array of Mexican delights. Think less taco and burrito, more precise executions of unusual flavors. Probably best known for their complex, multi-layered moles (sauces), Maria Bonita features sweet, spicy, savory and creamy concoctions to accompany a variety of meats, seafood and vegetables. Pumpkin seeds, anise, sesame, chocolate and tequila lend depth to dishes. Bottles of their sauces are on sale for people to use at home.

We started our meal with a perfect summer blend of homemade horchata and a stem of sangria. Their arrival scented our table with cinnamon, fruit and red wine. The horchata had most of its cinnamon and flavorings at the bottom of the cup, so my companion’s first sip was quite a surprise that left him stirring (literally). My sangria came slightly chilled and had a sea of chopped orange rinds floating over its sanguine surface. The elements were delicious, and the temperature aided in heightening the flavors. I liked the drink’s warmer temperature but it made it go down almost too smoothly, too quickly.

Hearty yellow corn chips arrived with our drinks, as did a fresh salsa of onion, tomato, cilantro and jalapeño. The chips were thick and crunchy — corn tortilla triangles that had been fried and salted. The spicy crunches with the sips of sangria and horchata were an enlivening prelude for our taste buds.

We ordered the mole negro (black sauce) with chicken and the camaron borracho (drunken shrimp). There are three choices of mole at Maria Bonita. The owner explained that the negro is sweet, the brown mole is sweet and spicy, and the yellow mole is fire (my interpretation of what he said).

After he took our orders, the owner disappeared into the back to cook our dishes. That night, he was a one-man show, but he made it all seem pretty effortless; and actually, the timing of when he was available and when we were left on our own worked out and, surprisingly, everything came out expediently.

The Oaxaca-style mole negro featured three types of chiles, pecans, almonds, peanuts, tomatillos, cinnamon and cloves. It was smoky (from chipotle), sweet (from chocolate, spices and nuts), rich (with chocolate) and subtle. The tar-black sauce coated each piece of chicken, and tiny sesame seeds crunched with each bite. “It’s like candy,” said my companion. It is. But it’s like grown-up candy — an illicit delight. Both of our dishes were served with a mound of creamy green rice infused with tons of cilantro and other herbs and spices, a pool of puréed beans and corn or flour tortillas.

The camaron borracho had a velvety cream sauce with chunks of spicy jalapeño, lime and tequila. I overheard regular diners making jokes about wishing they could order shot glasses full of borracho to drink. The shrimp were cooked perfectly, and crunches of green peppers and strips of onion finished the experience.

The creamy green rice enhanced both sauces, as did using corn tortillas to mop up some of the borracho. It was hard to stop eating … but when we discovered scooping the remaining salty corn chips into bits of the dark, chocolaty mole, we were in real trouble.

For dessert, we wanted to order the arroz Azteca, a chocolate rice pudding with annatto and fennel seeds, but they were out so we settled on flan. Flans can be as diverse as daylilies, and this was not the fluffy, light custard variety but more the “take a bite and see if you can still stand” flan. It’s a dark, dense confection with caramel sauce and lots of almond flavoring, and its texture resembles bread pudding.  It’s tasty but very stout and, quite frankly, a lot to stomach on top of mole negro!

Dining at Maria Bonita (named after a film star of the 1940s whose photos also grace the walls), is a transporting experience. The space, the décor, the menu and the flavors all escort you briefly out of our vintage beach town, down the rabbit hole to an exotic location somewhere south of the border.  If you are craving diverse flavors, I recommend you “Eat this, Drink this,” and hang on.       

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