Texas barbecue

If you haven’t been to Terlingua yet-the neighborhood restaurant that is the new anchor along a burgeoning restaurant strip in this desultory part of town-it’s time to join the crowds who already favor it as a congenial haunt for barbecue.

Along Washington Avenue, the Nissen building across the street will be housing a new restaurant; outdoor dining at Terlingua

I first wrote about it in June when it opened. I had the pork belly and shell-on shrimp and liked both. The pork was cooked just right with its fatty layer of skin rendered crisp and sweet with honey. And the guajillo chili sauce that cloaked the shrimp had a nice winey favor typical of the guajillo. The shrimp were good, though most likely flash frozen and thawed. It’s nearly impossible to get fresh caught Gulf shrimp in Maine.

Pork belly and head-on shrimp

Terlingua is essentially barbecue but not the usual kind in which northern cooks try to mimic Down South pit masters. The food has also been described as Latin. But the closest it gets to it is more Tex-Mex border food.

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It’s been a while since another barbecue restaurant has opened in Greater Portland beyond Salvage and Elsmere. Otherwise, our restaurant world bulges with Asian and American bistro cuisines, with the plethora of small-plates in a continual burst of fusion flourishes. But now we have Terlingua, on the burgeoning restaurant row of Washington Avenue, formerly one of the grimiest byways in the city. But gentrification is everywhere in Portland, and even the disparities of this neighborhood are coming together.

The start of an outdoor patio and the pleasant interiors of Terlingua

Terlingua’s handle is to offer barbecue with a Latin flavor. After one visit (on opening night), my first impression has left me nonplussed regarding having a romp through a Latin style of barbecue. If you look deep and hard into the flavor profile of the menu, it does have a subtle Latin bent (more border cuisine of Tex-Mex), but I wouldn’t say it goes whole hog. There’s the use of various chilies; hominy (homemade or canned?) in the chicken pozole; the shell-on shrimp is bathed in a guajillo chili sauce. And such dishes as chicharron of pork belly with a honeyed glazed were impressive presentations.

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