El Morro

Nashville Restaurants and Food
El Morro
495 Myatt Drive
Madison
615-860-4545

The red linen table cloths and artful plating get your attention. The lovingly cooked food shows care in the kitchen. The Martin family is taking this restaurant enterprise seriously and while they may have a few more kinks to work out at El Morro, their new Cuban restaurant in Madison, they are off to a good start.

El Morro is named for a castle that guards the entrance to Havana Bay. The restaurant is a bit of an outpost itself, blazing new frontiers in the industrial boredom of Myatt Drive. New Metro Nashville offices are scheduled to be built down the street and that could help business substantially. For now, they’ll have to pull people in with the food.

The menu reads like a list of Cuban classics: Ropa Vieja (stewed shredded steak), Picadillo a la Habanero (beef hash) and Bistec Palomilla (lightly breaded steak). Other Latin American dishes with Cuban versions are thrown in the mix such as Churrasco al Chimichurri (skirt steak). The emphasis here is on entrees and side dishes. While there is the ubiquitous Cubano and a couple of other sandwiches on the menu, El Morro is striving for a finer dining experience.

The Vaca Frita, shredded steak, comes out of the kitchen with a sprinkle of red paprika and green dried parsley around the edges of the plate. Everything looks pretty and yet the food is plenty hearty and served in generous portions. There is only one problem: this clearly isn’t Vaca Frita, it’s the Cuban cousin Ropa Vieja. The shredded steak is hard to miss as Ropa Vieja because it’s stewed in a light tomato sauce with onion, green peppers, olives and bay leaves. It’s mellow and deeply flavorful, almost something that you would expect to be served in a Cuban home, just not the dish ordered. Is it an issue in the kitchen or with the inexperienced waitress? Hard to say. In this case the quality of the food makes up for the mistake.

The sautéed veggies on the side are perfectly cooked and coated with pieces of garlic. The signature house sauce reflects the rest of the menu and shows the delicate touch in the kitchen. It’s a light butter sauce with a citrusy tang. It’s just enough to bring up the wonderfully tender Yucca Con Mojo. Perhaps that sauce makes a few too many appearances on the menu, but it works on the dishes I sampled.

A vegetable and beef soup is really more noodle and potato oriented. It has a strong dose of black pepper and yet is still well balanced. Congris rice has solid flavor and the pan fried sweet plantains are sweet and juicy inside. Grilled chicken on one outing is a bit overdone, but other than that everything coming out of the kitchen is good. Now it may take a while: they cook to order and at a leisurely pace. Even a quiet lunch crowd of just three tables brings a twenty minute wait for even soup to arrive. In the end it’s okay due to the quality of the food. It does make one wonder how they will do when the place is packed. A waitress in training doesn’t help matters much.

The dining room itself is comfortable enough. They need to spruce the place up a bit with artwork or something on the walls. It has a slightly temporary feel to it right now.

El Morro fills the void for entrée based Cuban food on the north side of town. Hopefully, despite the location, the Martin family can smooth things out, build a following and keep cooking. I paid $20 with tax and tip on one visit and $19 on another.