Kiva Grill Features Style and Plenty of Legume

The menu at Kiva Grill opens with black bean nachos and closes with a sabana of pounded steak rolled around black beans.

The black bean appears with such frequency at this new Golden Triangle restaurant, in fact, that to dine in ignorance of it would be to not know beans about the culinary thrust of the place. There is black bean soup and black bean relish, and a bowl or hillock of black beans attends most entrees as garnish.

The Spaniards who brought black beans to this hemisphere most likely did not foresee that this legume one day would be a fashionable adjunct to a modish style of cooking called Southwestern cuisine. But Southwestern is ever so trendy these days, as is Kiva Grill and the handsome, brand-new Aventine development in which it is situated.

Like the three other eateries in the Aventine’s instantly popular restaurant row, Kiva Grill pays immense attention to style and a good degree of attention to the cooking. Plate decorating counts for much, and artistic squiggles of sour cream and red and green sauces run across various preparations like the bands of color applied to Hopi pottery.

The place is done up in the turquoise and coral shades that are virtual trademarks of contemporary Southwest style, and, if the emphasis seems a touch corny when it runs to such things as the steer skull mounted over the fireplace, it is likable for the live cactus plantings and the open exhibition kitchen. For the Indians of the New Mexico pueblos, the kiva was a special room set aside for occasions of ceremony and circumstance, and the restaurant presents itself as such a place.

Southwestern cuisine in modern parlance is one of those nouvelle things that doesn’t mind being labeled but is terribly difficult to pin down. Certainly, it is based on traditional Southwestern cooking, an amalgam of American Indian, Spanish and Mexican styles tempered a bit by the tastes of settlers from east of the Mississippi.

As generally practiced today, it means any ingredients prepared in the Southwestern style, with chilies, cilantro, cumin, pine nuts and other flavor accents playing large roles. As defined by Kiva Grill, it involves not only novel approaches to traditional foods, but a lot of updated Mexican cooking that will be familiar to anyone who ever has bitten into a burrito or enchilada.

The restaurant bills itself as a grill and takes the appellation seriously--even the green salsa quemada that accompanies the frequently replenished fresh tortillas is grilled, an unusual fate for a sauce, but one that gives the cilantro-based relish a deep tang of mesquite smoke. There are also smoked vegetable fajitas and a blackened swordfish, the latter of which sounds like an unprecedented case of Southwestern cooking meeting ersatz New Orleans Cajun cuisine.

The tortillas, which issue constantly from the kitchen’s tortilla corner, are themselves a good appetizer and can be dressed with the spicy red sauce or orange-flavored honey butter offered as alternatives to the smoked green sauce. There are many other choices, though, including dressy nachos--the crisp chips are made with both regular and blue corn--garnished with a choice of beans, smoked chicken, steak, carnitas or lobster and shrimp; a quesadilla garnished with what the kitchen is pleased to call “green chile pesto “ (how Southwestern! how nouvelle !); a ceviche of sea bass, and small tamales filled with chicken. The black bean soup, served as a thin and nicely textured puree, has a good depth of flavor to it.

The two most notable starters are prepared at table, one of the small pretensions of this restaurant that pays good results. The first of these, the queso fundido , extends the usual melted cheese-chorizo sausage combination with corn relish and chopped tomatoes, which the server folds into a happily gooey mess and encloses in warm, soft tortillas; a little red sauce spooned over the filling works wonders, although the filling also is good plain. Guacamole likewise is prepared at table, with the server scooping the flesh out of ripe avocados and mashing it with cilantro, serrano chilies, onion, garlic, salt, tomato and lime. The taste is, of course, quite fresh, and the texture much more pleasing than the ready-made stuff served elsewhere. An order will feed several comfortably.

The salads are entree-size, imaginative and, at $5.95 to $7.50, reasonably priced. The blue-corn tostada crowns a base of crisp chips with an attractive jumble of avocado, tomato, greens, roasted peppers and a choice of grilled chicken or steak strips, and the warm fajita salad extends the choice of meat garnish to include duck while varying the salad ingredients with the addition of jicama, toasted pumpkin seeds and cucumber. A vinaigrette flavored with a bit of jalapeno gives this salad a rather suave flavor.

The specifically Mexican entrees run from burritos--filled with chicken and mushrooms, lobster and shrimp and other items--to chicken and carnitas burritos and mesquite-grilled chiles rellenos . The lobster-shrimp enchiladas are presented rather elegantly (if the tasty filling is somewhat sparsely apportioned), with bands of red and green sauce streaked across them and side garnishes of black beans and good, Mexican-style rice. This plate garnish, sometimes extended by a crisp corn cake, accompanies most entrees.

The so-called Southwestern specialties, many or which seem like basic Mexican dishes, range from a selection of fajitas to a chili-heated pozole verde filled out with corn kernels and seafood. The Santa Fe shrimp varies San Diego’s beloved “shrimp scampi” with the addition of pine nuts to the sauce of white wine and garlic, and there are two styles of carnitas , including the excellent “soft tacos” filled not only with meat but also with shredded romaine and chopped tomato and onion.

The torte Azteca makes quite a presentation piece, and is a raised cake of corn tortillas layered with chicken, chilies and cheese, the whole smothered in a burnt umber-colored sauce of subtle flavor and heat. The sabana , at $17.50 the most extravagant dish by a good margin, consists of a filet steak that has been flattened into a sheet, grilled, spread with mildly tangy red chili adobo paste and rolled at table around a filling of scallions and black beans. It is handsome, and the beef gains a great tenderness from the process, but perhaps it ought to be finished in the kitchen. By the time the server had done his work at the table, the meat was cool.

The Southwestern theme continues to the end, with a mango “creme brulee” that is a misbegotten and sadly textured mess, but also with a pine nut brownie of wonderful flavor and richness. Like other restaurants of its ilk, Kiva offers specialty margaritas, of which the “Kivarita” is the lead item. Composed of premium liquors, it is served in a shaker; these are good, and one goes a long way. The list of wines by the glass, on the other hand, is ridiculously brief and in some instances quite overpriced.

KIVA GRILL

8970 University Lane

558-8600

Lunch and dinner daily.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, tax and tip, $30 to $65.