Loud Art, Loud Food at the New Border Grill : The Mexican restaurant aims to overwhelm--and succeeds

“She’s not usually this quiet,” confessed the proud mother. Quiet? The kid looked hypnotized.

Probably she was just overwhelmed. Imagine being about a year old and immersed in the new Border Grill. The dominant color is construction-site orange. The walls and the ceiling, a jumble of panels that angle down threateningly close to the tables at one point, are covered with huge, brightly colored, cartoon drawings by the London artists Su Huntley and Donna Muir, who have also done album covers for Sting.

They look like party-time graffiti from a Mexican roadhouse, mostly showing the traditional Judas figure of Mexican folk art. With his satanic ears, Judas looks rather like a tomcat who has turned into a hardened sinner, defiantly puffing on cigars and consorting with skeletons and fallen women. There are also naive drawings of planets and rockets, and the wall over the bar (separated from the dining area by an orange fence of artfully clumsy planks) is covered with big, crudely drawn faces of people getting sloshed, whether maniacally, lustfully or despairingly.

The table settings are assertive and vivid themselves: midnight-blue water jugs, artlessly fashioned beer glasses in loud colors. The restaurant is loud in the literal sense too, of course, like every restaurant Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken have ever owned, notably City Restaurant.

So of course the 1-year-old was staring around the place bug-eyed. She was overwhelmed, like us. This was like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse with food.

Border Grill clearly means to overwhelm. The menu aims at the same broad, aggressive impact as the decor, a rough immersion in the loud flavors and bright colors of Mexico, above all the less familiar dishes of Mexico--as the original Border Grill on Melrose has always done on a smaller scale (it’s recently been upgraded with similar murals and some of this menu). The result is basically irresistible.

Take panuchos. These come four to a plate, each consisting of two tiny, paper-thin tortillas sandwiching a filling of black beans, topped with some smoky grilled chicken, some salsa, a slice of avocado and a few rings of delicious pickled onions. Sometimes, I swear, there’s a little dollop of something that could be a sort of black pepper salsa. They’re impressive: rough and elegant at the same time.

Or take the specials. One night there was a bread soup--not a tortilla soup, but a bread soup. It was as far from cliche Mexican food as you can imagine, consisting of bread cooked to mush in stock that had an insistent walnut-like aroma of oregano and the Mexican herb epazote. It looked like a mess (or maybe baby food; the baby did look at it appraisingly), but it was impossible to stop eating.

Everybody liked that one, but I can’t say everybody at my table liked the spinach salad with lentil dressing. I thought it impressively earthy, though: spinach with a dressing of perfectly cooked lentils in lime juice, all topped with browned garlic chips.

The usual Mexican seafood appetizers (cocteles, ceviches, salads) can be ordered separately or on a big chilled seafood assortment, where they come in little rectangular porcelain pots, looking like so many miniature bathtubs. One of the ceviches is shrimp in a light, somehow exhilarating sauce of garlic, lime and cilantro; swordfish ceviche comes in a richer, sweeter one of oregano, olives and tomatoes. The octopus salad and raw oysters topped with a little bit of onion sauce are also a lot of fun.

One of the best appetizers is the simple and unpretentious enchiladas frescas. They’re just little corn tortillas dipped in a sauce of ground mild red peppers and wrapped around a crumbly white cheese, and they have the true bittersweet taste of Mexico.

However, not everything here is Mexican. Milliken and Feniger reached down to Peru for the anticuchos: two tiny skewers of grilled beef heart. The little chunks of heart have a wonderfully smoky flavor and are more tender than you’d expect. Incidentally, the avocado corn relish on the side is probably a bit hotter than you expect.

There’s a Caesar salad, quite appropriate since the Caesar was invented in Tijuana. The version here, which is slightly quixotic by local standards, is fresh and pleasant and seems to be the original Caesar’s Cafe recipe. Sparing the anchovies but leaning into the garlic, it mostly tastes of lemon juice and olive oil.

Just about everything on the appetizer side of the menu is impressive in one way or another. The Oaxacan pickled pigs’ feet salad, however, is a bit disappointing. In its savory hash of vinegar and red and yellow sweet peppers, the chopped (practically minced) pigs’ feet are so polite they’re not much more than a texture. Of course, that may be exactly how a lot of people want their pigs’ feet.

The most impressive entree proves to be the most baroque, octopus veracruzana. Red snapper veracruzana is of course a classic Mexican dish, which Mexican restaurants in our part of the world unaccountably make into a very dull dish. This dish has nothing in common with them. The octopus is dressed with red and yellow peppers, black olives and yellow grapes (!) on a bed of rice sopping with a wild, slightly sweet sauce full of cumin and (of all unexpected, curry-like spices) turmeric.

Ironically, the best thing after that operatic extravaganza is the simple grilled fish, which is always smoky and perfectly cooked, often arranged on some odd foundation, such as guacamole mixed with salsa and lime juice. If you want a wilder fish, there’s one wrapped in tortillas along with olives and pieces of potato. The whole satchel of stuff is then fried. This is what you might call the sloppy-sexy school of Mexican cooking.

There’s a lot of that style around here, the sort of thing that would horrify a French chef (actually, probably all of Mexican cooking would horrify a traditional French chef). The epitome is the chicken chilaquiles: chicken and corn masa mixed with sliced onions and the odd pepper, baked in some tortillas. It comes out a sort of savory mush, served with a tart tomatillo sauce and a rather pedestrian tomato sauce. Exotic comfort food.

The grilled and vinegared turkey, a dish already known at City Restaurant, is also groomed for a rugged, South of the Border look, sliced into big irregular leaves. Sabana, a thin steak evidently marinated in lime juice, also has an apparently conscious weirdness. It’s very tasty, but the lime juice gives it an odd, puffy texture some people truly hate.

The braised lamb shanks are served in a hearty, rough-and-ready way, the shanks, with the meat practically falling off them, stuck in a bowl of sweet, dark-brown lamb broth flavored with lots of oregano. The bland hunks of unmeltable Mexican cheese floating around in it are apparently for color and texture contrast only.

Everybody liked the braised duck, a very fat-free skinless duck topped with soft, boiled onions. The pile of lentils on one side had a nice bit of lime flavor. On the other side was a stunning contrast to this carnal, earthy assembly: an ethereal salad of oranges and jicama sliced paper-thin.

Some of the most unpromising things turn out to be great, like the red bean stew, a vegetarian dish of red beans, slightly tart, very rich, not at all bitter. There are some chunks of carrots, squash and plantain floating around in it, more for contrast than anything else.

Great stuff. But it must be said that the tacos are a real disappointment. The Yucatan lobster tacos (there are several other fillings available) have plenty of lobster on them, along with some salsa and guacamole; perhaps too much--they’re a soggy mess. The griddled tacos include a lamb taco that’s always sold out, even as early as 7 in the evening, so I assume they’re good. The carnitas model, though, is pretty pedestrian, especially at $12 for a small plate.

The chicken pibil may be all too authentic. It’s genuinely steamed in banana leaf, but extremely bland. Spices might help, some black beans on the side would surely help, but as it is, this dish is just steamed chicken with rice and some middleweight tomato and cilantro sauces.

The dessert list is a whole menu on its own and includes some stupendous treats. The lime pie is positively furry with tan curlicues of shredded toasted coconut; it looks like a Muppet. The Mexican chocolate cream cake is a savagely rich chocolate concoction dosed with cinnamon and clove.

The blueberry pie has a graham crust, but oddly only the top crust. Still, it is filled with smashingly good blueberries. There’s a nice guava cheese tart, the obvious Latin American dessert combination of cream cheese and guava preserves encased in flaky pastry, a very foreign-looking tart about half an inch high.

The safest bets among the desserts are the ices--things like light and refreshing tequila-and-lime ice spotted with chia seed, served in big, tall glasses. The rest of the desserts, however, are on the not-so-overwhelming side of the Mexican spectrum, the sort of sweets that taste like breakfast rather than dessert. Fried plantains with strawberries. An unfrosted walnut cake. A dense upside-down cake is a whole lot like coffee cake topped with pecans, dried apricots and prunes.

They don’t serve breakfast at Border Grill, but they do have a weekend brunch with all sorts of Mexican egg dishes, including a papadzules, an exotic Yucatecan deal where hard-boiled eggs are wrapped in tortillas and topped with pumpkin seeds. If you want to avoid eggs, you can have pancakes made from batter that includes banana chunks, served with shredded coconut, guava jam, coconut syrup and cream.

So what do we think? We’re overwhelmed. Time will tell whether this kind of loud, sleeve-tugging cookery wears well (the panels of cartoon art feel pretty temporary to me). But for the time being, we’re impressed. Aren’t we, kid?

Border Grill

1445 4th Street, Santa Monica; (213) 451-1655.

Open for lunch 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday; dinner 5:30 to 11 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 5:30 to 12 p.m. Friday, 5 to 12 p.m. Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m. Sunday; brunch 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Full bar. Street parking; valet parking in lot across the street at dinner. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $34 to $77.

Recommended dishes: panuchos, $4.50; shrimp ceviche, $7.50; spinach salad, $9.50; octopus Veracruzana, $16; grilled fish, $18; braised duck, $18; lime pie, $5.50; Mexican chocolate cream cake, $5.50; passion fruit ice, $4.75.