Mouth by south of the border at the new Fresko

Lori Midson

​Fresko is Mexican casual cuisine, a unique place, an experience, and a taste only known in Mexico. Fresko is honored to be in Colorado. Fresko is genuine, culture, quality, passion, freshness, ambiance, with a staff that loves to share. Experience metropolitan Mexican dining for a fast lunch, or a comfortable dinner with friends and family.

Sounds like something William Shatner should recite as poetry on The Tonight Show. I kid, I kid...kind of. The verbiage cited above is what's written on the menu and on the mural that greets you at Fresko, a week-old Mexican restaurant that isn't exactly "metropolitan" given its south suburban address -- 5062 South Syracuse -- in the Denver Tech Center, but if you live in, say, Bonanza, Colorado (population: 15), then, yeah, sure, why not?

Anyway, the menu -- soft corn or flour tortilla tacos, flautas, burritos, quesadillas, enchiladas  -- reads like your run-of-the-mill south of the border joint, but when I stopped by for lunch this week and ordered the chicken enchiladas smothered in a piquant tomatillo salsa, I really wanted to take another plate home with me. And the samples of salsa, delivered with a heap of house-made flour chips (I much prefer corn, but whatever) and nine small ramekins of salsa -- everything from a mild and creamy avocado to a smoky chipotle and a fiery roasted cayenne -- held their own, perhaps not against temples of taco worship like Tacos Y Salsas or Las Carboncitos, the two top taquerias in town for anyone who's a salsa bar slut, but Fresko's concoctions were hardly slouchers.

And the wine list, with its nod to Chilean, Argentinian and Spanish labels, is no loafer, either. In fact, there's not one California -- or American -- label on the entire list. On second thought, maybe there is something metropolitan about Fresko, after all.