El Camino Cantina offers trashy Tex Mex and margarita mayhem
El Camino Cantina might have one of Australia’s best chefs attached, but it won’t hide the vomit in the men’s loos, the 20-somethings stockpiling margaritas or the sombreros scattered up the road.
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There’s video hits blaring throughout the cavernous space that’s festooned with bulbs and neon, the riot of colour like a migraine on peyote.
The Tex Mex pastiche and Day of The Dead iconography is as OTT as the giant sombreros many in the three-quarters full 400-seater are wearing.
There’s a group of twenty-something women in Supre skirts, slathered in Sephora makeup and stockpiling oversized frozen margaritas, as part of their $79 two-hour food and unlimited drinks deal, next to a table of Asian tourists bemusedly taking happy snaps of their Mexi-Mel adventure.
Before long, Tequila plays. Conversations turn to one-sided shouts, there’s vomit in the sink in the men’s loos while someone’s yakking up in the ladies.
It’s just gone 7.30 on a Friday night.
At first blush you wouldn’t know this is a restaurant that has attached to it one of Australia’s food greats. A chef who has supported grassroots Victorian producers for years and who led the way in the produce-first philosophy now parroted by every chef from Williamstown to Woop Woop.
But I doubt Neil Perry has stepped foot in El Camino Cantina here in Fitzroy on a Friday night, as surveying this scene of margarita-fuelled mayhem I’d imagine he’d last all of five minutes before screeching, “I’m melting!” leaving nothing but a ponytail floating on a puddle of Omega-3.
It is the country’s largest dining group, and while Perry’s high-end Rockpool is the name of the Quadrant Private Equity-owned group that took over the chef’s stable of restaurants in 2016, it’s the themed restaurants – the Bavarian, Munich Brauhaus, Fratelli Fresh – where the group’s future growth is forecast both here and overseas.
El Camino is the Tex Mex version of the Bavarian and has the same seemingly unstoppable formula of appropriated cuisine served in cartoon form.
It opened a few months back in what was most recently the Fitzroy Social but what most will know as the old Little Creatures.
At the Bavarian it’s all about litre steins of beer, here it’s 100 types of tequila and mescal and oversized margaritas that come in such flavours as mango and Red Bull.
For just $19 you’ll get a giant custom-made glass filled with 24 oz (700ml) of party starter that packs a proper punch.
With a good balance of citrus and sugar, the original on the rocks is well made, a big drink with bigger boozy kick.
I can’t imagine the carnage late at night and pity the heroic staff who are tasked with both endlessly ferrying drinks and cleaning up the aftermath.
Here’s hoping the group’s reported wage issues are well sorted, for staff here earn every cent and then some.
People seem to be having fun, but in a dead eyed more-is-more way I thought you’d only see at Mar-a-Lago.
I don’t know what dad on the next table is looking for at the bottom of a huge margarita tower ($49) but he’s going for it like a drought-stricken calf on a water tanker’s teat while ignoring his family around him, who have done an admirable number of returns to the Chevy boot that’s filled with free corn chips and salsa.
That salsa is awful – acrid, insipid, stale – but otherwise the food is surprisingly decent, even if it suffers the curse of a cuisine that’s predominantly dull.
Call it a fajita or a quesadilla, a burrito or a taco, but they all pretty much amount to the same thing – meat and beans and sour cream and cheese wrapped in tortilla.
We had a few tacos, which were fine but forgettable (3 for $20 with rice and beans) and crunchy-cheesy quesadillas filled with pork and pineapple, and chicken with guacamole ($12.50 each) and a fat burrito of brisket and beans served with good sweet potato chips ($18).
Most impressive were the DIY fajitas with excellent steak and chicken sizzling on cast iron plates with onion and capsicum, charry tortillas and all the other bits on the side to wrap and roll. For $59, it makes a meal for four.
This is food for sopping, with such deals as $2 Taco Tuesday and 10c Wing Wednesday highlighting the Big Restaurant Group economies of scale at play.
It’s a business model that’s evidently successful, but catching the tram home afterwards, sombreros were seen sporadically scattered up the road, like a pissed Hansel or Gretel had swayed their way through town dropping pieces of clothing as a trail back to dignity.
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El Camina is a snapshot of how Brunswick St has changed and a vision of a dining dystopia where the owner-operator has all but been replaced by the Big Corporation selling F.U.N.
Not that the 20-year-olds pre-loading before clubbing are concerned with such things when there are $7.50 happy hour ‘ritas to be drunk.
EL CAMINO CANTINA
222 Brunswick St, Fitzroy
Open: Daily from noon
Go-to dish: Steak and chicken fajitas
SCORE: 11/20