Review: Zebulon's food, service falters short of summit

When I showed up for dinner in late January at Zebulon's Southwestern Grill and Tequileria at the Marriott hotel, what I found was the biggest smoking, multicar culinary train wreck I've ever seen.

The tequila-specific bar had almost no tequila. The servers knew almost nothing about the food. Two hours of long waits and mediocre, overpriced plates started with the server spilling water on our menus and not mopping it up, and stumbled into a landscape of goofs and gaffs so ridiculous they had me looking around for the hidden camera. The server called the rustic Italian ciabatta bread Chewbacca bread. He arrived with a tray of tequila shots no one had ordered. He did a Macarena-like jig while singing in Spanish when we ordered the Tres Leches cake, then came back with the wrong dessert. When he was explaining the nightly specials, his cell phone rang, and he answered it.

When I found out later that the place had been open only a week, I shelved what had been a less-than-warm-andfuzzy review. It deserved time to find its feet. But last week I went back, and had an almost identical experience, minus the zany waiter.

Zebulon's occupies a stylish corner of the hotel with tall ceilings, comfy booths, and warm red and yellow walls ranged around a central arrangement of cactus and fountains. It would have looked invitingly hip if on a recent Friday night there had been more than one other occupied table.

When the people at that table saw the hostess bringing us by, they practically pounced on her.

"Please," a woman said through clenched teeth. "It's been an hour. My mother would just like some vanilla ice cream."

"Long wait, huh," I said. She rolled her eyes.

It wasn't a good start.

The scattered, not-very-Southwestern menu has changed some since my last visit, but still offers some of the real dogs I thought were mistakes in January, as well as some new ones. The shiitakecrusted salmon in mole ($19.95), which sounds weirdly intriguing, is slathered in a sauce that tastes like little more than salty baker's chocolate. The seasoned, yellow rice in an ambitious paella heaped with a mix of mussels, sea scallops and shrimp with a hint of chorizo ($24.95) had improved from January's soupy version, but a quartet of mealy, pungent mussels seemed to be past their prime. Never order mussels in a place with low turnover.

Zebulon's makes a play at being haute cuisine. Each dish is beautifully plated, replete with trendy microgreens garnishes, but the tastes don't live up to the packaging.

A delicate fillet of snapper dusted in blue corn and served over tasty mango rice ($19.95) was pinned under a sweetand-sour vegetable slurry that tasted as if it had been spooned from a Chinese takeout box. A crab cake appetizer ($8.95) was nice and meaty, but the crab tasted a bit old.

"It's as if they concentrate on coming up with all this exotic-sounding food, but have no real understanding of flavor," a dining companion said.

She ordered the signature cocktail to try to improve morale. A $12 "house specialty" called El Dios Verde. "Can you guess the secret ingredient?" the menu said.

When the Dios arrived, bright, opaque green and stinking of sweet coconut, looking like something from a spring break frat party, she said, "What's the secret ingredient, Coppertone?"

Not everything is bad. The standard expense account fillet mignon ($32.95), with haricots verts and fingerling potatoes was cooked perfectly to order, and restrained in its use of butter and salt. Morroccan-style seared tuna ($22.95) came over crunchy slivers of raw fennel bulb that lent a bright, licoricey zing. But nothing in the whole experience approaches what diners could get for the same price at great, nearby restaurants.

It's not fair to blame the staff for all this. The restaurant was probably conceived by a distant corporate brainiac to look great in a press release, then whittled down by cost cutters until it served neither the convenient comfort food diners staying at the hotel might want nor the special-occasion meals sought by locals looking for destination dining.

I got to thinking how this Zebulon's exploration of the Southwest mirrors another Zebulon's journey in many ways - Zebulon Pike's: It started with grand intentions but had no clear mission and probably not enough resources, and it got hopelessly lost.