Review: Seviche — A Latin Restaurant

Steve Grimes, left, Brandon Hamilton, and David Martin at the bar. (Credit: Michael Hayman)

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Opportunity cost. It never shows up on a restaurant tab. You won’t find it listed on your credit card statement. It doesn’t affect your pocketbook in any tangible way. But from an emotional and psychological standpoint, it’s the cruelest bill of all, because it robs you of what might have been.

Say you’re reading the menu at Seviche – A Latin Restaurant, Anthony Lamas’s five-year-old restaurant in the heart of the Highlands, and the pan-roasted halibut with red chili ginger butter catches your eye. Then you notice that today’s special is pan-seared ahi tuna with a green chimichurri sauce made of jalapenos and mints. At that moment, you are confronted with two glorious futures – but you’re forced to choose one and only one (unless, of course you have an infinitely insatiable appetite).

The future lost? That’s opportunity cost.

Every time I look at Seviche’s menu, I’m tormented by visions of lost futures. I want everything on the menu: all the ceviches, all the appetizers, all the entrees, all the desserts. The only solution I’ve found is to keep going back (which I’ve done often enough that it’s pretty much impossible for me to dine there anonymously).

One way to minimize your opportunity cost (and your dollar cost) is to visit on Sundays, when the ceviches (and bottles of wine) are half price. Instead of making a difficult choice, you can order a tasting of three or five ceviches ($25/$40, before the discount). You can sip oyster shooters ($13), three shot glasses stuffed with plump oysters submerged in what tastes like the perfect Bloody Mary, a blazing mixture of tomato juice, vodka, and horseradish. You can move on to pink chunks of crawfish bedded down in a saucy mixture of greens, sweet peppers, punctuated by crunchy pieces of jicama, and sauced with an intense lemon-cilantro pesto ($14). Then feast on tender slices of medium-rare beef tenderloin dressed with Serrano chile sauce and toasted garlic ($15), or a halved coconut filled with ahi tuna steeped in sesame, scallions and ginger ($15).

Plate for plate, Seviche’s ceviches are the equal of any to be found in the United States, marvels of texture and flavor, each one distinctive, visually striking, and perfectly executed, night after night.

The same is true for humbler sounding items: empanadas are structurally similar to those you’d find anywhere in the world - they’re fried crescents of pastry. But the fillings - chunks of spicy chicken ($8) or wild mushrooms and Capriole goat cheese ($9) are joyously spiced pools of pleasure. Tender rings of calamari are plated with peppers, olives, onions, and cumin-lime aioli ($11). Guacamole, prepared tableside, is a luscious green treasure.

Unlike many chefs, who reserve their boldest flavors for the small plates, Lamas and his team are as adventurous with entrees as with appetizers – a practice as rare as it is commendable. Halibut is pan-roasted so precisely that the outer crust is as sheer as naughty lingerie; it furnishes just enough surface tension to give you shivers when your fork breaks through it to reveal the delicate, snow-white flesh within. A bed of rice studded with macadamia nuts, a “cigar” stuffed with spicy crabmeat, and a sauce of red chiles and butter furnish the perfect frame ($29). Ahi tuna is always on the menu, in a rotating assortment of presentations and sauces that express the chef’s whim of the moment – and the kitchen’s perfect command of technique (recently, a tuna steak was faintly seared to a luscious texture, then topped with a few shrimp in a delectable spice rub, $33).

And though much of the menu is given over to seafood, meat-eaters and vegetarians will find plenty here, as well. A long, thin slab of well-seasoned skirt steak is grilled, skewered in a pinwheel shape, and plated atop mashed red potatoes with a slurry of chimichurri (you might as well ask for extra dish of this all-purpose green concoction – it’s certainly the finest “steak sauce” on the planet).

While you’re at it, you might as well ask for lots of things: the servers are experts in every dish. The bar staff knows the wine list inside and out (and if the Pisco Sour (I consumed recently is any indication, they know their way around a cocktail shaker, as well). Given the intense flavors of the food, it makes sense to rely on expert advice for food-beverage pairings.

And it certainly pays to heed advice and order the exquisite desserts. Black and white tres leches may be the definitive Louisville take on this traditional three-milk cake; flan infused with rum had the intense flavor of caramelized sugar you’d expect from a crème brulee. And you could hardly do better than to finish your meal with a glass of leathery Bodegas Oliveres Monastrel Dulce Port ($7.50).

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