There was a time in the not too distant past when downtown Mesa was generally quiet after dark and many restaurants in the area were dry. A lot has changed over the past decade, with more live entertainment at venues like the Mesa Arts Center and the Nile Theater and breweries and even a distillery now operating on Main Street. The next level in the evolution of the city’s downtown drinking and dining scene involves craft cocktails, and Espiritu has brought those to Mesa with its creative combination of Mexican influenced meat, seafood, and beverages.
Espiritu occupies a storefront almost exactly halfway between the Country Club / Main and Center / Main stations on the A Line. Bike racks are found throughout downtown Mesa. The restaurant is next door to the Mesa outpost of Tacos Chiwas, whose ownership overlaps with Espiritu, as well as Main Burgers nearby and Cocica Chiwas in Tempe. Among all these different restaurants along the Main/Apache corridor, Espiritu is the most ambitious, making the jump to full service with cocktails, a raw bar, and an inventive menu in an urbane environment.
The restaurant addresses Main Street with a patio that offers an appealing outdoor experience in temperate weather. Espiritu’s interior space has recently doubled in size, making it now a slightly wider shoebox than before while retaining the depth and coziness common with restaurants in urban environments. Dimensions aside, the room is deliberately dark, creating a nighttime atmosphere enlivened by hanging plants and star-shaped lanterns suspended from the ceiling. A bar counter dispenses cocktails, and a new raw bar displays the day’s seafood.
Seafood is a predominant theme of Espiitu’s menu, which much of it served uncooked. The daily raw bar menu usually features oysters, available either without any alteration at all or lightly grilled with chili butter. The card also announces a daily crudo, generally presented like sashimi, and a daily ceviche. Recent choices have included a crudo of amberjack swimming in a smoky salsa combining roasted garlic, onions, chiles, and squid ink to darken the sauce’s color, as well as a ceviche of diced hamachi with abundant chunks of watermelon radishes and cucumber.
For cooked fish, the whole pescado features tender, moist, white flesh inside a crisp, fried exterior. The seafood is served with a generous slaw of jicama and chayote squash lying underneath and a spicy red salsa and corn tortillas on the side. Other equally substantial entrees lean towards red meat with a skirt steak, costilla (ribs), and a beef cut of the day. These generous platters are all optimal for sharing, but a more manageable entree for one person is a dry-aged burger with caramelized onions, cheddar, bacon, and chiltepin aioli on a brioche bun.
Not everything here is huge, and not all of it involves meat. Many of the smaller plates at the top of the menu have more of a plant basis. Espiritu’s version of queso fundido is distinctive with melted cheese sandwiched between a pool of tangy green salsa below and crispy shoestring potatoes above. Mushroom quesadillas are slender but attain some additional heft from refried beans and micro greens on top. A salad of little gem lettuce is augmented with almonds, machengo, and true to the meaty orientation of the restaurant, a bit of thinly sliced dried beef.
The birria dumplings are thoroughly successful with the tender beef inside melding almost imperceptibly with the wrapper and the entire pockets swimming in a dark sauce much like the usual consomme typically served with birria, but a bit more viscous. There’s also an Asian feel due to an abundance of bok choy, sesame seeds, and scallions. Papas tacos may sound like a crossover from Cocina Chiwas, but the ones served here find their own path distinctive from those served at their sibling restaurant in Tempe. A side of broth for dipping is recommended.
Dessert offerings at Espiritu are a mix of items produced on site and a few that are outsourced. One perennial favorite is the carlotta, which comprises thin layers of moist cake between sheets of key lime and cream cheese. The result is an interesting hybrid of tres leches, key lime pie, and cheesecake. Like many of the desserts served at Espiritu’s sibling restaurants, it’s a little on the heavy side and therefore a good candidate for sharing. A recent feature from another purveyor was a cajeta cheesecake, and one or two flavors of ice cream are always available.
Espiritu’s food alone is reason enough to visit, but the underlying theme is cocktails. In contrast to its single sheet food menu, the restaurant offers a cocktail book full of irreverent descriptions of its beverages. Favorites include the Phoenix, a semi-spicy margarita set ablaze by the server and Los Caidos, in which it seems like a margarita, a piña colada, and a mai tai all swimming in the same pool that just happens to be shaped like a skull. In terms of interesting drinkware, Chee-Chen Eet-Za is an effervescent, icy creation in a vessel that resembles a Mayan temple.
There’s also a choose-your-own-adventure page that invites customers to describe what they like and then trust the bartender to fulfill their cocktail cravings. Beer and a small selection of wine are available for those who don’t care for all the crazy concoctions, and Mexican Coke is an option for customers who wish to avoid alcohol altogether. To be sure, there are still some unfulfilled wishlist items in downtown Mesa, most notably for places to eat that are open Sunday evenings, but with Espiritu, Main Street has started to come out to play and stay up a little later.
PHX Rail Food 