Carolyn Fath Ashby
Try the restaurant’s specialty: Salvadoran pupusas, stuffed with pork, beans or cheese.
There’s an art to creating a menu that feels focused but not narrow. If it tempts a few different appetites and offers enough variety to hold a sense of discovery, chances are I’ll come back more than once.
Then again, maybe the kitchen only needs to nail a couple of items so well that you forget that pesky sense of discovery altogether.
At Finca Coffee, owners Marleni and Silas Valle have aced that last part. The restaurant occupies a bright rectangular space in a stretch of Rimrock Road at the Novation Campus, filled with shiny new construction. The dining room feels light but cozy, dotted with rich azure blue tiles and pendant lamps as well as a glowing fireplace. There’s an open kitchen and a mad scientist’s cold brew station involving snaking clear tubes and huge glass jars.
Finca is as much coffee shop as restaurant, judging by the variety of coffee options and the restaurant website’s emphasis on Salvadoran, direct-relationship coffee, which Finca (farm in Spanish) purchases straight from the coffee farmers at fair trade prices. You ought to be able to satisfy a wide variety of coffee cravings here, from pour-overs to the cold brew to flat white to plain old drip coffee. I found their pour-over deeply flavored but a little too cool by the time I got my hands on it; the café mocha was rich and satisfying. (Both the mocha and hot chocolate feature Gail Ambrosius chocolate. Madison Sourdough provides a variety of croissants, too.) The cold brew is served with ice, a dark, aromatic, faintly chocolatey tincture that seemed to be many cups of coffee concentrated into one day-changer of a drink, and I mean that as a compliment. Still, I was so busy trying out various coffee preparations that I forgot to try Finca’s version of a simple cup of drip coffee.
I’ll have to remedy that oversight, accompanying said coffee with, oh, about 10 or 12 of the Salvadoran quesadillas, which are briefly explained on the menu as “sweet; made fresh daily in house.” These petite, lightly sweetened cakes are a deep, crunchy chestnut on the outside, speckled with sesame seeds, but the interior is a tender, rich ivory crumb. Made with (among other things) rice flour and queso duro, a hard, white Salvadoran cheese, they are both familiar and unique. If I hadn’t been told what was in them, I wouldn’t have placed the specific ingredients that make these unassuming little cakes so addictive. I would just have kept trying to describe their delicate fragrance and flavor, delighted for the excuse to keep eating.
The Salvadoran quesadillas, so much more satisfying than their looks suggest, turn out to be a fine introduction to the restaurant’s specialty, pupusas — a Salvadoran dish consisting of a thick corn tortilla stuffed with fillings and fried crisp on a griddle. Finca keeps these simple too: they are stuffed with finely shredded pork, beans, cheese, or combinations thereof, and they arrive in paper-lined rectangular metal trays, with sides of mild tomato salsa and a slaw containing the occasional welcome pickled jalapeno. My favorite pupusa bore the crunchy browned lace of escaped cheese on its griddled exterior, while the filling was bright white, stretchy and molten.
The bean pupusas are a velvety maroon swath surrounded by a thin layer of cakelike tortilla, and the chicharron filling tastes like pork rendered down to its porkiest essence. The dish is a combination of unctuousness, crunch and a touch of zinginess in the condiments. It’s also a reminder of what a pleasure it is to encounter a restaurant that’s decided to do only a few things, but to do them very, very well.
The lunch menu also offers tacos, Mexican quesadillas, and burritos along with the pupusas, but only tacos — a straightforward double layer of corn tortillas, creamy guacamole, chopped tomato and onion and shredded cheese, with a side of lime and salsa — were available the day we stopped in for lunch. The chicken tacos and veggie tacos, filled with bell pepper, cauliflower, and onion, are both raised above serviceable by the salsa verde’s vegetal, stealthy kick. The meat in the steak tacos and the pork tacos had a caramelized crunch that was glorious on its own but with a spike of salsa verde become conversation-pausingly good.
Maybe the next time I go back to Finca I will branch out from pupusas for the sake of research, but I can’t imagine skipping the Salvadoran quesadillas. I don’t think I will actually consume 10 or 12 of them with a cup of coffee, by the way. But I could, without blinking an eye, and that’s just something I must live with.
Finca Coffee
2500 Rimrock Road; 608-285-9230; fincamadison.com
6:30 am-4 pm Mon.-Fri., 7 am-4 pm Sat.; $2-$9
