Review: Blue Corn soars above typical Italian Market Mexican fare

Stand on Ninth Street, stick out your arm, point your finger and spin. Stop. Chances are, no matter which way you're pointing, it will be in the direction of tacos.

Blue Corn's Fundacion Olmeca sampler
Neal Santos

Stand on Ninth Street, stick out your arm, point your finger and spin. Stop. Chances are, no matter which way you're pointing, it will be in the direction of tacos.

The tipping of the Italian Market's flavor to South Philly's rising Mexican population is not a new story. It's been this way for years now, to this city's collective gustatory benefit. But with few exceptions, the taquerias that have sprung up like wildflowers beneath the corrugated awnings are interchangeable. Even those with destination-worthy specialties — Prima Pizza's banana-leaf tamales, Taquitos de Puebla's tacos al pastor, Mole Poblano's titular dish — aspire to little more than serving the best version possible of their food.

Nothing wrong with that. But when a place opens up that aspires to more, you notice.

At Blue Corn, where diamond-patterned place mats pad the tables and ceviches marinate in housemade "bruja" (witch) vinegar, it doesn't take long to figure out this white space trimmed in nautical blue is aiming for something beyond the typical Ninth Street dining experience.

Its owners, Armando Sandovar and his brothers and sister, show their Susanna Foo background in details that speak to a restaurant more fully developed than its neighbors: a verbal menu of nightly specials, for example, and dessert. Blue Corn has a bar — a bar! — with palomas and tamarind margaritas and chile piquin-rimmed elixirs of a kind similar to the drinks at Distrito, La Calaca Feliz and the Cantina twins. And when I drained the Alacran, a tall, grenadine-pink, tequila-grapefruit cocktail with a sunken treasure of chopped papaya, an eagle-eyed woman bearing a jangly pitcher was an empty-water-glass assassin. She seemed to have no other purpose except keeping customers hydrated and folding the napkins into precise paper-plane points that stack perfectly in the upright plastic cones on each table.

The Sandovar clan has invested in visuals, too, lining the walls with curved mirrors and paintings depicting the restaurant's namesake vegetable. Even the obligatory Virgin Mary statue seems unusually decked, watching over the restaurant in a watermelon-hued robe and fiery aurora. Pendant lamps dangle from the drop ceiling like exotic fruits, flattering the colorful cooking served on terra-cotta pottery tattooed with yellow flowers. The colors that vibrate within these walls are so saturated that it's like you're looking at everything through an Instagram filter. I blinked a few times and peered at the shiny pomegranate seeds beading Sandovar's stuffed chiles en nogada. My nose was so close I could see the individual kernels suspended within each glistening fuchsia droplet. This is the color of pomegranate seeds? I felt like I'd spent the past 30 years seeing dried cranberries.

Of course, none of this — not the $7.50 cocktails, the eager service, the trippy pomegranates — matters if the food sucks. Fortunately, Sandovar and his siblings can cook; they share chef duties at Blue Corn, where the menu is based on — you guessed it. Dried and ground, the azure ears become everything from dusky tortillas to desserts, crusting a silky mascarpone cheesecake and baked into an amazing, steamy, muffin-like cake I wanted to split, toast and butter for breakfast the next morning. The blue huarache was an oblong masa cake layered like a pizza with refried beans, queso fresco, grilled cactus and crumbles of chorizo bleeding scarlet fat.

The Sandovars hail from Puebla, but brew the most complex Yucatan pibil I've ever tasted — robust, sour, spicy. Instead of the typical pork, they braise chicken in the sauce, pull and redress the meat, then pile it onto tender, silver dollar-sized sopecitos with cilantro and crema. Ringing the pibil's ruddy scarlet is a blue iris.

The sopecitos pibil are a third of the "Fundacion Olmeca" sampler. Crispy chalupas paved in queso fresco and zippy salsa verde and soft tlacoyos filled with refried beans and wreathed in rajas round out the platter. You get two of each item for 10 bucks, a perfect starter to share with a date or hoard for yourself as an entrée.

There's also gorgeous sopa poblana, a creamy tomato-and-pepper puree garnished with meaty strips of charred pepper and hunks of panela cheese that melted ever so slightly, and the "Charrito," an unusual but enjoyable salad of roasted beets and sliced chayote flanking a meadow of fresh watercress. The menu says goat cheese and Maggi dressing, Maggi being a soy-like sauce beloved in Mexico, I learned later. Strange that the salad needed salt.

The fabled chiles en nogada, a special, also could have used a salty element to combat its sweetness. Dried papaya, raisins, nuts and sweet spices mined the ground beef filling of this fat-roasted poblano pepper blanketed in white walnut-cream sauce. Pomegranate seeds speckled the surface of the pepper, and came on the side like a trove of jewels. Sliced fresh apple and sticks of more dried papaya also complemented — pretty, but less useful than, say, a dusting of salty queso fresco. That might be an unexpected addition, but then again, so is Blue Corn to Ninth Street. One that makes everything better.

BLUE CORN| 940 S. Ninth St., 215-925-1010. Mon.-Thu., 10 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri., 10 a.m.-2 a.m.; Sat.-Sun., 7 a.m.-2 a.m. Appetizers, $5.50-$12; entrees, $6-$20.