I'm so appreciative of restaurants that serve farm-fresh food! I especially appreciate when a kitchen is on full display for customers to see what's cooking, allowing for full accountability. The food looked delicious!
And then I bit into it.
I got the sweet pork barbacoa enchiladas. My partner got the quesadilla with the same meat. Now, we saw the word "sweet," and we thought: honey mustard sweet. Honey BBQ sweet. Maple glazed ham sweet. Honey bourbon chicken sweet. In other words, sweet PLUS savory/spicy/tangy. The balance can work really well and be scrumptious!
This was just sweet. Good lawdy, like it was doused in sugar. It wasn't a meat dish anymore, it was almost a dessert at that point! I should have gotten a hot sauce instead of mild. My partner had to douse his whole quesadilla in tabasco and Tapatio. He didn't finish and will use a lot of Sriracha on the leftovers. We'll finish our food because it certainly wasn't bad by any means, but that unexpected flavor was too off-putting for us to think of Cafe Rio as an option for lunch or dinner in the future. The customer should not have to correct the chef's recipe, and while I could tell the food was very fresh and wanted to like it more than I did, I'm afraid we'll be looking elsewhere for our Mexican food.