Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Café Poca Cosa gets 'urban edgy' in parking garage
TEYA VITU
Tucson Citizen
It's a striking big-city touch: a seven-level pastel green parking garage with a restaurant tucked into the street level.
Not just any restaurant but the beloved Café Poca Cosa, that downtown fixture that many shower with the words "best Mexican food in Tucson."
Suzana Davila moving her "alta cocina mexicana" into the new Pennington Street Garage is today's evolution in the continual sprucing up of the eastern edge of downtown. Recent months have seen the opening of the remodeled Rialto Theater and the opening of Central Bistro in the historic train depot.
"This is an urban edgy statement," said Karen Leone, special projects coordinator at Rio Nuevo, which sold Davila on the idea of going into the garage erected on the site of the Levy's department store of yore.
"She could bring her slightly evolved Poca Cosa here. That creates a whole new dynamic for Pennington."
Davila had to move Poca Cosa out of the Santa Rita Hotel after 17 years because of its conversion to condominiums. She mourns leaving the Santa Rita, but at the same time fully embraces the chance to do something entirely different.
Café Poca Cosa opens Thursday in the garage at Pennington and Scott.
"It's going upscale a little bit, with the times," Davila said. "It has that chic-iness to it, a click to it. It has the feeling of the big city. I was dying to do that."
Gone are the red and purple walls, green ceiling, Mexican folk art scattered about, mix-and-match furnishings and the occasional unbalanced table.
Davila swapped out wild colors for black and chocolate - dark, dark chocolate barely distinguishable from black. The glazed concrete floor bears the chocolate as do the ceilings and the walls between the 10-foot-high windows.
Davila contrasts all the darkness with a burnt-orange back wall that curves in and out for the entire length of the dining room and bar.
"It is a very long space," Davila said. "I had to be creative with that. I try to curve the wall and illuminate it and not have it look like a bowling alley."
Tables and chairs are all new.
There's a white, curved banquette that splits the dining room. There are leather padded chairs, velvet chairs and wooden chairs.
The wood tables - nearly square, or small and large round ones - are topped by stainless-steel candle holders with the candles set within white, frosted glass.
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