Heathen Eating

Not far from the bass-boat-riven waters of Lake Ray Hubbard is Heath. Heath is a town of roads that curl and hog-leg through a sprawl of open grasses and sod fields buckled together by occasional subdivisions of homes bearing monstrous footprints and modest circa 1950s and ’60s ranch houses on yards as big as landing strips. One of those yards, cordoned by a stylish, brawny iron fence, is home to donkeys and goats.

Heath has a population of 5,600-plus: prosperous folk judging by the subdivision ornamentation and the goat and donkey pens. Heath was named after John O. Heath of Kentucky, who hit the place in 1845 to visit his kinsman, Daniel Rowlett, whose name was affixed to a Texas town next door. In addition to family bonds, Heath was drawn by the town’s jet black and fertile dirt. “The soil, coupled with the abundance of wild turkeys and other animals and the lush growth of endless prairie grasses, made such an impact upon Heath that he decided within a matter of weeks that this area would become his new home,” explains the city’s Web page. Heath burned to the ground in 1916.

Today the town is a place of polished schools, quaint old houses spit-polished, shingled and infested with lawyers, and a handsome contemporary municipal complex that looks as fireproof as stone, brick and mortar can be. It also has a water tower nearby that looks like it was pulled out of the ground and upended.

Mimo’s is a Tex-Mex restaurant in an aging strip mall, a stubby length of downscale architecture among the yuppie goats and donkeys. A ribbon of concrete, barely wide enough to serve as a sidewalk, adds a bit more strip to the mall. The roofline hangs low, and a length of mister tubing is affixed to its edge over the sidewalk. This sidewalk barely has the width to accommodate a barstool, let alone significant patio apparatus. So the mister tubing, blurring the air in a cloud of drizzle, mostly just sabotages hairstyles.

Mimo’s storefront sign is a garish, almost Vegas splash of red and yellow, making it the loudest part of the mall. Inside, the room is brooding with darkly stained concrete floors, simple wooden chairs as black as Heath dirt and tablecloths and banquette sheathing in deep bordello crimson. Yet cheeriness creeps through with salsa vigor. Walls are done up in ham-fisted stucco that is peeled back intermittently to reveal pairs of faux bricks.

But it is on the back wall where the room really gets chipper. Painted over the surface is a seascape mural, complete with macaws, tropical foliage and a stone arch doorway. That arch neatly frames a steel emergency exit door upon which is painted the sea part of the seascape.

Above the restroom portal is a bold sign: “Feeding Heathens and Non Heathens.” Heath municipal pride has a hearty wink that even John O. must find becoming.

Unfortunately, not much else here is. Sure, the chips are crisp and relatively greaseless, with reinforcements deployed at a clip that could choke an elephant. Salsa is good, too: thick, rich, tangy, middle-of-the-road.

The waitstaff is exceptionally courteous and as friendly as a black Lab whelp. Yet service is a little rickety, with pacing that seemed dictated by recovered memories driven into consciousness with the rhythm of a clutch-popper rifling through five gears.

An order for chile con queso never arrived at dinner. But this may have been a gesture of courteousness rather than an oversight. A seemingly more skillful server promptly delivered it during a lunch visit. The chile con queso is a gentle, pale ooze with a spray of paprika dust over the surface that resembled quarter-panel rust or maybe pubescent forehead topography. The queso had almost no flavor. No, that’s not true. It had a flavor of slightly used dishwater. Even the little bumps of pepper occasionally rippling this splurge of institutional yellow did little to change the complexion on the tongue.

Taco salad is better. A rough pyramid of shredded greens buries a tostada. The apex of the mound hosts a dollop of sour cream ringed by a hula hoop of red onion, while the base is flanked with avocado and tomato wedges. It is competent, this salad, but uninteresting. It contains not a shred of cheese. But it does have smears of smooth refried beans spread over the tostada surface that meshed with shreds of chicken that teetered dangerously close to desiccation.

This is in striking contrast to the stuffed chicken chile rellenos. Ours was packed with well-seasoned chicken near perfect in its cookery: chewy with juices teased from the fiber in floods by red and green sauces. White cheese, raisins and pecans both round and sharpen the edge around the well-roasted and mild green pepper husk.

But like nearly all Tex-Mex restaurants well-dressed in cantina couture, Mimo’s is rife with redundancies. The dinner menu is a bulky list of enchilada, taco and tamale combinations and permutations saddled to blots of beans and rice. On the lunch visit, the same Mexican song repeated endlessly over the sound system in a tape loop cycle spliced with exacting precision.

The Tex-Mex menu loop, however, mimicked none of this technical wizardry. Resembling a weathered scroll stained with marinara drippings, the shrimp enchilada is a hard and rubbery sheath barely snuggling a gaggle of tiny white shrimp loops blanched of flavor. Peeling back the folds reveals a hollow and runny interior sopped with a tepid red sauce. Yet the sidelines pump up the center of the plate considerably. Rice, drenched in amber, is separate and fluffy, never coating the mouth with that gluey fuzz sloughed off of some Mexican plates. Refried beans are creamy and smooth, drooling slowly from the fork in elegant drips instead of gripping the tines like a scoop of wall spackle.

High on one wall hangs the skull of a longhorn bull. But beef dishes don’t do justice to this piece of cantina iconography. Stiff-shelled tacos hold grains of dark, dry beef, clinging together in clumps that skid the tongue in a rainbow of slightly off flavors. Beef flautas, “grilled, not fried,” look like leather dog chews, though these were dolled up with beads of sour cream. The shell exterior is brittle and chalky, wrapping (barely) a fistful of beef grains that are dry, hard and kitchen-tortured into insipidity.

This isn’t to say that Mimo’s isn’t worth a visit. A trip to this Heath destination over curvy farm roads and grippy asphalt is entertaining, especially if you drive with a clutch. And you may come for the margaritas (they’re OK) and find yourself staying for the chips, refried beans and rice.

213 Hubbard Drive, Heath, 972-772-3128. Open for lunch 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 10:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday & Sunday. Open for dinner 5-9 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday; 5-9:30 p.m. Friday & Saturday. $