El Sancho is a curious little fellow, all dash, flash and ’stache, who somehow gets around quite nicely on a pair of bird legs that emerge from a head rounder than Charlie Brown’s.

Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t want to introduce him to your wife or girlfriend: The name “El Sancho” is Hispanic urban slang for “The Other Man.”

An exception should be drawn, however, for the newest Sancho in town.

After a year and a half operating a wildly popular food cart beside the Crux Fermentation Project brewpub in central Bend, partners Joel Cordes and Jon Barvels took the next step. Their El Sancho Taco Shop opened on July 1 on Dekalb Avenue just off Third Street, in what was previously the El Burrito and, briefly, Rose’s Cocina restaurants.

It’s been a great addition to a community that loves Mexican food of the authentic street variety, not the Tex-Mex or Cal-Mex mutation seen in most “traditional” Mexican restaurants in this country.

But with a Super Mario-type caricature as its logo, a mischievous spirit was perhaps inevitable. El Sancho’s attempt at adding festive color to the mixed residential-and-commercial quarter was not well received by new neighbors, and the City of Bend stepped in to request that they “tone it down a bit,” Cordes said.

“Someone complained that the colors were too bright,” Cordes said. “The city had a code, but they worked with us to get a suitable color and still keep the same feeling.”

Festive flair

The restaurant still cannot be missed.

The exterior remains mostly canary yellow, trimmed with cardinal red, sea green and royal blue. Inside, the color scheme is rose, orange and turquoise.

Diners order from a large blackboard beside the front counter. They wait for delivery to casual tables, helping themselves to silverware, napkins and glasses of water. A spacious new front deck offers ample additional seating, popular in warm weather: The restaurant is thinking of covering the area and adding heat lamps for year-round al fresco dining.

The food arrives quickly. And it’s good. Anyone who has dined with Cordes at his previous establishments — including downtown Bend’s Barrio, which he opened with Steven Draheim in early 2012 — knows what quality they might expect.

The food cart set the pace, offering seven varieties of tacos: pork carnitas, beef barbacoa, lengua (cow tongue), chipotle chicken, chorizo, and two vegetarian choices — mushroom and Oaxacan cheese with green chiles. Four more have been added to the restaurant menu — carne asada, shrimp, mahi mahi and poblano peppers with potatoes.

But the restaurant has many more choices than the cart. There are chilaquiles, vegetarian rice and beans, a salad and a choice of sides. There is a variety of special entrees, between one and three of them a day. And there’s a fully licensed bar that serves Mexican beers and a variety of fruit margaritas.

Tempting tacos

Tacos are served street style, on fried corn tortillas stuffed with cotija cheese, red and green salsa, cilantro and onion. They are wrapped in light aluminum foil in combinations of two or three.

Among the various ingredients, my favorites are the beef barbacoa (shredded brisket with a delicious barbecue sauce) and mushroom (wild fungi blended with onion, cabbage, tomatillos and chili paste). My dining companion is partial to the carne asada (grilled skirt steak) and the carnitas (pork, fried and shredded).

I also was delighted with El Sancho’s fish taco, Hawaiian mahi mahi grilled just to flaky, then dressed with Mexican crema and avocado salsa. And chipotle chicken, thigh meat grilled in garlic butter, had the smoky flavor that the chipotle pepper injects.

I was less enthralled with the café’s lengua (seared cow tongue), which elsewhere is one of my preferred preparations. Neither did I love the Oaxacan cheese taco, melted together with roasted green chiles. But those may be simply a personal taste issue.

Salads and entrees

Another of my favorites from the daily menu is the Sancho salad. Available in small and large sizes, it features pepitas (pumpkin seeds), radishes, chopped tomato and shredded Oaxacan cheese, tossed together with red leaf lettuce in a delicious vinaigrette.

My dining companion enjoys the deep-fried plantains; me, not so much. I think they’re kind of greasy, while she considers them to be a caramelized finger food, like fried bananas without the ice cream. A small plate of the fruit is served with a serrano aioli sauce, flavored with lime and crema.

Entrée specials change daily. We’ve tried three, each of them served with jasmine rice and black beans (simmered with herbs), and enjoyed all.

Fried pupusas were filled with chorizo sausage, squash and Oaxacan cheese. Pork chile Colorado offered large chunks of meat in a moderately spicy red sauce with chopped onions, cilantro, radish, white cabbage and lime. And a machaca tamale in a corn husk featured shredded beef in masa dough with a mildly spicy chipotle sauce. It was finished with crema and salsa, onions and cilantro, and crumbled cotija cheese.

Perfect partners

Cordes is a native of Bend who left Oregon after high school to explore food (and life in general) in Colorado and Seattle, Mexico and the southern African nation of Mozambique. He returned to Bend in 2007 to work as a line cook at The Blacksmith before launching himself fully into south-of-the-border cuisine.

The El Sancho taco cart was born in 2010 and reborn in 2013, less than a year after he and Draheim had started Barrio. “I wanted to follow my own style,” he said at the time. “I just wanted to re-create the feel of something you’d see on the streets of Mexico.”

He partnered with Jon and Beth Barvels, a couple who had just moved from Minnesota to Bend after their marriage. Jon Barvels was working as a line cook at Rockin’ Daves Bagel Bistro when he met Cordes. Together, the pair moved the food cart to Crux and soon began to look for expansion opportunities.

Cordes credited the Barvels with taking charge of the design and business aspects of the business. “This is the perfect spot,” he said. “It has turned out to be more of a restaurant than we had originally planned.”

— Reporter: janderson@bendbulletin.com