El Dorado Cantina a good Mexican restaurant but hard to find

I'll be honest: On my first attempt to dine at El Dorado Cantina, I turned around and left.

The problem, you see, is that when I followed Industrial Road to 3025, I found that the address was shared by Sapphire, which, I have to say, doesn't mince words by calling itself a gentleman's club but skips right ahead to reality by bragging that it's the "world's largest Las Vegas strip club," even if those geographical designations muddy things a bit.

I'm definitely not a prude, a fact pretty much guaranteed by a whole lot of years in newsrooms, not generally the most demure of places. I am, however, ever aware of the fact that I work not for an alt-weekly but for a family newspaper with a broad range of readers, and that the middle ground usually is the best way to go. Plus, it bugged me that nowhere on El Dorado's website or in any of the ads I could find does it mention its somewhat unusual location.

But El Dorado lingered in the back of my mind, because I had heard good things (none of which included, "Oh, yeah, and ...") and found the menu more interesting than that of the usual Mexican restaurant, and so back I went. And yes, it's very good, and the neighbors become irrelevant.

We started the way we do in most Mexican restaurants, with chips and salsa. There were three salsas, which our very friendly and helpful server described quite clearly as an extremely hot habanero, a milder tomatillo and the mildest, a pulpy tomato. All of them were very good, the preparation methods and seasonings serving to showcase the principal ingredient without camouflaging it. We didn't think the habanero was all that hot, until we realized it had separated a bit, and dug our chips to the solids on the bottom. Well, OK then.

The racy boom-boom music that leaks into the parking lot hadn't emboldened us enough to try the chauplines — grasshoppers to you and me (and yeah, I know, a delicacy ...) — so we started with the Tostaditas de Tinga ($7.50), crisp corn tortillas topped with refried beans and chicken, which had lingered in a marinade that carried flavor on a number of levels.

The Siegel Plate ($22, plus $2 for two fried eggs) was sauteed seasoned chicken and steak strips with a few crisp asparagus spears — a welcome offbeat touch in a Mexican restaurant — with a side of simple but well-flavored and again, refreshingly offbeat, cilantro rice.

Pineapple Shrimp ($26.50), served in a half-pineapple and claiming Cancun origins, was a nice treatment, the shrimp accompanied by grilled peppers and a blanket of melted cheese. One quibble was that we wondered what happened to all of the pineapple that had been removed from the shell, because it wasn't detectable in this dish.

We also wanted to try an old familiar, and what's more familiar than cheese enchiladas ($12.50)? As we expected, no culinary ground was being broken here, but they were excellent enchiladas, stuffed with so much cheese (a blend of three, which boosted the flavor) that they were sort of squared off instead of just rolled, and topped with a kicky, tomato-based sauce and crema. Cilantro rice with this one, too, and a workmanlike version of black beans.

And flan ($8), which we always find hard to resist, but which was so, so much better than the average, rich and dense and, like the enchiladas, a laudable iteration of a classic.

Service was good, our waiter fairly flying around the room when it got busy, which it did — with families, conventioneers and all manner of folks. As it turns out, while El Dorado shares a wall with the strip club they don't have a common entrance, and this really is a serious restaurant and not just a for-the-randier-tourists novelty.

But I have to say, I don't understand why the ownership/management ignores the risque elephant in the room. They have a very good restaurant, which just happens to have an only-in-Las-Vegas location. Not being open about that only serves to cause confusion.

Las Vegas Review-Journal restaurant reviews are done anonymously at Review-Journal expense. Email Heidi Knapp Rinella at Hrinella@reviewjournal.com. Find more of her stories at www.reviewjournal.com and bestoflasvegas.com, and follow @HKRinella on Twitter.