Optimistic outlook
Tempo Urban Bistro a step in the right direction
This chicken and dumplings is almost great. It isn’t going to win any awards, but it’s exactly what you want from the place around the corner on a night when you can’t deal with your own kitchen. It’s half a juicy bird — tender, deeply bronzed and perfectly seasoned, tucked into a mountain of roasted vegetables and basted by a silky pan jus flecked with herbs. Simple, easy to fall into, easier to fall for. Tonight it’s Jidori, one of those sexy, buzzworthy breeds that looks great on a menu and has the temerity to taste like chicken. But as chef Steven Maynard hurries from table to table, he describes how he’s testing out some local suppliers and agonizing over which chickens he likes best. It’s refreshing, particularly so deep in the West Valley, to see somebody boosting local product while going out of his way to feature excellent ingredients.
Problem is, the dumplings have the texture of modeling clay.
On paper, Tempo Urban Bistro is the kind of restaurant everybody wishes for more of in the West Valley — a plucky independent swimming in a sea of chains, its menu built on classic favorites, scratch cooking and local product offered by a warm and earnest chef. When it’s on, it gives you hope that things are slowly moving in the right direction.
But as its denizens can tell you, supporting the West Valley dining scene can mean tiptoeing the line between hope and frustration, even within the confines of a single dish.
A comfortable community space
When it comes to the West Valley, reader emails fall squarely into two disparate camps: despair over its shortcomings or indignance over its lack of recognition. But whether they seek to commiserate or castigate, they both come bearing recommendations. That’s what led me to Tempo Urban Bistro.
It’s tough to ignore a place that inspires such devotion, and in my line of work it would qualify as malpractice. Over the course of six and a half years, Steven and Karen Maynard have slowly built their downtown Verrado restaurant into a rousing success story that its fans love to crow about.
Stepping through the door on a busy Saturday night, it isn’t hard to see why.
For all the trendy, manufactured “public houses” foisted upon us, here’s one that genuinely embodies the part — a community space where folks gather to relax, be with people they love and have a good plate of food. There’s a jovial buzz about the place as Karen greets guests with a brilliant smile and Steven makes the rounds, weaving his way through a packed room and warmly wrapping his substantial mitts around the hands of countless neighbors and friends. Their staff might be a little awkward and disengaged, but the couple could carry the front of the house themselves on a tide of ebullience and generosity.
Comfort is the name of the game, after all, and the food fits.
The menu’s so close to the middle of the road it’s practically parked on the median, but what’s not to like about meatloaf? Name not withstanding, Tempo Urban Bistro’s menu is more suburban than urbane, chockablock with straightforward chunks of meat, mashed potatoes, bowls of pasta and no shortage of starters that could double as bar snacks.
Sometimes they’re pretty good, but not as often as they should be.
Tempo Urban Bistro
21067 W. Main St., Buckeye.
Starters and salads $8-$18; entrees $16-$29; pastas $16-$19; desserts $8.
11 a.m.-9 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays. 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
It gets pretty boisterous during peak dinner hours, but never so much that conversation becomes uncomfortable.
A few dishes here and there, but it definitely isn’t a focus.
Should you go?:
— Drop everything
— Yes, and soon
— When you get a chance
— Maybe, if it’s close
— You can do better
But for every hit, there’s also a miss
You don’t have to be a barfly to dig on the fried cheese. Panko-crusted mozzarella medallions — pulled in house — are golden crisp, served in a puddle of bright tomato sauce heavy with crimson-twinged oil. On the lighter end of the cheesy spectrum, a creamy boule of burrata really doesn’t need the sticky balsamic glaze, but the dish flies on the wings of some excellent tomatoes, carefully seasoned and hit with a splash of fresh pesto.
For every crisp starter, there’s another that falls flat.
A warm plate of shredded Brussels sprouts is carefully sautéed, but without the faintest hint of acid it plays like cut grass. A deep saucer of pasta fagioli, meanwhile, is a tomatoey, sausagestudded sort and the beans have some fight in them. The pasta, unfortunately, has the defeated texture of a can of Franco-American. You could sip these ditalini through a straw.
Just as the West Valley cynicism starts to set in, Maynard quickly wins you back.
That’s actually lamb in the shepherd’s pie, infused with Guinness and capped with singed peaks of sculpted potatoes. It’s a satisfying, pea-studded rendition and the meat’s rough crumble lends a nice, feisty bite.
A geometric boulder of braised short rib, however, displays the kind of casual errors that keep Tempo from being what it should. The meat sports a deep, lacquered however,
Tempo’s charms are self-evident when the food is on, but it becomes increasingly clear that Maynard and his kitchen need to keep their eye on the ball.
There might not be enough pork fat in the Amatriciana to satisfy a Roman, but it’s a solidly constructed pasta dish based around some awfully nice housemade noodles. On another night, however, the carbonara seems like it came from a different planet. It’s great if you remember to salt the pasta water, but you still have to salt the rest of the dish too. An unseasoned mess of goopy cream binding pasta cooked to a gummy, tooth-sticking consistency is a hard pass no matter how gracious your hosts might be.
It’s all the more frustrating because your hosts are so achingly gracious.
Tempo might be best experienced at the Saturday chef ’s table, when Steven offers a multicourse family style menu built on his weekly finds at the local farmers market. Maynard is a straightup evangelist when it comes to local producers, personally serving every course and carefully walking his guests through a cool, crisp wedge salad built on Blue Sky Farms greens and creamy goat’s milk quark from Crow’s Dairy — both a stone’s throw away.
But even his special, personal menu hits its snags. A buttery bundle of exotic mushrooms would be a delight if they had even a touch of salt, the pastry wrapping the beef Wellington boasts tooth-defying density and a cheese course of brandy-flambéed kefalotyri lacks that signature saganaki sizzle, a hefty load of pale cheese melting lazily into the pan.
A delightful sundae piled with crisp caramel corn and salty peanuts is a pretty good salve when you catch a disappointing dish, but it shouldn’t have to come to that.
Why Tempo still deserves your support
If it sounds like I’m of two minds, that’s because I am, depending on which dish is in front of me. Even with a menu that plays it safer than a prevent defense, the issues are there for anyone who cares to see them.
And yet, it’s easy to see why so many readers urged me to visit. If you’re a West Valley resident, Tempo Urban Bistro deserves your support. Restaurants like this aren’t easy to come by, and when the kitchen is firing, you can’t help but root for the place.
As Maynard takes time to talk through his work with guests, you can see him connecting with diners and slowly building something meaningful. You couldn’t find a more earnest champion for careful, farm-fresh cuisine in a part of town that desperately needs more of it.
We all want the West Valley dining scene to grow, but it will take both optimism and honesty.
I hope I can offer both.