Danny Cordova has eaten eight different kinds of oysters in the past few weeks, and he’s on track to try more. Such are the sacrifices made by the entrepreneur behind Cruda Mariscos & Oyster Bar, the newest in a slew of opulent, Mexican-influenced restaurants across Tucson.
“I haven’t tried enough to tell you which is my favorite yet,” he said. “I only want to recommend the best to my customers.”
The concept for Cruda emerged when Cordova wanted to fill the lease left empty when his first downtown venture, La Chingada, moved into the former location of the now-closed restaurant Cafe Poca Cosa. “I know [Chingada had] a good spot,” he said. “So I did some searching to see what downtown needs.”
“Tucson was an oyster town back in the day,” Cordova said. “There are still a couple spots with some options for oysters, but (it's limited). We don’t want to overwhelm ourselves, but we want to present our customers with three to four kinds of oysters on a weekly basis.”
While every restaurant demands logistical prowess, oyster bars require an additional feat: Chefs have 14 days from harvest to receive and sell the mollusk, which is kept cold and alive until the second it is cut from its shell and eaten.
Many of Cruda’s menu items can be found on its Instagram (instagram.com/crudamariscos). A video of a cheese pull off of the baked-mozzarella top of shrimp culichi and a picture of lobster-stuffed toritos (yellow jalapeños) are shot in the signature food-porn style of Cordova’s other outposts, The Neighborhood and La Chingada.
Cordova imagines the menu in terms of lunch and dinner. “At lunch, we’re tackling more of the fresh stuff, raw items. The dinner service will focus more on our cooked dishes, and that’s where we’re playing around a bit, putting some fusion in it. Not just straight mariscos, but we’ll play around with pasta, some interesting things.”
The bar menu, meanwhile, features the michelada that made The Neighborhood famous. “We tried to do a more traditional michelada at La Chingada, and people kept requesting it with all the candies,” said Cordova. Right before our phone call, he had been on the phone with his sister as she picked up their order of tamarindos in Nogales. But Cordova aspires to outdo himself. Cruda also offers a michelada topped with 8 to 10 ounces of ceviche.
Cordova describes himself as a “marisco fanatic,” with a litany of favorite seafood dishes: shrimp culichi (cooked shrimp in a poblano cream sauce), aguachiles (raw shrimp marinated in lime and a salsa of serrano chiles and cilantro), callos de hacha (scallops) are all favorites, “but it’s really just whatever I’m in the mood for,” he said.
