Naples Daily News Reviews ZAZA Kithen, Raves About the Meat

Naples Daily News, Naples Fl – April 26th, 2018 :

ZAZA Kitchen knows how to do meats.

When a platter of sizzling-hot fajitas whisks by, its trail of smoke lingers and fills the tiny Mexican restaurant with a hazy cloud. It’s the kind of smoke that stays a while, soaking into your skin and hair and clothes, leaving you smelly with beefy goodness.

And when you bite into that slow-cooked, 12-hour brisket piled high in a soft corn tortilla, you know someone in the kitchen knows exactly what they’re doing.

ZAZA, which opened last month on Marco Island, smokes its meats long and slow each day behind the restaurant on Bald Eagle Drive, in the former space of Kirk’s Coney Island. Fusing Mexican specialties with Latin street food, ZAZA Kitchen is the latest product of local restaurateur Mike Cardascia, who also operates Zen Asian BBQ in North Naples.

At ZAZA, I quickly found myself fawning over the spicy-sweet chorizo crumbles in the queso blanco fundido, and the melt-in-your-mouth pork that’s been marinated in achiote. And that brisket? Don’t get me started.

The restaurant, with its walls awashed in colorful splashes of paint, was quite small; ZAZA could probably only fit about 40 or 50 people in there. And the place just smelled good. Whiffs of something delicious emanated from a large kitchen window into the dining room — was it those sizzling fajitas, a deep-fried burrito, a torta with fresh Mexican bread? And once the dining room started to fill up, here came that delicious smoke.