Latin American cuisine also suffers from oversight, although our restaurant of the week, Conga Latin Bistro, is a step in the right direction. Yet this isn’t a food forward place. The bar area is larger than the restaurant area and I suspect the establishment is getting to be better known for its dancing than its dining scene. Even the lunch hour was indicative of this trend. The kitchen’s wares were in short demand, there being perhaps a couple of other tables occupied, but in the bar-cum-dance-floor two busloads of high school kids were attempting to jam to the D.J.’s tunes. The kids were from outstate Minnesota and fish out of water, their awkward attempts to move to the Latin beat simultaneously pathetic and brave!

If it seems strange to be writing about music and dance in a restaurant review, by the way, you haven’t been to Conga as yet. Even the dining room has a musical theme, from the art on the walls to the carpeting to the floor-to-ceiling ornamental drums that frame the doorway¾ not to mention that, with the open connecting space to the bar, you dine to the dance music. I half expected our waitress to break into a samba.

You might expect the food to get short shrift in a place like this, but I was pleasantly surprised. The menu covers a good selection of Cuban, Spanish, and South American items. Appetizers include empanadas, plantains, squid (camarones), and shrimp (in a shrimp-cocktail-like rendition). Garlic and black bean soups are also available, the latter with some accompaniments that B’s review describes. A soup of the day is also listed on the menu, but none was available this day.

The sandwiches come with soup-of-the-day or salad, and the black bean soup had been substituted for the former. I wanted to try the garlic soup instead, and offered to pay the price difference, but the waitress, with a less-than-winning smile, politely refused. I found this a little inexplicable for such a casual place.

I ordered the "pernil" sandwich with the salad (a simple leaf lettuce, cucumber, and croutons affair). Whoever wrote the menu referred to the pernil as "my favorite" sandwich on it. Superlatives can’t be handed out on the basis of one visit, but it was very good. Roast pork slices with melted swiss cheese and a mayonnaise sauce in crusty baguette, quite succulent and tasty. The sandwiches also come with fried plantains, lengthwise strips cut thin, but not so thinly as to lose all substance, and fried just to the point of brittleness.

There are several other sandwich options and several entrées. Roast pork, steak, chicken breast, and seafood are the main ingredients. The wine list features Chilean and other South American wines, with a number available by the glass. Professional reviewers have remarked on the hit and miss nature of dining at Conga, and B’s and my previous lunch here, shortly after it opened perhaps a year ago, was a middling experience, but this time I walked away content and with a rhythm to my stride.

The same family that owns El Meson, that venerable south Minneapolis fixture, owns the Conga Latin Bistro, though the family resemblance is limited to the menu as the latter is (relatively) upscale and not quite as drab as its elder sibling. The décor has a musical theme, with larger than life conga drums marking the entrance to the dining area. The walls have prints depicting musicians and orchestras; even the carpeting is not immune from this trend. The colors are (as you might expect) bright and tropical: reds, yellows and greens. The dining area is fairly small with a combination of booths and dining tables. The bulk of the restaurant is reserved for the bar area, which is large and extremely well done. There is plenty of room here for revelers to sit and eat empanadas washed down by El Salvadoran beer between bouts of cha-chas. TV screens are omnipresent and seem to be playing Latin music videos. The bar was full at lunchtime with kids visiting the restaurant on some sort of high school trip, dancing away to Latin rhythms; why did this never happen at my school?

The menu features wines from South America – Spain being an exception – and offers half dozen each of white and red by the glass. I ordered a glass of the Sangre de Toro, a beefy wine from Spain, which was smooth with a nose suggestive of wild berries. There are two soups on the menu plus soup of the day. The soup of the day was mysteriously unavailable. I had a soup and sandwich combination consisting of sopa de frijoles negros (black bean soup with onions and rice) and a pollo ripiado (shredded chicken sandwich); this caused the waitress much consternation since the soup I wanted was not available in combination but as a stand-alone item. The soup (when we came to an agreement about its availability) was excellent, full of flavor and worked well with the onions and rice; initially I had thought it slightly burnt but this impression was fleeting. The sandwich came on a toasted crusty baguette style bread, the chicken covered lightly with cheese. It was delicious and just the right size. All this was served with plantain chips. Some of the other items on the lunch menu are empanadas, croquetas, yuca con mojo and traditional Cuban pork sandwiches. I have had dinner here twice and have been disappointed each time with the quality of the food but I thought the lunch good.

The service was friendly in an incompetent sort of way. There was the initial problem with the soup (A should have something about it in his review) and the waitress' grasp of the English language was tenuous at best. Our bill came to around $23.00.

They serve a mean Mojito (mint rum drink) on the bar side – a drink that I had perversely discovered in Hamburg – and you can have your fill of empanadas and Mojito at half price between the hours of 5 PM and 7 PM on weeknights. This makes the Conga Latin Bistro a particularly good place to have your after work gatherings, especially since the music is kept to a modest volume until the serious dancing crowd starts filtering in.

If you’re on your own bring in your copy of Graham Greene’s Our man in Havana, sit at the bar, ignore the Spanish videos on the monitors if you can, and you might find yourself transported to warmer climes.