Hot Meal: Marino in Hayes Valley

Caldo de camaron: Don't skimp on the sexing up.

Damn Diana Kennedy -- the author pretty much buzzkilled any Mexican cooking that doesn't have the snarliest regional hook, like the pork stew with tomatoes and wild pigweed her Yucatecan maid taught her to fix. That's what makes Marino (579 Hayes at Laguna), which opened today in Hayes Valley, something less than fierce. It offers a taste of Mexican home cooking -- as long as by home cooking you mean food assembled by someone living in a condo with access to a nice big freezer.
If your high school Spanish fails you, you might not get that Marino is a seafood place, but the decor (ships' wheels and portholes, Cap'n Jack's style) leaves little doubt. The menu, however, skews Chevy's (fajitas, burritos, and combo plates), but there are also cocteles (seafood cocktails), including a grand Campechana and shrimp aguachile. Caldo de camaron, shrimp soup, is big, red and chunky, packed with deluxe frozen vegetable mix (which is to say, not just corn, green beans, and ripple-cut carrots, but lima beans, too, and even the odd piece of cauliflower). Sexed up with lime, it's not bad; crumble in shards of house-fried tortilla chips, and it begins to stir. And add a glob of the amazing table salsa (packed with flecks of charred tomato skin and a searing bite), and you swear you can make out the faintest echo of a snarl.