Fortuna Cocina Mexicana opened on Fry Street without much fanfare, and that restraint suits it. The room is small — maybe fifteen tables — with warm ochre walls, handmade ceramic plates stacked near the open kitchen, and a faint smell of dried chiles that hits before the menu does. It is not trying to be anything other than what it is: a Mexican kitchen run by people who know the food.
The menu divides cleanly between antojitos and platos fuertes, and both halves are worth taking seriously. The sopa de lima is the kind of thing a kitchen either gets right or doesn’t — tart, deeply aromatic, finished with thin strips of fried tortilla that hold their crunch just long enough. Fortuna gets it right. The chile relleno, stuffed with a mix of cheese and picadillo, arrives in a red sauce that tastes like it was started well before service began. Most nights it sells out before eight o’clock, which tells you something.
Cocktails lean toward mezcal. The agua de jamaica margarita is the drink that shows up at almost every table — tart hibiscus, smoky mezcal, a salted rim that isn’t overdone. A full margarita runs around twelve dollars, which is fair for Denton and exceptional for what’s in the glass. The beer list is short and focused on Mexican lagers, which is the right call given the food.
Fry Street, for those who haven’t been down it lately, is a corridor that has cycled through a lot of concepts over the years — bars, cheap pizza, student-facing spots that didn’t last past a few semesters. Fortuna feels different in that it seems to have been built for people who actually eat dinner rather than people who eat dinner incidentally. The pace is relaxed, the service attentive without hovering. Reservations are accepted and advisable on Thursday through Saturday, when the tables fill up and the wait can stretch past forty minutes if you walk in cold.
Lunch is a quieter affair and arguably the better time to go for the first visit. The comida corrida — a rotating fixed meal of soup, rice, beans, and a main — runs around thirteen dollars and changes daily. On a recent Wednesday it was chicken in a dark mole that stopped conversation at the table. The tortillas are made in-house, pressed thin, and served hot in a cloth-lined basket that gets refilled without asking.
There are no chips and salsa to start, which some people find jarring. What arrives instead is a small ramekin of pickled vegetables — carrot, jalapeño, cauliflower — and a smoky tomatillo salsa with a basket of tostadas. It is a different kind of beginning, and a better one.
Fortuna is not the loudest place on Fry Street, or the biggest, or the one with the most neon. It is the one where the food tastes like someone made decisions about it. For Denton, that is enough.
