Taken for Granite

The rich are different than you and me. For one thing, they’re easier to fool. Consider the clay-tiled turret of Hispanic wealth that is Cabos, located near the corner of Douglas Boulevard and Auburn Folsom Road, the gateway to Granite Bay, perhaps one of the most pretentious neighborhoods in the Sacramento region. Cabos’ expansive, L-shaped layout with elegant archways and colors that modulate from mustard to mauve to taupe to purple to red to green is packed with authentic Mexican relics, and promises some real authentic tip-of-the-Baja-Peninsula-type cooking. But, surprise, when your shrimp taco arrives, you discover that Cabos is something more akin to Chevy’s Fresh Mex, albeit in a slicker, more expensive skin. No problem there; Fresh Mex is good, and if those Granite Bay high-schoolers who frequent the place at lunch require a little window dressing lest they feel they’ve stooped to the level of eating at a chain restaurant, what’s so wrong with that?