Attention, mall rats. There’s a new, colorfully outfitted restaurant at University Towne Center that spares you from the insipid food court and takes you on a contrived journey through Cuba, Latin America and the Caribbean via Southern Florida.

The Miami Grille is an end-cap structure in the mall that greets consumers with almost equal prominence as neighboring Macy’s when entering the parking lot from La Jolla Village Drive. An out-facing entrance allows you to sneak directly inside this former brew house while avoiding the bumbling pedestrians of the central midway just around the corner.

But this is a mall restaurant for the masses, with its expansive 7,000-square-foot dining room that seats nearly 240 people amid a festive commercial theme interfaced with vivid murals, squiggly mirror panels and walls accented in fun colors. Large steel beer kettles left behind from its brew house predecessor peek over the busy bar area. Though, truly, if it weren’t for the name I’m not sure how many locals would grasp the Miami connection through sight alone.

The food tells a more distinct story. Owners Margarita and Basil Hernandez gained their culinary experience working at family-owned eateries in Cuba, Miami and their native Puerto Rico. The result is a long menu of what they call “Floribbean” cuisine: Cuban sandwiches piling slow-braised pork, chicken spiked in a homemade jerk sauce that’s made with traditional Scotch bonnet peppers, shredded marinated beef draped in bell peppers when it’s cooked, Puerto Rican pink beans and more. A glossary of mostly Spanish culinary terms are translated into English on the menu’s back page, in what seems directed toward the severely food-impaired to help them distinguish between jamon (ham) and queso (cheese).

Less obvious, however, is the translation for sofrito, a traditional northern Caribbean admixture of oregano, onions, green peppers, sweet chilies, cilantro and garlic used for flavoring meats and beans. Unfortunately, its savory qualities didn’t deliver much zest to an order of shrimp empanadas we ordered, which my dining companion and I agreed tasted as generic as one of those free samples doled out at Costco. Their pastry shells were dry and crumbly, and the filling was nondescript.

Conversely, I’m guessing that a dash of “so-free-toe” was used in the Frijoles Negros (black bean) soup since a faint tinge of cilantro and garlic surfaced. For $1.50 extra, I recommend opting for the shot of Madeira offered on the side, which added a nutty, boozy essence to the thick, homey soup. The other soup choice, Sopa de Garbanzo, would have tasted much better if put through a desalination plant. The heavy amount of salt marred the quality of the soup’s robust vegetable base and stripped the garbanzos of their subtle, meaty flavor.

From the tapas section, the Camarones a la Eddie was memorably good. The shrimp are sautéed in a spicy Brazilian sauce – basically butter, white wine, cayenne pepper and garlic – and served with toasted Cuban flatbread for mopping up the leftover juice. Less impressive was Calamares a la Espanola – calamari whose tentacles resembled firm tofu in texture, only to be drowned in an ordinary red sauce that jumped tracks to Italy. Perhaps it was the mildly minted mojitos made with white and aged rums muting our palates, but we couldn’t detect the capers, green olives and fresh garlic incorporated into the sauce.

“Hot, hot, hot,” is the tag on the description for Jamaican Jerk Chicken, an excellent entrée choice of cubed chicken breast that measured about a 6 on the 1-to-10 heat scale the evening we visited. The jerk sauce, made from scratch in the restaurant’s commissary-size kitchen, gives you in every bite the authentic flavors of allspice berries, brown sugar, nutmeg and those high-capsicum Scotch bonnet peppers. It ranked as the most edgy dish we tried here.

I quickly became a fan of the chef’s slow-roasted meats. The bone-in pork roasts are marinated for two days in dry rub, olive oil and garlic, then cooked for an extended period of time at low heat and pulled apart into fine shreds. As an entrée you get a titanic mound of it with black beans along with rice tinted sunny yellow from nature’s purest food coloring, the annatto seed. The shreds are also used on the Cuban Sandwich, a twist from how Cubans eat them with sliced pork instead.

We also augmented our feast with Ropa Vieja, roast beef prepared the same as the pork except that it’s covered with bell peppers during the cooking process. It tasted a little less garlicky. My companion made the odd discovery of forking both the pork and beef into his mouth at the same time, which no doubt complimented each other with their slightly different fat flavors and ingredients. The marriage was further clenched with a gulp of hoppy South Beach Pale Ale, crafted by a brew master for the restaurant before it opened.

All of the chow is made in-house, including some gourmet-quality desserts. The Latin Lover is a dark chocolate soufflé that practically drugs the senses with its denseness. Puerto Rican Rum Cake is loaded with the star ingredient and laced with a pleasant caramel sauce and sweet-tangy Craisins, a hybrid of raisins and cranberries. And then there’s Key Lime Pie, one of the few recipes I’ve had locally that strikes the classic balance between creaminess and citrus flavor.

With an atmosphere infused with high-beat Latin music and a geographic focus atypical for San Diego, I’d say that mall eating just got a notch more interesting.