Not only is prowess in the kitchen gender-neutral, you don’t have to be born in a country to get its cooking down right. Matt Wronski and wife Dana — with Enrique Mata expertly heading the kitchen — opened Tio Mateo’s Mexican Grille in East Greenwich at the beginning of May, and it’s already become understandably popular.

Exactly four years ago they started up Greenwich Bay Gourmet, offering prepared foods, but the sit-down service has since taken over. The Wronskis, chefs who escaped from the chichi restaurant rat race in San Francisco, settled in Rhode Island because they liked what they saw during a visit. When a storefront became available near their existing establishment, they thought they’d try their hand at replicating the Mexican food they’d loved in California. Mata was already in charge of their existing kitchen, so they were halfway there.

Ambience is probably more important with Mexican and Southwestern restaurants than with others — with Italian, say, you can’t rattle expectations whether you go low-rent with a Lady and the Tramp red-checked-tablecloth atmosphere or upscale with soft lighting and spouting marble dolphins.

With a place called Tio Mateo’s, you’ve got to give us sunshine on stucco. Especially after a New England winter that jerked us around, it’s pleasant to walk into a restaurant with patchy-textured butte-colored walls. Above is a wraparound strip of shiny corrugated steel, which is echoed by the sheet metal-covered tables. Paintings — of a city street overview, a tropical motel strip — are accompanied on the walls by colorful bric-a-brac such as a ceramic parrot and a cross made from recycled tin. No sombreros, gracias a Dios.

You order at the counter, but get served at your seat. Things are done practically and efficiently here. Your eating utensils are plastic, but they are the sturdy black variety. All the food preparation is done at the larger Greenwich Bay Gourmet kitchen down the street, and then baked or otherwise heated on these premises.

The menu is simple and effective. Burritos, quesadillas, enchiladas, tacos, and entrée salads. There is a children's menu for the little ones. Sides include corn chips with salsa ($2.75), made from fresh tomatoes; and the refried beans ($1.75) are made right, from pintos. Only one soup is offered, the sopa de la casa ($3.50), but it’s delicious: corn and zucchini are in there with potatoes and plenty of pork in a spicy tomato-based broth.

The four dinner-sized salads ($6.95-$7.50) looked appealing, especially the signature Ensalada Mama Dana, which contains tangy queso fresco, pepitas (roasted pumpkin seeds) with chicken and other items, and a cilantro citrus vinaigrette. When I eventually complemented their smoky chipotle salsa del diablo and got a sample of the ancho chili vinaigrette that goes for their Southwest salad, that became a promising bet, too.

But my appetite was heftier than a salad would satisfy, so my choice was a burrito del mar ($6.95). Shrimp, sliced in half and marinated in a lime and cilantro preparation, are packed in with a roasted corn salsa, queso fresco, and Mexican rice. I ordered separate sides of the medium-hot salsa verde that already came with it, as well as the hotter chipotle sauce (each is $1.25) to further spice up the taco we wanted to sample. We were curious to see what they would do with an adobo marinade, which is how your choice of chicken, steak, or pork is prepared.

The shredded chicken in the taco was tasty from complex spices, and cooled off with shredded lettuce and sour cream. At the same time, the tacos are sparked up with your choice of salsa. They are small and pricey at $2.25 and $2.50 with cilantro-lime shrimp — but as they say at the Zabar’s caviar pyramid, nobody’s forcing you to buy any. A better choice would be to have one on an $8.50 platter, which gives a choice of three tacos and/or enchiladas along with rice and beans.

Johnnie chose the El Mateo Supremo ($6.95), which proudly tops the list of burritos. She could have had steak in it, but picked the grilled fajita chicken and was happy with her decision: lots of moist pieces of chicken breast were in there with Jack and cheddar cheese and kitchen-made guacamoles. Both our burritos came with sour cream-topped shredded lettuce, to dampen the heat if you go overboard with the hotter salsas.

We checked out both of the offered desserts. There was a lime square ($1.50), which is a jazzed-up and quite tangy version of the omnipresent Rhode Island lemon square. Johnnie noted that the texture of the flan ($2.95) was more like cheesecake than custard, but I enjoyed its not-too-sweet flavor.

Upscale Cal-Mex eats in upscale East Greenwich. Sounds like a fair match to me.

Bill Rodriguez can be reached at bill@billrod.com.