Book Through Tock, or Call Before You Fly
Elena Reygadas cooks Mexican produce through an Italian grammar inside a Roma Norte mansion. The pasta earns the visit; the cocktails do not.
A ricotta ravioli lands under a lemon cream sauce so pale it looks like weather, and the sauce is doing the work the room's reputation cannot. This is the dish Rosetta is quietly famous for, and it explains why a Mexican kitchen with an Italian grammar has stayed at the top of Roma Norte for a decade and a half.
Elena Reygadas opened Rosetta in 2010 and has since been named The World's Best Female Chef 2023; Rosetta has held one Michelin star since 2024 and is No. 46 on The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2025. The room is a Porfirian mansion on Colima that she has left mostly alone: plants where the courtyards used to breathe, a staircase that leads to another dining room upstairs, an indoor garden feel that most tasting-menu rooms would kill for and could not fake.
The pasta is why you come, the guava roll is why you stay, and the cocktails are the one thing the kitchen has not solved.
Editorial Deep
The cocktails miss. Skip the bar list and go to wine.
Colima 166 does not announce itself. The façade is a Porfirian townhouse with a door that reads as a private residence, and the first thing the room does is make you check the number before ringing. Then you are through, and the mansion opens into what Reygadas has built inside it: plants against old plaster, a staircase leading to a second dining room upstairs, roughly eighty seats broken into a mix of lounge corners and traditional tables so the room never resolves into a single view.
The access model rewards planners and people who speak the platform. Tock takes the reservation, and a phone line and a WhatsApp number take the overflow — +52 55 5533 7804 by phone, +52 55 3931 4702 by message — and the room holds you ten minutes past your slot before it starts giving the table back. It excludes the drop-in and the group of six who did not read the small print: parties of five to twelve owe a 700-peso-per-head deposit, refundable up to five hours out, and thirteen or more goes through eventos@rrosetta.com.mx rather than the standard channel. None of this is on the door. All of it is on the site.
The tagliatelle with chile de árbol earns its place on the bill on its own. It is the clearest expression in the room of what Reygadas is actually doing — a northern Italian technique executed on a Mexican chile, plated without either half apologising to the other — and there is no bowl of pasta in Roma Norte doing that idea better. The ricotta ravioli sits at the same tier.
First visit is the ricotta ravioli, the tagliatelle, the hoja santa, and the guava roll. Second visit is the tagliatelle again, the hoja santa again, and whatever has moved onto the menu on the produce side — Reygadas rotates the vegetable register hard through the year, and the room is worth timing to a season rather than a month. Skip the proteins the second time. Skip the cocktails both times.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Ricotta ravioli with lemon cream, tagliatelle with chile de árbol, hoja santa, guava roll
“Book Rosetta for the pasta and the Porfirian mansion, not for the proteins or the cocktails.”
Reygadas has built a fifteen-year kitchen around a specific idea — Italian technique on Mexican produce — and the ravioli, the tagliatelle and the hoja santa are the argument. If pasta is not what you want in Roma Norte, Quintonil in Polanco is the tasting-menu room worth the cross-town trip instead.
The Verdict
