The Basement Brasserie You Reach Through the Kitchen
The Kenmare Street corner looks like a taqueria and is one. It's also the front door to a basement dining room you have to book a month out to see.
The unmarked corner at Kenmare and Lafayette reads as a taqueria and is one — a fluorescent-lit counter selling tacos to the sidewalk. That's the decoy. The reservation you spent a month chasing is for the room underneath it, and the way in runs through what looks like an employee door and down a staircase past the line cooks.
Three operations share the address: the street-level taqueria for walk-ups, a café-cantina, and the basement brasserie everyone actually means when they say La Esquina. The trick has been running long enough that it isn't a trick anymore — it's the format — and the room still books out weeks ahead because the theatre of getting there still works.
The entrance is the loudest thing on the menu, and the ceviches are good enough to justify the walk through the kitchen.
Editorial Deep
The menu covers a narrower band than the room suggests — ceviches and aguachiles up top, tacos and quesadillas and a short list of brasserie mains under it, and nothing that pretends to be modernist Mexican in the Cosme sense. This is a cantina menu with a couple of raw-bar showpieces, not a kitchen chasing a star.
The crowd downstairs skews younger than the bill suggests — early thirties, mostly, in the kind of clothes people put on for a specific photograph. At nine on a Thursday it's dates and small group dinners; by ten-thirty it's the pre-going-out contingent drinking mezcal on ice and waiting for the volume to climb.
You check in at the taqueria upstairs — the corner counter that looks like it has nothing to do with a reservation — and after a minute a host walks you past the register, through an unmarked door, and down a staircase that passes the working kitchen at close range. Cooks on your left, plates going up on your right, and then you're in the room. The whole sequence takes under a minute and it's the best sixty seconds of the night.
The specific trap is ordering like it's a brasserie. Two mains, a bottle of wine, sides for the table, and you're paying for food the room is not the reason to eat. The mains are the priced-up part of the menu and the least distinctive part of the cooking, and a four-top that leans into them is the four-top that leaves quietly annoyed.
The reason to come back is a late Thursday in summer, 10 p.m. or after, two people at a corner banquette with an aguachile and a bottle of something cold, staying long enough for the room to turn over once around you. That's the version of this restaurant that earns its reputation, and it's a specific enough set of conditions that most first visits miss it.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Aguachile Verde, elotes, huitlacoche quesadilla
“The entrance is the show; order the ceviches and you'll leave happy.”
Book downstairs on Resy weeks ahead, take a late Thursday-through-Saturday slot, and build the meal around the raw bar and small plates rather than the brasserie mains — that's the version worth the month of planning.
The Verdict
