Here, some twenty guisos—cooked stews—are offered as fillings, representing several northern states: Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Durango and Sonora. The menu reads like a survey of northern comfort food, with machaca, deshebrada, cortadillo, discada and chile con carne sharing space with a handful of central Mexican standbys. Mostly beef-based, the flavors don’t stray from a particularly narrow palette. Northern cooking relies on simple ingredients and a relatively small repertoire of chiles, so the results can seem one-dimensional. At their best, however, they are rich, deeply savory, a beautiful dark brick red and unapologetically picante.
Machaca con huevo, my favorite, is dried, reconstituted beef scrambled with eggs, a Monterrey standard that welcomes a spoonful of salsa verde. While the picadillo could use a bit more chutzpah, the slow-cooked beef barbacoa provides an excellent canvas upon which to pile onion, cilantro, lime and fiery red or green salsa. The chile de carne and cortadillo are similarly satisfying, recalling the sort of food one finds in roadside cafés along the highways of northern Mexico.
