We worked up our appetites after a morning of ballooning and visiting the ancient pyramids at Teotihuacan. We decided to go to Rosetta. This restaurant is #49 on the 2023 World’s 50 Best list and chef Elena Reygadas was also named World’s Best Female Chef 2023. The cuisine is a fusion of Italian and Mexican cuisines which sounded unique and interesting to us.
I originally booked the table for outside seating because that was all that was available at the time, but once we were at the restaurant, we asked for an indoor table which they provided to us no problem. There are so many reviews where people describe having terrible experiences sitting at the curbside seating, but at least from what we saw, that didn’t seem that big a deal, but then again, we also live in a city (albeit a much much smaller one than CDMX) and parklet seating is not big deal to us with the vehicles that are passing by on the street, but I suppose if you don’t live in a city and aren’t used to that, you could find that a big turn off).
Back to the food or rather the drinks to start. I don’t normally like to have anything to drink at lunch becaue I’ll get sleepy (and we were underslept from the early departure for the morning’s activities), but the signature cocktails looked so good so we started with the two margaritas they had on the menu. Both were made with mezcal which we have definitely been enjoying in cocktails. Andrea’s was a jasmine martini with some habanero and mine was had traditional margarita ingredients with the exception of the mezcal instead of tequila. Both were delicious.
Bread was provided, which isn’t surprising since directly adjacent is their bakery. We were provided a focaccia and a walnut? bread which were both very good (we’re pretty picky about bread since we primarily consume Tartine and Acme bread back home) the walnut bread was so nice and chewy glutiny) and the olive oil was very good as well.
We decided to go with all recommendations from our server. We had 2 starters – first, a taco made with a savoy cabbage leaf for a tortilla, romeritos, and a pistachio (instead of the usual pumpkin seeds) pipian. That was a fantastic and interesting start. Second starter was a green mole an quelite tamal. The dish was very green with the tamal on the very bottom and the mole was one of the best green moles we’ve had (granted, we have not had many).
We then went with one pasta and one main to split. We went with the sweet potato fagottini with buttermilk and macha sauce because it sounded the most different from pasta we typically have. The fagottini was stuffed with the sweet potato puree. Andrea descrived the shape of the pasta as like a pillow and I described it like crab rangoon that wasn’t fried.
For the main, we went with the fish special which was a grouper with a tasty romesco sauce topped with a little crumble of some kind that gave a nice bit of textural crunch.
We were both full, but when we look at the dessert menu, it’s hard for us to resist. We did, though restrain ourselves mildly by only ordering one dessert. We were initially inclined to go with the lavender tres leches cake, but that seemed a little more familiar than hoja santa and white bean cacao criollo. We didn’t even know exactly what it was, but that was exactly what we were going for and it was also the one that our server recommended as well. When it arrived, there was a large dried and sugared leaf (the hoja santa) on top of the chocolate. i did not even know there were white beans or a different criollo variety of cacao. I love to learn new things, so this was great. The way they recommended to consume the dish was to break up the leaf and stir it into the chocolate below. It actually was not very nice looking after that, but the flavor was great. The hoja santa seemed to have a very mild anise type flavor and the chocoloate was also very slightly spiced to give a tiny bit of heat. So this dessert, while not much to look at once mixed, was quite tasty.
In any case, this ended up being an interesting, educational, and very satisfyingly delicious lunch.
Leave a Reply