RATINGS Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor. The restaurant is difficult to find it is on the south side of Fort Lee Road, between Queen Anne Road and Hickory Street. The same menu is served at lunch and dinner, but some special dishes are served at lunch. IF YOU GO Lunch: Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. WHAT WE LIKED Guacamole, ceviche, mole poblano, steak chimichurri, chile en nogada, chile relleno, pork tacos, cecina (salt-cured dried beef) tacos, deep-fried ice cream. American Express, MasterCard, Visa and Discover accepted. THE BAR Bring your own wine, beer or spirit virgin margaritas and piña coladas available. THE SPACE Seating for 40 at tables in a bright, festive dining area and an adjacent glass-enclosed former greenhouse. It may not be as balanced or as subtle as many dishes on the menu, but it is certainly festive, an appropriate way to end a meal at a restaurant with orange and lavender walls and an artist in the kitchen. My favorite is the deep-fried ice cream served with sopaipilla, or fried dough, dusted with cinnamon and drizzled with maple syrup and honey. “But still he does what he thinks will make it better.” “I tell him, ‘Bernabe, once you perfect a dish, keep it the same,’ ” Ms. He made hamburgers but aspired to make chile en nogada and other creative dishes. Rojas cooked for his seven brothers in America, he worked as a corporate chef. Such craftsmanship takes a lifetime to develop. That word does not apply, however, to the side of rice and beans, so carefully prepared that finishing it does not seem optional. The super-burrito is large enough to justify the “super” in its name, but it is ordinary. In contrast to the tacos with cecina, however, the fish tacos are unpleasantly salty. Rojas’s creativity is evident in other dishes as well: a chile relleno that delivers a fresh kick with every forkful, and corn tacos filled with either pork or cecina, a salt-cured, dried beef. Sprinkled with pomegranate seeds, it is as pretty as it is complex, and reasonable: $13.95 for a generous portion. Too many ingredients, you might think, but the dish perfectly balances its many flavors (sweet, sour and fiery) and textures (smooth and crunchy). A list of its ingredients gives you some idea of its complexity: a poblano pepper that he roasts to bring out its fruity flavor three kinds of meat (pork, filet mignon and ground beef) fruits (usually apple, pineapple and raisins) and an almond dressing made with goat cheese, which gives it a subtle tang. Rojas makes the dish with almonds and pecans. The name connotes the presence of walnuts (nogal means walnut tree), but Mr. Rojas is more ambitious, and he couples traditional dishes with more inventive ones. Rojas supplies them: ceviche enriched with buttery avocado chicken in a mole made velvety with Mexican chocolate and skirt steak in a smoky chimichurri sauce fragrant with lime and cilantro. You expect to find familiar Mexican dishes in a restaurant named after a resort area in the Yucatán Peninsula, and Mr. Whether or not that is true, I liked this version because it was brazenly citric and sweet but also fiery, thanks to the use of both jalapeño peppers and spicier habanero and serrano peppers. Some Mexican chefs believe that a seasoned molcajete imparts a deeper, richer flavor to the guacamole. Start your meal with guacamole, prepared at your table in a molcajete, the traditional Mexican mortar, and ground with a tejolote, or pestle. “It will work, believe me,” she told him. Rojas said during an interview after my visits. “ ‘How can it be that color?’ he asked,” Ms. When she first proposed painting the walls a lively yellow, orange and lavender that reminded her of Mexico, her husband was skeptical.
Erika Rojas, who is married to Bernabe Rojas, the owner and chef, bought most of the pottery and sculptures that brighten the two pretty dining areas during trips to Mexico, where she and her husband were born. Perhaps word had not gotten out that in November, Riviera Maya Mexican Cuisine had switched from a takeout stand to a full-scale restaurant in which you could sit and have a splendid meal.Įven before I tasted the chile relleno, which turned out to be the best I had eaten in a decade, I was glad to be in a dining room that clearly had been designed by a person rather than a decorator. The wonder is that I was among only a few diners in that sunny, cheerful dining room in a forlorn stretch of Bogota. Last month, I ate dishes that were as memorable and authentic as the ones I had eaten at the taqueria. The last great Mexican meal I ate was in 2004, at La Super-Rica Taqueria in Santa Barbara, Calif., whose most famous patron was Julia Child.
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