Mexico City’s local dive would be New York City’s food Mecca. Discuss.
The first time I saw the taqueria Los Palomos, I thought it was on fire. I was in a new neighborhood, with a new guy, and we had turned onto a street cloaked in smoke coming from a corner restaurant bright with ugly fluorescent lights and the occasional burst of flame. Waves of thick smoke rolled out from under the orange awning. I was taken aback, surprised to see patrons sitting inside, calmly ordering tacos and Cokes, their jackets and freshly washed hair marinating in the black plumes coming off the plancha.
As it turned out, the pall of smoke is this taqueria’s natural state. Since 1971, Los Palomos, on the corner of Ahorro Postal and Balmaceda, has offered carnes y queso al carbon to a neighborhood called Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez that few people have heard of even here in Mexico City, the years marked by a grey soot stain that darkens the top third of the interior walls. The area is quiet and residential; a place that no tourist would have reason to visit. Locals might know it because it is near a circus off a main highway. And I came to know it when I started dating someone new, seduced into, and later by, a new part of the city.
Open from 5pm to 1am, the taqueria serves grilled beef in various forms, excellent pastor, and soupy black beans. But their most famous dish—if you can call a place that no one outside the colonia has heard of ‘famous’—is their chile rojo, a taco made from a dried ancho chile stuffed with cheese and fried on the griddle, a stripped down version of chile relleno with no breading, no batter, no deep frying. If you mention Los Palomos to locals, they’ll say, “Ah yes, the chile rojo place.”
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