Mixtli

MEESH-LEE, MIX-TLI / has the variant form MEX-TLI: Aztec spoken word for cloud.

The Cloud

To define Mexican cuisine is impossible. Mexico is as diverse as it is vast. Within its borders lie rocky mountains, humid jungles, arid deserts, and endless coasts: a stark diversity that forced each region to develop uniquely rich cultural and culinary histories.

Like clouds, our menu travels from place to place offering a tour in Mexican gastronomy. If the state has a border with the ocean, we start our trek on the coast and work inland, bringing dishes specifically from that region or state. After each season, the cloud travels to other lands and we begin again.

It is our mission that you fall in love with Mexico.

Our current menu: Del LEvante a Mexico.

“Del Levante a México” explores one of the most influential yet often overlooked migrations in Mexican culinary history. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the first decades of the twentieth, thousands of immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean, many arriving with Ottoman passports from what are now Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and surrounding regions, made their way to Mexico. They settled in cities such as Veracruz, Tampico, Puebla, Monterrey, Mérida, and Mexico City, bringing with them not only the languages and traditions of the Levant, but centuries of culinary knowledge shaped by the crossroads of the Mediterranean.

Rather than replacing the foods they encountered, these families adapted them. Mexican ingredients became the canvas upon which Levantine techniques found new expression. Wheat breads and flatbreads flourished alongside corn tortillas. Yogurt, tahini, sesame, bulgur, fragrant spice blends, pickled vegetables, citrus, garlic, mint, parsley, and pomegranate molasses entered kitchens that were already deeply rooted in Indigenous, Spanish, and regional Mexican traditions. The result was not a separate cuisine, but a gradual conversation between cultures.

Perhaps no dish tells this story more clearly than tacos al pastor. Descended from the vertical spits used for shawarmaand döner, lamb was gradually replaced with pork, local chiles transformed the marinade, pineapple was added as a distinctly Mexican flourish, and tortillas took the place of pita. What began as an immigrant tradition became one of Mexico's defining national dishes, a testament to how cultures evolve through exchange rather than imitation.

Our menu follows that same path. Its foundation remains unmistakably Mexican: aguachile, tamales, masa, tortillas, moles, and salsas provide its structure and identity. Yet woven through each course are the techniques, flavors, and sensibilities of the Levant. Toasted spices bloom in warm fat before meeting dried chiles. Sumac and pomegranate lend brightness where lime alone once stood. Sesame, chickpeas, bulgur, herbs, and cultured dairy appear not as novelties, but as ingredients that have lived in Mexican kitchens for generations. Baking traditions, communal ovens, charcoal roasting, and the rhythm of neighborhood bakeries echo through dishes that remain firmly rooted in Mexico.