On the evening of our arrival to Oaxaca from Puebla, we had dinner reservations at Casa Oaxaca, an establishment that over the years many have considered the best restaurant in Oaxaca. This was our third visit to this restaurant. We walked away from our first meal there feeling we had eaten one of the 5 best meals of our lives. You can read about that first glorious meal in 2017 at our Oaxaca Restaurants page.
But about a year later, our second visit was underwhelming and a bit of a disappointment in terms of both the food and the service.
The meal on this third visit in August 2019 was somewhere in-between. It was much, much better than our last visit but not quite to the same high standard as the first. But it was good enough that we will probably come back again for another bite on our next trip to Oaxaca.
One place that most definitely did not disappoint was Origen. It’s located half a block off the Zócalo at 820 Miguel Hidalgo. The entry into the building and reception is on the street level but a walk up a flight of stairs is required to reach the classically pretty dining room. Our window seat gave a great view of the street scene below and the service was top notch.
We’ve got some nice photos but unfortunately, at this writing it’s now been a few months since the night of that meal and I’m afraid I didn’t make notes so I can’t report with 100% confidence exactly what we had but can say that we came away with the strong impression that this was the best meal we had eaten in Oaxaca on this trip and was on par with the best of the fine dining we had done in the 2-weeks immediately before in San Miguel de Allende and Puebla.
The menu at Origen changes seasonally so the current menu really doesn’t help in prompting my memory but my best guess from looking at the photos is that one main course was Lamb Chops and the other was something with Shaved Truffles and one appetizer was Fish Tacos. We shared another delicious starter but I can’t for the life of me tell you what it was. Maybe the next time we are in Oaxaca I’ll show the pictures at the restaurant and hopefully they can tell us what we ate!
Thanks to a photo of the cocktail menu, one item that I can report with 100% assurance is a hand crafted mixed drink the restaurant calls “Picante”. Ingredients are a good quality espadin jovin mezcal, pineapple (juice), seasoned chili powder (on the glass rim) and agave honey. Delicious! The only problem is that it tasted so good and went down so easy we were probably guilty of drinking it too fast. We’ve happily shared this drink with friends since we returned from the trip and everyone (even those that aren’t regular drinkers of mezcal) seems to love it.
We managed to include one more new dining experience on this visit to Oaxaca. On the day that we took the tour to the Toltec ruins at Monte Alban; the tour included a lunch stop at Los Huípíles Restaurant in San Pedro Ixtlahuaca about half an hour outside of Oaxaca Centro. This is a buffet restaurant designed to serve families and groups touring the area, which made was pretty much the perfect place for our tour operators to deliver us to.
Upon arrival, we were served a complimentary shot of mezcal and invited to head to the buffet. What it might have lacked in top notch quality, it made up for with a HUGE variety. Lots to choose from including several stations where cooks were preparing dishes to order. IMHO, the food was decent (but some dishes suffered from being on a buffet line) and while the prices weren’t outrageous, they seemed a little on the high side. If we weren’t in the area and hadn’t been brought here by a tour, it’s not the type of place we would normally choose on our own but for the purpose of this particular day, it was a reasonable option.
Our other good dining experiences on this trip were returns to favorites from previous visits. We enjoyed a very nice lunch at Boulenc Café and picked up a few baked goods from their bakery counter to take back to our hotel room. Whenever we got the urge for good basic tacos, which was an almost daily event we enjoyed the good food, friendly atmosphere and convenience of Roy’s Tacos. And pretty much every visit there included an order of Pan de Elote (Mexican corn bread) for dessert. We go into much greater details of previous visits to these two places on our Oaxaca 2018 Restaurants page.