Borriquita de Belém

For a long time, the neighbourhood around Borriquita de Belém was a place Mexico City's bar-going crowd drove through rather than stopped in. Colonia Doctores sits just south of the Centro Histórico, gritty and underappreciated, the kind of place that serious drinkers eventually discover when everywhere north of Reforma has been thoroughly catalogued. Borriquita was here before the discovery. It arrived quietly, opened the kind of natural wine list that takes a genuine obsessive to assemble, and began serving small plates from a kitchen barely larger than a wardrobe. The locals knew immediately. Visitors took a little longer.

The cellar leans hard into Mexican and South American natural producers alongside selections from the Jura, the Loire and a handful of orange wines from Georgia and Slovenia. It's a list that assumes you know what you're doing, but the staff are happy to guide anyone who doesn't. Order a glass of whatever they're most excited about that week and let them pick the small plates — the kitchen works with whatever is good at the market, which means the food changes more often than the wine list does.

There is something refreshing about a wine bar that has no interest in being photographed. Borriquita is loud on weekend nights, dim most of the time and deeply committed to the idea that the glass in your hand is more important than the room around it. For the full CDMX cocktail picture, Xaman Bar in Roma Norte offers a complementary experience in the mezcal register — equally unhurried, equally serious about what's in the bottle.