El Catrin Destileria

At El Catrin Destileria, a meal is built to be passed around. Tables tend to start with guacamole mixed tableside and an order of queso fundido — warm smoked provolone under pasilla chile syrup and crispy shallots — before anyone settles how many tacos to add. The Mexican menu runs wide and tapas-style, from botanas through tacos to larger especialidades, and that breadth is the practical draw: a vegetarian, a seafood eater, and a table after braised short rib can all order from the same pages without anyone compromising. It is built for groups, and the ordering rewards them.

The tacos are where the kitchen makes its case. Birria leads — braised beef in an ancho-and-guajillo chile broth with red onion, cilantro, lime, and an arbol chile salsa, served with extra broth for dipping so the order slows into something shared. Cochinita pibil arrives from pork braised twelve hours in achiote, with black beans and a maple-habanero salsa; the Baja stacks beer-battered haddock under chipotle-lime aioli; the gobernador packs sautéed shrimp into a flour tortilla with a cheese crust and cascabel salsa. The tuna tostada is the sharpest way to open a meal — ahi tuna, morita soy glaze, salsa macha, and avocado crema on a corn tortilla — and the costilla cargada, braised bone-in short rib with salsa verde and serrano, gives the table its heaviest centrepiece. Desserts keep it classic — churros and a tres leches cake to finish.

That range signals a kitchen comfortable cooking in several registers at once. There is real seafood in the chicharron ceviche and the tuna; a vegetarian section that does more than token duty, with ajillo mushrooms in a guajillo-garlic mojo and charred cauliflower rubbed in chiles with almond morita and coconut; and Sonora-style refried beans, sopa Azteca, and chicken tinga flautas holding the comfort end. The plating leans modern — bone marrow shaved over carne asada, tahini threaded through a mushroom taco — but the structure stays familiar, plates meant to land in the middle of the table and get divided. It reads as a menu designed less to showcase a single dish than to make sure no one leaves without finding theirs.

El Catrin opened in 2013 as one of the Distillery District's large-format destinations, a 10,000-square-foot dining room and heated patio launched by the restaurateurs behind Distillery Restaurants Corp, John Berman and Mathew Rosenblatt. The bar was built to match the scale: more than 120 tequila and mezcal labels, among the deeper agave selections in the country, enough that patio drinks and an after-dinner mezcal read as their own reason to stay. Overhead, a mural that Mexican artists spent close to a hundred days painting gives the interior its through-line, the visual anchor that pulls a sprawling floor plan into one identity.

The schedule reflects that ambition. The kitchen runs brunch and lunch as well as dinner, keeps a kids' menu and a vegetarian one on hand, and points takeout traffic to its own current list — a wide service footprint for a place that could have leaned on dinner alone. In warmer months the heated patio extends the night well past the dinner rush, and the format that makes a quiet weekday lunch easy is the same one that absorbs a large group on a Friday without strain.

What holds it together is that the place runs at more than one speed without losing its centre. The food stays bright and built to share whether the table is two people at lunch or a dozen on a Friday night, and the patio and the agave bar are there to carry the evening once the plates thin out. Long after the botanas are cleared, that is usually where the table still is.