Molkagtez Mexican Cuisine

Molkagtez runs two restaurants out of a single Parkdale address. One is a late-night party — DJs, karaoke, cocktails, weekend hours that stretch past one in the morning. The other is a kitchen willing to put chicatana-ant salsa and cricket-dusted macha on the menu and mean it. What holds the two together arrives in the middle of the table: the molcajete, the bubbling volcanic-stone bowl the restaurant takes its name from, loaded for two and built to be shared by hand.

The molcajetes anchor everything. The Solo Carnes version fills the hot stone with pork, chicken, and beef alongside homemade salsa, cheese, nopales, corn, and jalapeño; the Cielo Mar y Tierra pushes the same format into surf-and-turf, adding fish, shrimp, and octopus to the meat. Around those centrepieces the menu fans out. Tacos run from pastor — pork marinated in mild chilies with pineapple — to a campechano of steak, chorizo, and nopales, to a beer-battered Baja fish finished with chipotle mayonnaise, with a cactus-and-mushroom version for the vegetarians at the table. The kitchen works the birria circuit hard, too: a quesabirria of folded tortillas stuffed with pulled meat and cheese, consommé alongside for dipping, and a Birria Ramen that drops noodles, a cooked egg, and tender meat straight into that same consommé. Starters and sweets bracket the meal — a choriqueso of melted cheese and chorizo with warm flour tortillas to start, a caramel-crowned Flan Napolitano to close.