By Eric Griffey
Photography by Brooks Burris
Adrian Burciaga spotted four regulars walking toward his restaurant from a window in the private dining room. As the co-owner of a newly opened haute Mexican eatery rushed to greet the quartet at the downtown locale’s entrance, he maneuvered his way through a phalanx of friendly greetings, handshakes and hugs.
The local dining fixture seemed to know everyone. That sense of familiarity is fitting at Almacén El Gallo, Burciaga’s new restaurant at downtown’s 7th Street doorstep — in the same building as Italian standout Osteria 61. The food may arrive carefully composed on artisan plates, and the menu bears the fingerprints of a Michelin-starred chef, but the concept’s inspiration comes from someplace considerably less formal: the fondas, cantinas, markets and neighborhood gathering places of Mexico.
Burciaga calls it “casual elevated.” The phrase sounds slightly backward until you spend some time here. There is serious cooking at El Gallo, but very little ceremony.
“You’re going to be transported to Mexico,” he said. “If you have traveled to Mexico, you’re going to have those memories, like, ‘Oh, I tried this before.’”
For Burciaga, the restaurant represents both a new beginning and something of a return home. Last summer brought a professional transition for the veteran restaurateur. Instead of immediately trying to recreate what he had done before, Burciaga began talking with his partner in marriage and business, María José Cervantes, and the couple’s other business partner, Martin Quirarte, about what they might build together.
The discussions eventually circled around memory: the foods they grew up eating in Mexico, the places they ate them, and the particular kind of hospitality found in restaurants where the dining room feels less like a business and more like an extension of someone’s home.
Then a downtown space became available. Its previous life as a market helped give the restaurant its name. “Almacén” can mean a store, warehouse or shop, and the team began imagining a restaurant that borrowed from the visual language of an old Mexican neighborhood market without turning the idea into kitsch.
“We decided to bring the idea of nostalgia in Mexican cuisine,” Burciaga says. “Let’s bring together some dishes that are back in our memory from things when we were growing up in Mexico in different places and put them in an elevated way.”
The restaurant looks the part. Earthy colors and warm woods soften the room. Chairs were custom-made in Guadalajara, while many of the decorative elements came from Jalisco. Mexican films from the country’s Golden Age flicker on screens. Cervantes helped develop the restaurant’s story and design, while artist Fernando Rojas created original artwork, including a mural depicting a Mexican cantina from another era.
The final piece of the restaurant came from Monterrey. As Burciaga and his partners developed the concept, they had a space, an aesthetic and an increasingly clear idea of what they wanted the food to say. What they lacked was a chef who could translate those ideas into a menu.
Around that time, Chef Rodrigo Rivera-Río called. Rivera-Río is the chef behind Koli Cocina de Origen in Monterrey, which has earned a Michelin star for three consecutive years. He and Burciaga are longtime friends, and the chef offered to help with whatever Burciaga was working on.
Within weeks, Rivera-Río was sending ideas, and suddenly the concept had a culinary vocabulary. The resulting menu roams Mexico rather than planting its flag in a single region.
Rivera-Río’s Monterrey roots are evident in its northern Mexican influence, but the cooking wanders through Chihuahua, Nayarit, Yucatán, Michoacán and Oaxaca.
That philosophy becomes clear quickly. Guacamole arrives with the smoky perfume of burnt avocado leaf. An aguachile combines shrimp with pistachios. The Olvidado de Camarón layers zarandeado shrimp with frijoles con veneno, chile dressing and pico de gallo inside a fried corn tortilla. Duck carnitas take their cues from Quiroga, Michoacán. The kitchen uses non-GMO heirloom corn from Masienda to make its tortillas.
“I think the pop, diversity and the layers of flavors you can notice from bite to bite,” Burciaga said.
The trick is that the technique never seems intended to distance the food from its origins. Burciaga talks repeatedly about “layers of flavors,” and it is perhaps the best shorthand for what El Gallo is attempting. Familiar ideas keep revealing something else underneath. Even the guacamole is designed to trigger something more elemental: Burciaga describes the aroma of the burnt avocado leaf as reminiscent of a campfire in the Mexican countryside.
Other dishes are more direct. Ceviches, aguachiles, tacos, grilled meats and seafood form the backbone of a menu that can accommodate wildly different evenings. A diner can stop in for a couple of tacos and a drink or make a night of it with premium steaks and larger plates. That range is central to Burciaga’s insistence that El Gallo is not, despite appearances, a fine-dining restaurant.
“We want people to feel they can come here without spending a fortune,” he says.
There is luxury available for those who want it, but luxury is not the price of admission. That distinction matters in a restaurant carrying this much culinary firepower. Rivera-Río’s involvement could easily have pushed El Gallo toward the tasting-menu formality associated with Michelin-starred cooking. Instead, his technique serves food rooted in the everyday traditions of Mexico. Fondas and cantinas, after all, are not temples of gastronomy. They are places where people eat.
The bar follows the same path. It is heavily driven by agave and Mexican spirits, with tequila, mezcal and other Mexican distillates forming the foundation. There are tequila cocktails, mezcalitas and a cocktail made with Mexican gin and hoja santa. Burciaga has also resurrected a pineapple-and-tamarind mezcal drink from his past.
The intention is not simply to assemble the familiar markers of a Mexican restaurant. It is to build an experience in which Mexico keeps surfacing in different forms, from what is poured into a glass to what is playing on a screen.
Plenty of dining rooms promise travel by dinner reservation. El Gallo’s more convincing argument comes through specificity. This is not some generalized, sepia-toned Mexico. It is Monterrey and Oaxaca. Yucatán and Nayarit. It is the smoke of an avocado leaf, the heat of a table salsa and the clutter of an old neighborhood shop. It is a cantina mural on the wall and the sounds of an active kitchen spilling into the dining room.
And then there is Burciaga himself, moving through the room. He is balancing El Gallo with another Fort Worth restaurant, Tinie’s, where he has helped build a team capable of running the day-to-day operation while his attention shifted downtown for the opening. The two restaurants are only a few miles apart, a convenient distance for a man suddenly required in two dining rooms at once.
For the moment, though, El Gallo is the newborn, and Burciaga seems incapable of staying in one place for long. A guest needs something. Someone wants to say hello. A table welcomes diners. Another familiar face walks through the door. Months of planning have turned into the noisy reality of a restaurant filled with people, which is ultimately the point.
After all the talk about Michelin stars, contemporary technique, regional Mexican cuisine and elevated presentation, Burciaga, Cervantes and Quirarte keep returning to a simpler idea. The trio wanted to build the kind of place they like to be.
This afternoon in downtown Fort Worth, surrounded by friends, customers and plates of food carrying memories from hundreds of miles away, they appear to have done exactly that.
ALMACÉN EL GALLO
500 W. 7th St., Suite 175, Fort Worth
817-937-2997
Monday–Thursday: 11 a.m.–9 p.m.
Friday: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.
Saturday: 3–10 p.m.
Sunday: 3–8 p.m.