Behind the taco meme is the taco: First up, meet El Parnita (restaurant review)
(Located at Yucatán 84 Loc. E2, Roma Norte, Mexico City. Written for Life in Condesa and Roma.)
“El Parnita es una antojería única,” wrote an unnamed journalist at Hotbook last month. And then somebody else inserted the following photo:
“El Parnita is a unique …” Okay, it turns out I don’t know how to translate “antojería.” Just think of it as a place that provides you with the kinds of foods you crave. Which is to say, this is a taquería and not a salad bar, dudes. If you accept crowd-size as indicative, this one ranks among Mexico City’s favorites. And this brings me to the point by which the above photo becomes problematic: in fact, I am pretty sure the only time El Parnita looks as it does above is well past closing time.
What I found, in contrast, was something more like what you see here:
In this write, my most important assertion is that every taco you have ever had is likely to pale in comparison to what you are about to experience: Tacos Carmelita, Garbanzo Bertha, flor de calabaza con crema, pulled pork... I state this having done Farolita and Califa and a whole lot of street and market and chingona holes-in-the-wall taquerías in my now-decade-long Mexico City residency. I state this, too, having done my internet research. El Parnita rates 9.2 out of 10 on Foursquare and has 4.5 stars on Yelp.
Eso dicho, I have chosen to focus in this write on the El Parnita vibe―since vibe rather than taste can be conveyed convincingly via text. I mean this as a euphemism for “Go do your own taste tests, queridos.” So now let’s return to vibe. Beginning with my ethnographic evidence:
Mariana, who is a jeweler into working with raw cut stones and gold, called El Parnita “traditional Mexican with a touch of kitsch.”
Naiki, an entrepreneur into furniture design, said, “It’s like a restaurant from a small town in the middle of Mexico City.”
Later, eleven year old Skaska who is an up-and-coming blogger in her own right chose the words: “Classic meets modern, where people can be comfortable and without problems.” No small claim in the postmodernist, neoliberal year of 2016. “Rustic,” Skaska added as an afterthought, and she didn’t mean overly commodified faux-rustic when she said this.
Think overwhelmingly-hipster-at-first-glance-which-quickly-gives-way-to-something-infinitely-cooler. Because the hipsters are there. And in fact, I would argue that the Mexico City art and design crowd is overrepresented at El Parnita. “He’s a designer, she’s a photographer… That table over there, they’re designers, too” Mariana explained; “siempre hay muchos creativos” (there are always many creatives).
Like a coworking of taco eaters, I wrote into my notes. Once inside, however, you realize you are among hipsters, creatives, plus everybody else and their grandmothers.
“This place was opened with antecedents,” co-owner of the family establishment, Paulino, said; “not with money, but with care and soul. I am here with you now, but I was also with him, and him, and him,” he explained while pointing from table to table to table.
“That’s how my mom was, too… My mom knows ninety percent of the customers―their names, if they have a child, if that child has been sick.” Paulino explained that this, the emphasis on sincerity and social interaction within El Parnita, are what results when one is committed, first, to being present in one’s life, to living life in a way that empowers each moment with the potential to change one’s life. As proof, he concluded: “For example, here is where I met my partner, and that changed my life, no?”
I showed up Friday (a not quincena Friday), late afternoon, expecting something chill, thinking I would miss the comida crowd and beat the happy hour crowd. But then I turned onto Yucatan and into the kind of loud buzz that radiates up the street, a buzz that Mariana called “the bustling of people having interesting conversations.”
“How do you know they are interesting?” I countered, because I like people who can show me rather than tell me what they mean, and Mariana answered with zero smugness and zero pause to consider: “Because the people always come back.”
I recalled Paulino’s mom who “knows 90 percent of them.”
At the top of Paulino’s list of aspirations for the taquería is transcendence — “to transcend and be transcended,” he explained. “I hope to be affected by all the people here. We didn’t make a restaurant to earn money, we came to [have an impact on] people. This I learned from my mom. The thing is to modify la vida social (social life) every day.”
And thus, this. This, I would argue, is where El Parnita begins to set itself apart. “Unique,” the Hotbook journalist wrote, but in 2016, unique is boring, an adjective we use when we are too tired to think accurately and effectively. I am going to tell you instead that El Parnita is social, socio-cultural even, the kind of establishment you can claim as your own and to which you can belong. No, really. Yes, there is wifi. And yet the masses are engaged in interesting (as Mariana claimed) and live (as I am adding here) conversations.
At El Parnita you get to know and take pride in the list of ever-evolving, multi-regional specials for which the restaurant is already known. You can choose between mezcals and brews or the best agua de guava you’ve ever experienced (nobody’s paying me to say this, I swear), and in either case, you feel at home, at home in the kind of age diverse, race diverse, national-origin diverse community for which neighborhoods like Roma, Condesa, and even Escandón are now known. A space that is not touristic despite the tourists, El Parnita is, rather, global.
“A family restaurant,” was how Naiki explained El Parnita upon our arrival, but Paulino was quick to assert that that isn’t how he sees it. “It’s more profound than that,” he said, after ducking Naiki’s “It’s his restaurant” comment.
Later I got to ask Paulino what he meant by “more profound,” and he explained that El Parnita is a life project, a commitment to generating community as well as family. He said this not the way a contracted-by-the-hour, inspirational speaker at a cultish self-help conference might say this, but instead, he said it like he could never imagine such a statement getting tossed off as cliché. He said it, in fact, as if he really believed in community. In 2016.
“La profundidad radica en que tiene alma; está formada por una familia y está convencida que la familia es la única comunidad de la sociedad.”
Which is to say, the profundity of El Parnita derives from the fact that this is a place with soul, a place created by a family and with the conviction that family (fictive as well as biological) is what real community looks like. In the words of Paulino. Más o menos. And then of course, there is the part about El Parnita’s awesome tacos.
I told Mariana I was surprised by the crowd so early on a Friday. “It’ll be like this until close” was her reply.
