My heart leaps the minute I walk into Pickosito, the Mexican restaurant on North Lotts, just off Liffey Street in Dublin city centre. Iris Gaspar is working at a counter near the entrance, bowls of dough lined up in front of her. She pinches off small balls of dough, rolls them with a palote – a long, slim rolling pin – ready to be cooked on the flat-top griddle nearby. Already it feels like my type of restaurant.
My daughters, accomplished scouts when it comes to restaurants, have been telling me about Pickosito since it was in its original premises on Mary Street. It is a favourite of Katherine’s, who warns me the servings are generous, so any effort to get a sense of the menu will require additional sets of gnashers.
It was opened in 2024 by Edlyn Garcia Morán and Raquel Hernández Rodríguez, two women from northern Mexico (Torreón and Sabinas, both in the state of Coahuila). Hernández Rodríguez, the head chef, was raised on a ranch where she learned how to cook over open fire and make wheat flour tortillas.
Food writer Diana Kennedy spent half a century arguing that there was no such thing as “Mexican cuisine”, only the cuisines of Mexico. “The regional dishes of Sonora, or Jalisco, have practically nothing in common with those of Yucatán and Campeche; neither have those of Nuevo León with those of Chiapas and Michoacán,” she writes in The Cuisines of Mexico. Outside Mexico, we tend to think of its cooking as a single cuisine. However, in the northern states of Coahuila and Sonora, the cooking is quite different from that of central and southern Mexico. Vast cattle ranches mean beef is the dominant meat, and the dry climate is better suited to wheat than corn. So tortillas here are made from wheat flour, not corn.
At first glance, the menu at Pickosito, mixing northern Mexican dishes with classics from elsewhere, looks extensive, so a large plate of nachos especiales (€13.50) is the perfect thing to stave off hunger as we strategise how best to work through the menu. Though the tortilla chips are not home-made, the nachos are excellent, one of the most generously topped plates I’ve encountered on these shores. Queso, sour cream, guacamole and salsa verde are piled on top, with more queso hidden underneath. Our aguas frescas (€4.20), all made in-house, include mango, hibiscus and horchata, the cooling, gently sweet rice-and-cinnamon drink inspired by Valencia’s tiger nut horchata.
The system is straightforward. For mains, there is a choice of tacos (flour or corn), tacotones (oversized tacos) or burritos/bowls, and you then pick one of the fillings listed: barbacoa, adobada, carne asada, chorizo, vegetables or chilli sin carne. There are further options from the traditional plates section – enchiladas, enmoladas and chilaquiles, which are sizeable plates with rice.
Four flour tacos filled with crumbled home-made chorizo (€15.90), topped with chopped onion and coriander, are a northern Mexican staple. The tortillas taste as though they have just come off the griddle: warm, pliable and salted to just the right point. The opposite of the cardboard supermarket ones. The chorizo is spicy, sharpened by a squeeze of lime. Cubed chips are served alongside, as they are with most dishes.
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For vegetarians and vegans, the tacotón chilli sin carne (€13.90) is a large flour tortilla, gloriously blistered and filled with…