In landlocked Mexico City – the nearest coast is 250 miles away – you might think that it would be difficult to find fresh seafood. However, ever since Aztec times, the ocean’s bounty has been brought to the valley daily.
Back then, the Aztec emperors got their goods using a system of relay runners that covered those hundreds of miles from sea to city per day. Things require less footwork today: technology and Mexico’s highway system allow daily deliveries of fresh seafood to the capital from the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts.
That said, feeding the Mexican capital’s fish craving still requires some hustle. Every morning at around 4 a.m., Miguel Ángel López visits La Nueva Viga, Mexico City’s largest fish market, where trucks of all sizes arrive daily with the day’s catch. He picks the freshest ingredients directly from the truck for his restaurant, Baby Fish, located in delegación Álvaro Obregón, a borough west of the city.
For almost five years, López and his wife, Roxana Cárdenas, the restaurant’s head chef, have been serving lovingly-made seafood dishes on the patio of what once was his parents’ house. When the restaurant started to take off, he and his parents switched homes. Showing an exceptional level of commitment to their business, Miguel adapted an apartment on top of the restaurant where he now lives with Roxana, and his parents took over his old place.
That commitment shows in the food the López family serves. The day we visited we had one of the most delicious seafood meals in Mexico City. We started with a caldo de camarón, shrimp broth, which had just the right amount of spice, an octopus tostada that was cooked to perfection and a blue crab tostada that could easily compete with our favorite in the city.
Our main dishes arrived shortly after, brought by what seemed to be a small army of attentive servers. We had the Vuelve a la vida, a dish that roughly translates into “come back to life,” a mixture of many ingredients, including octopus, shrimp and clams, cooked in a spicy sauce and served with onion, cilantro and avocado. We also ordered two different types of tacos, Gobernador, shrimp tacos served on a corn tortilla with melted Oaxaca cheese, and Sinaloa, shrimp dipped in batter and deep fried served on a flour tortilla with lettuce, avocado and a mayonnaise-based salsa.
Although all of the dishes we tried that day at Baby Fish were outstanding, our favorite dish of the meal was the Alambre de mariscos, a combination of grilled octopus, shrimp, bacon, onion, bell peppers and melted manchego cheese. In México, alambre is a dish of grilled meat and vegetables that is popular for making tacos. However, this was the first time we had tried it with seafood and we absolutely loved it – the seafood was tender and blended perfectly with the melted cheese.
Baby Fish is a family restaurant where commitment to quality, freshness and good service are a priority; and it shows in the delightful dishes they prepare. We’ve heard that desserts are also great at Baby Fish, but we were so full that we couldn’t eat anything else. But now we have an excuse to go back.
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