Barbacoa – pit-roasted lamb or goat – is a Mexico City weekend essential. Stands pop up all over the city on Saturdays and Sunday selling the soft-as-butter meat on a warm tortilla, topped with a sprinkling of cilantro and raw onion and one of the many smoky salsas that generally accompany this dish. Even more, barbacoa broth is a well-known hangover cure, among the ranks of menudo (tripe soup) and pozole (hominy and meat soup).
Before the city’s Roma neighborhood became the hip, bohemian mecca that it is now, Moises and Norma Rodriguez opened El Hidalguense, an unassuming spot on one of the neighborhood’s quieter streets. Now, 30 years later, it is known far and wide for roasting some of the best barbacoa in the city.
One of El Hidalguense’s many wow-factors is its ability to control every part of the production process – from the feeding of animals to the selection of the agave leaves integral to the roasting process. The meat is wrapped in the leaves, then placed in underground pits roaring at temperatures over 400 F. Even the cilantro and avocados used to garnish the barbacoa are purchased from small farmers in the city of Tulancingo in Hidalgo state, where Moises and Norma still live.
Each weekend is a blur of activity. The Rodriguezes make the two-hour drive to Mexico City on Friday afternoons and work steadily until Sunday evening. They are awake almost constantly, grabbing 20 minutes of sleep here or there until they can finally rest in the early morning hours of Monday. It’s an endeavor involving the entire family. The couple’s daughters run the restaurant’s social media accounts, and their nieces and nephews work as waiters. “We are invested in making sure this a project that is continued far beyond our lifetimes,” Moises tells us.
Hidalguense occupies a tiny place on Campeche Street, where it started out as a small weekend fonda at which Norma cooked other traditional dishes from a list of regional cuisine best known in the state of Hidalgo. As the years went on, they expanded their frontage and their menu to include smoky quesos asados (grill-roasted cheese), maguey worms, ant eggs and mixiotes (shredded meat spiced with chiles and herbs and steamed in parchment paper).
They offer lamb mixiotes as well ones made of wild mushrooms and chamorro, a slow-cooked leg of pork that falls off the bone when it’s done (let’s just say it spends a lot of time in a chile pasilla sauce). El Hidalguense is also now home to a full-service bar, and started bottling a half-dozen salsas that put regular taco stands to shame
“We have customers that came when they were first dating, then had families and now their children are parents,” Moises says of the many regulars who have come to view Hidalguense as a mandatory stop on their weekend culinary outings. For Moises can always be found chopping barbacoa on the massive tree trunk cutting board that sits at the front of the restaurant. Norma runs the kitchen, taking calls, managing waiters and chatting with customers that come by to ask about where the meat comes from, where the honey comes from, where the corn for their delicious tortillas comes from. They are a seamless machine in a place that is packed to the gills most days it’s open.
Before the city’s Roma neighborhood was the hip, bohemian mecca that it is now, Moises and Norma Rodriguez opened their own barbacoa spot, El Hidalguense. Now, 30 years later, it is known far and wide for roasting some of the best barbacoa in the city.
They use only manso and mestizo agave leaves (plants that are generally reserved for making pulque – a drink made with fermented agave sap – but that at a certain age are ready to serve another purpose) to wrap their barbacoa meat when it goes into the oven. Even more than the meat, Moises says that the agave is the most important element of good barbacoa.
The meat is smooth as butter and has a tinge of smoke underneath the taste of maguey. Their barbacoa isn’t gamey like some, which can happen when the animal is too old or not well taken care of. El Hidalguense’s stock are raised on a 100% whole grain diet, without the fattening additives and antibiotics generally used in meat production.
“We’ve been doing this for 35 years, and I eat barbacoa every Friday, Saturday and Sunday,” Moises says. “Our cholesterol levels, everything, is always good. I can assuredly say that our meat is 100% clean. It’s manjar” – a delicacy.
The Rodriguezes’ hometown of Tulancingo has a dramatic climate, Moises says. “Intense cold, intense heat, intense wind, intense rain.” It also breeds intense people – the family are proudly Hidalguense, and boast that their dishes, ingredients and staff all hail from the region. While lots of things have changed in the neighborhood in the last 30 years, Hidalguense is not one of them. This culinary icon is still happily serving customers in the Roma, and the line around the block every weekend says their customers are happy too.
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