Birría in the Big City: Where to find the best birría in CDMX

While birria-mania has been slowly accelerating in the United States for the past several years, everyone in Mexico has always known how delicious it is. The first birria was created in hardscrabble central Mexican deserts. Europeans brought goats for milk, cheese, and sweets-making like cajeta (caramel), according to Jalisco food historian Maria Eugenia Toledo Vargas, author of the book De Vaqueros, Comida y Tradición.

The animals were valued for their heartiness, but their meat was muscular and tough and needed to be transformed in order to be tender and edible.

Traditional birria is slow-roasted in its own juices and a mix of roasted tomatoes, chiles, and garlic. Seasonings can include oregano, clove, cinnamon, ginger, sesame, cumin, white vinegar, salt, bay leaf, thyme, black pepper, and sometimes even beer or pulque, fermented agave sap. Old school cooks made in a wood-fired oven or an underground cooking pit, but today most folks make it on the stove.

You will find that this dish varies from place to place, sometimes the meat and broth is served separately and sometimes together like a soup or stew. Sometimes the cooked meat is finished in the oven, giving it an exterior crust (birria tatemada).

Sometimes you find places that call themselves birria but the meat is more like barbacoa, simple and unseasoned goat or lamb and the traditional flavors are provided by the consomme (broth). Then there is the almighty quesabirria which is, generally, tortillas dipped in salsa and then cooked on the comal with cheese and birria meat inside, sometimes with a cheese crust on the outside.

I love this dish in Jalisco, but definitely wanted to find some that I loved as much here at home in Mexico City, so here are a list of my favorite places so far. An interesting note is that many of these places serve beef birria which is more common in the north and along the border.

Birría Santa Barbara, Bahia de Sta. Barbara 39, Anzures

By far my favorite birria en CDMX, Birria Santa Barbara has been around for 45 years in Anzures. What started out as a simple street food cart is now a full serve restaurant run by the four children of the restaurant’s original founders, Miguel and Socorro.

The family and recipe hail from the state of Jalisco, the birria has a delicious vinegar-umami flavor and you can catch hints of tomato, thyme, oregano, garlic and a touch of spice. The chile de arbol salsa is thin and fiery. Close to the Korean embassy, they have become a staple for transplanted Koreans who Carlos the manager says are obsessed with birria. 

Tacos Don Juan, Atlixco 42, Condesa

To be honest, I love all the tacos at Don Juan, and they only serve birria on the weekends, so any day of the week you want to eat well, I recommend them. Run by the two sons of the original proprietor, this spot was founded as a butcher shop in 1982 and slowly morphed in the incredible taco joint it is today.

They have a famed quesabirria with cheese inside and out, in a small corn tortilla but with a flood of meat, onion, and cilantro inside. The salsa bar is also a wonder. Get there early, there is usually a line and when it’s gone, it’s gone.

La 89, Colima 134, Roma

In an homage the Tijuana-style birrierías, this beef birria is saucey and spicy, with a warm blend of spices and chiles. The quesabirria is one of the best I have had in this search — a large, salsa-dipped flour tortilla with melted Sonora cheese, beans cooked with epazote, and cilantro diced super fine — that can hardly maintain its structure when all the ingredients come together.

This version is much more blended, so if you like a birria with meat in big chunks you might not love it. If you have spent any time eating tacos in Mexico City you will definitely balk at the prices (between 58 and 165 pesos a piece) but such is life in the very hip Colonia Roma.

Taco y Etiqueta, Ricardo Castro 77, Guadalupe Inn

Another weekends-only spot, Taco y Etiqueta has some of the best birria I have ever had. I love the consomme, but it is salty as shit (part of the reason why I like it) with a hint of heat. The tacos are nice and crispy on the outside, obviously fried in a little fat and the meat comes mixed with some fat as all good birria should. Oddly enough they also have a lemon pie with a graham cracker crust that I am crazy about. You can not go wrong with a weekend breakfast at Taco y Etiqueta. 

La Polar, Guillermo Prieto 129, San Rafael 

Their tag line is “La Mejor Birria en Mexico” (The Best Birria in Mexico) and I gotta say, it’s up there. Order the birria plate, which is a bowl of rich and guajillo-chile infused broth with big chunks of tender goat. There is a slightly gaminess that comes with goat or lamb, but it’s not overwhelming in the least. The broth has all the right elements — cinnamon, clove, oregano, chile — again, everything is subtle, balanced, it doesn’t knock you out with salt or beefiness or condiments.

I heard about the brawl that happened here a few months ago and got them shutdown and it had been hard for me to picture, until I went and realized it’s basically a massive cantina, badly playing mariachis and all. Which means lots of alcohol is flowing between bites of quesabirrias — which by the way are so spicy I started to sweat. I like it. The bad reputation give it a certain allure and the birria is solidly in my top three in the entire city.

Birria La Huacana, Popocatépetl Mz 894, Coyoacan

Like I mentioned above, there seem to be two mindsets when it comes to this dish. The first is that the meat is cooked plain and unseasoned and then the broth is added to it for the birria flavor, or the meat itself is immersed in a rich and seasoned sauce. I tend to go for the second, but there are definitely fans of the first. La Huacana is one of those kinds of birrierias. It’s very much outside any touristy area even though it’s technically in Coyoacan so don’t let that dissuade you from going. 

I love it because the broth is rich and deliciously seasoned with clove, oregano, and chiles, and the tortillas are made fresh to order and there is nothing better than a fresh tortilla. ALSO they serve FRENCH PRESS coffee???!!! I have never enjoyed a birria breakfast more than with my tiny French press coffee next to me. I will be back. 

Honorable Mention

I like Birria Colorado (Rio Lerma 218, Cuauhtémoc), but I also like things that are extra salty, which it is and a little bit greasy, which it also is. It’s not the height of quality probably either, but a great place to soak up some alcohol after a night out. The broth and the meat are both rich, salty, and beefy tasting, with some of the more traditional spices like clove, cinnamon, or oregano as not as perceptible.

The birria ramen is underwhelming and I don’t suggest it unless you are a fanatic of those convenience store ramen packets. The Birria pizza I liked but it’s basically just two giant tortillas with cheese and birria in the middle, sliced into slices that are so soft they are impossible to pick up — kind of like a sincronizada. The regular tacos and the quesabirria are both good. But come prepared for the saltiness, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Losers

In the process of writing this I ate a lot of places that I found kind of underwhelming. Nothing was disgusting, they just didn’t thrill my tastebuds in any way. Places I think you can skip are Don Pepe, Birria Michoacanissimo, La Buena Birria MX, Birria El Chivito de San Cosme, and Birria Don Chuy. Now I will say, that all of these places came recommended to me by someone and LOTS of people love Don Chuy in the Centro, so maybe you want to try them, they might just be your style.