La Pantera Asador

What La Pantera Asador is

La Pantera Asador is an open-fire restaurant at Colima 124 in Roma Norte, Mexico City, in the space that was for years the Club Petanca. It opened in mid 2026 and the entrance is not obvious: you pass through a wine shop and come out in what feels like a back warehouse, a wide covered patio with a retractable metal roof, concrete walls, a metal bar and a great deal of vegetation. Every table faces the grill.

The cooking is fire, done by a Baja California kitchen. That means charcoal and open flame applied to proteins and to vegetables with equal seriousness, and a menu that pulls northern Mexican asador tradition together with Asian and American influences. The room is designed for long meals and for large tables, which is a genuinely scarce thing in Roma Norte.

La Pantera opened in 2026 and holds no guide listing or ranking of its own.

Who cooks here

David Castro Hussong runs the kitchen. He is from Baja California, trained at Noma and Eleven Madison Park, and in 2017 opened Fauna at the Bruma wine resort in Valle de Guadalupe with the pastry chef Maribel Aldaco Silva. Fauna won the One To Watch award in 2020, entered Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2022 as the highest new entry, and was ranked number 17 on that list in 2025. In Mexico City he is also behind El Tigre Silencioso.

La Pantera is the newest project of the group that runs Campobaja, El Tigre Silencioso, Caimán and La 89, with Bernardo Galindo among the partners. The drinks list is put together by Daniela D’Acosta.

Awards and press

• Fauna, the chef’s restaurant in Valle de Guadalupe: number 17 on Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025. This belongs to Fauna, not to La Pantera.
• Time Out Mexico City reviewed La Pantera in 2026 and scored it four out of five.
• Publimetro covered the opening in July 2026 as a fire restaurant built around charcoal and sharing.
• The Happening and a number of Mexico City food writers covered it through the summer of 2026.

How the menu works

The format is the reason to come, and it is why you cannot simply order a steak and eat it.

• Choose a protein: meat, fish or shrimp, some cuts priced by weight.
• It arrives as a package: the protein plus eight sides, with flour and corn tortillas, and lettuce leaves if you would rather wrap it that way. Sides include rice, beans, nopal salad, pickled cucumber and salsas.
• You build your own tacos at the table, mixing and matching across the eight sides.
• Starters are ordered separately and are worth as much attention as the grill: grilled lettuce with esquites, roasted beets with jocoque and peanuts, shishito peppers with melted cheese and refried beans, aguachile de callo, beef sweetbreads.
• Tacos as a course: abalone with shiitake and jicama, octopus with guacamole, lamb.
• Dessert: a grilled donut with vanilla ice cream, or chocolate cake with hazelnut ice cream.
• Drinks: house wines under the Baby Pantera label, a white from Baja Norte, cocktails and house-made clamato for micheladas.

What I ate

When I filmed in September the table ran like this:

• A whole heirloom tomato brought out intact and chopped in front of us with feta and lime into a spread.
• Tuna toast, served on sourdough rather than on a crisp tortilla, which softens the whole thing.
• Cold roasted beets with jocoque and peanuts.
• Wagyu cross ribeye off the grill, with the eight sides and the tortillas.

Mixing and matching across the sides is genuinely fun and genuinely fills the table. The menu moves, so treat that as a shape rather than an order sheet.

What it costs

Prices were checked in September 2026 and they move, especially the cuts sold by weight.

Item	Price
Short rib	From 600 MXN, about 33 USD
Wagyu cross ribeye	4,200 MXN per kilo, about 230 USD
Half a kilo of ribeye	Feeds two people comfortably
Starters, dessert and drinks	Ordered and charged separately

The protein price includes the eight sides and the tortillas, so the headline figure is closer to a full meal than it looks. Two people sharing half a kilo of the wagyu, with two starters, a dessert and wine, is a substantial bill by Roma Norte standards. The short rib is the way to eat here for less.

How to book

Reservations are recommended and effectively necessary at the weekend.

• OpenTable: search for La Pantera, Ciudad de México.
• WhatsApp or phone: +52 55 1703 6478.
• Email: info@lapantera.mx.
• Instagram: @la.pantera.asador.

Opening hours are Tuesday to Saturday 13:00 to midnight and Sunday 13:00 to 18:00, closed Mondays. Large tables need to be booked well in advance, but they exist, which is the unusual part.

Getting there

• Address: Calle Colima 124, Roma Norte, Cuauhtémoc, 06700 Mexico City.
• The entrance: through the wine shop at street level, then straight back into the patio. It does not look like a restaurant from Colima.
• Metrobús: Línea 1 at Jardín Pushkin, about five minutes on foot.
• Metro: Insurgentes on Line 1 is about a ten minute walk.
• Landmarks: the western end of Colima, closer to Insurgentes than to Plaza Río de Janeiro.
• Parking: street parking on Colima is difficult in the evening. Use a taxi app.

Before you go

• Plan three hours or more. The format is slow by design and the room encourages staying.
• Bring people. Half a kilo feeds two, the sides feed a table, and the large tables are the best seats.
• Order the vegetables. The fire work on beets, lettuce and tomato is not filler.
• Book a lunch if you want to watch the grill. The patio roof is retractable and daylight changes the room completely.
• If it rains, stay. The metal roof under Mexico City rain is one of the better sounds in the city.
• Pair it with the rest of Colima street. Lotti at number 235 is the small, precise opposite of this, a few blocks along the same road.
• Check the hours before you go. The hours on this page come from the venue’s public listings, which drift, so confirm on Google Maps or the venue’s own channels before a special trip.

Watch the visit

The reel above is the short version, the fire, the cuts and the eight sides. For everything else in the city, open my map or browse the Mexico City recommendations.