Voraz

What Voraz is

Voraz is a restaurant and bar at Aguascalientes 93, on the corner of Manzanillo in Colonia Roma Sur, Mexico City. It calls itself Mexico’s first gastro-cantina: a cantina layout and cantina drinking hours, with a kitchen working at restaurant level. It opened in 2024 and holds a Bib Gourmand in the Michelin Guide Mexico 2025, the guide’s category for good cooking at a fair price.

The building was a car repair workshop, Servicio Becerra, for more than sixty years. Rather than gut it, the owners kept the bones: concrete, steel, the original industrial fittings, and metal tool cabinets that now serve as the host stand and the service station. The result reads brutalist rather than pretty, and the room is loud when full.

It is small. Roughly eight tables plus a standing bar, on a corner with some outdoor space, which is why a table on a Friday needs planning. The food is contemporary Mexican, cooked largely over fire and charcoal, and the whole menu is designed to be shared.

Who cooks here

The kitchen is led by Emiliano Padilla. Before Voraz he worked through a run of restaurants that explains the technique on the plates: Noma in Copenhagen, Ryugin in Tokyo, Fäviken in Sweden, Pujol in Mexico City and The Breslin in New York. He is also a musician, performing as N4NO, and has said publicly that music brought him back to cooking after burning out in high-end kitchens.

The drinks are run by Norman Pérez, and they are treated as equal to the food rather than as an afterthought. The house cocktails include a Maíz Old Fashioned built on whisky with popcorn, corn and a corn silk air, and a Margarita Santa made with hoja santa oil and salt, alongside mezcal, classic cocktails and cold Pacífico beer.

Awards and press

• Michelin Guide Mexico 2025: Bib Gourmand, listed under Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City.
• The Infatuation: reviewed as a Roma favourite for shared plates, naming the oyster gordita and the salty churro.
• Time Out México and Chilango both covered the opening as one of the city’s most talked-about new gastrobars.
• Featured in Marco Beteta’s Mexico City guide, with the oyster gordita and lamb shank singled out.

How the menu works

There is no tasting menu. You order à la carte from a short, seasonal list of snacks, small plates and larger dishes meant for the middle of the table, and the kitchen expects you to build a meal from three or four of them per couple.

• Snacks and small plates: the churro salado, the oyster gordita, tostadas, pressed tacos, salads.
• Bigger plates to share: whole fish, wood-fired chicken with a bitter orange and achiote glaze, lamb or pork shank.
• Fire first: the grill and the coals drive most of the cooking, which is where the smoke on the vegetable dishes comes from.
• Changing list: dishes rotate with the season, so a specific plate may not be there on your visit.

What I ate

When I filmed in June 2026 the table ran to spicy mussels, broccoli with a sauce worth going back for, and the churro salado, the savoury churro with warm aged Cotija sauce that shows up in almost every write-up of the place. All three are shared plates, which is how the whole menu is built. Go for the food rather than for the room.

What it costs

Prices are in Mexican pesos and the menu changes, so the figures below are the published 2025 to 2026 range rather than a fixed card.

Item	Price
Taco planchado, eight-hour confit pork belly	90 MXN, about 5 USD
Churro salado with Cotija sauce	105 MXN, about 6 USD
Machaca salad with cured egg yolk	235 MXN, about 12 USD
House cocktails, for example Maíz Old Fashioned	about 250 MXN, about 13 USD
Pescado negro or pollo pibil to share	485 to 550 MXN, about 26 to 29 USD
Typical spend per person with drinks	600 to 1,000 MXN, about 32 to 53 USD

The Bib Gourmand is the useful signal here: the snacks and tacos are genuinely cheap for the level of cooking, and the bill climbs only when you add a large shared main and two cocktails each. If you want the kitchen without the spend, eat at the bar from the small plates.

How to book

Book if you want to sit down. The room has about eight tables.

• Website: reservations are taken on voraz.com.
• Phone or WhatsApp: +52 55 2534 0704.
• Email: reservaciones@voraz.com.
• Instagram: @voraz_.

Thursday to Saturday evenings are the hardest slots; a weekday lunch or an early sitting is far easier. The standing bar takes walk-ins, and ordering snacks there is an accepted way to use the place.

Getting there

• Address: Aguascalientes 93, Colonia Roma Sur, Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City 06760, on the corner of Manzanillo.
• Neighbourhood: Roma Sur, the quieter half of Roma, south of Avenida Baja California.
• Metro: Chilpancingo on Line 9 is the closest, about ten to fifteen minutes on foot. Centro Médico on Lines 3 and 9 is a similar distance.
• Metrobús: the Avenida Insurgentes corridor is a walk of roughly ten minutes.
• Parking: street parking only and it is tight on the corner. Most people arrive by taxi or ride hail.

Before you go

• Book for a table, walk in for the bar. These are two different experiences and only one of them needs planning.
• Order for the middle of the table. Nothing on the menu is a single plate main course in the conventional sense.
• It is loud. The hard industrial surfaces carry sound, so it is a poor choice for a quiet conversation and a good one for a group.
• Come for the food, not the decor. The workshop shell is the look, and it is deliberately unfinished.
• The kitchen shuts before the bar. Order food by 23:00 on the restaurant’s own listed hours, then stay for drinks until 01:00.
• Pair it with a wine bar. Provocateur in Roma Norte is a short ride away for a glass afterwards, and Amand is the Roma Sur stop for the morning after.
• 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 of the plates and the workshop room at Voraz. For the rest of the city, open my map or browse the Mexico City recommendations.