Hoja Santa

The Restaurant

Hoja Santa opened at 722 Lake Street in the Hemingway District as Oak Park's chef-driven modern-Mexican answer — the working alternative to the family-Italian and classic-French defaults that have anchored the village's dining identity for decades. The room — about eighty covers across a long main dining hall with exposed-brick walls, a small front bar with eight stools facing the open kitchen, and a covered back patio that opens in warm weather — reads as a working farm-to-table interpretation of regional Mexican cooking rather than a Tex-Mex or selected-cocktail concept. The name references the aromatic leaf used in Oaxacan and Pueblan cooking, and the kitchen's regional focus runs through the menu's central preparations.

The menu reads as a polished regional-Mexican working programme. The starters include a daily ceviche with citrus and serrano, a tlayuda with house-rendered chorizo, a chile-relleno plate stuffed with seasonal squash and oaxaca cheese, a chicharrón with lime-and-salsa-verde, and a guacamole board prepared table-side with the morning's avocado. The tortilla programme — central to the room's working identity — runs on house-pressed corn tortillas made each morning from nixtamalized heirloom corn, and the kitchen's daily taco shortlist runs four to five preparations through dinner service. The mole programme is the menu's most ambitious course — a rotating daily mole built on the kitchen's pre-Hispanic-technique base that runs through negro, rojo, amarillo, and verde preparations across the week. The carnitas, the wood-fired pork plate, and the daily seafood preparation are the working secondi.

The bar — central to the room's evening anchor — carries a working mezcal-and-tequila flight programme with about forty bottles organised by region and producer, a selected agave-spirit board with proper depth in small-producer mezcal from Oaxaca and Puebla, and a rotating classic-Mexican-cocktail shortlist. The wine list runs about ninety labels with proper Mexican-and-South-American depth alongside a small but careful Spanish and Italian shelf. The dessert programme — flan, tres-leches, and a daily seasonal sorbet — closes the evening with the operational precision the room has built its OpenTable Diners' Choice reputation on. Service is warm, paced for the menu, and the captains work the patio in warm weather with the precision that a Hemingway District destination requires.