Casa Oaxaca

Casa Oaxaca El Restaurante is the eponymous flagship of chef Alejandro Ruiz — Oaxaca's most internationally recognised chef, a Zapotec native who built a career around contemporary regional cooking — opened in 1999 directly across from the Templo de Santo Domingo and located on the rooftop of Casa Oaxaca Hotel. The dining room is the most photographed view-driven dining setting in the city, with a direct rooftop view of the Templo de Santo Domingo (the canonical Oaxacan baroque facade).

Ruiz's cooking is contemporary Zapotec-Mexican with deep regional sourcing across the seven Oaxacan moles. Signatures include the famous 'mole negro casa Oaxaca' — the chef's nine-month-aged mole negro that runs continuously from a single mother batch; a slow-roasted Sierra Norte lamb shoulder with mole amarillo; a hand-cut chapulines (Oaxacan grasshoppers) with avocado; a wood-fired Pacific-Mexican octopus with chichilo; the famous 'flan de Casa Oaxaca' for the dessert course.

The wine list runs to 350 references with deep Mexican Valle de Guadalupe coverage and a tightly chosen French and Italian section. The mezcal programme runs to forty-plus bottlings — the deepest mezcal list in Oaxaca city.

The rooftop dining room and terrace together hold seventy-two covers; the kitchen times the dessert course with the sunset for diners booked on the western edge of the rooftop. Service is family-run — Ruiz himself walks the room before the cheese course on most evenings.

Casa Oaxaca is the impress-the-client room in Oaxaca — the rooftop view of Santo Domingo at sunset is the canonical Oaxacan dinner setting, the Ruiz-institution pedigree settles the credibility question, and the seven-mole programme is genuinely distinctive against any other Mexican kitchen. Book the western corner four-top at sunset.