Our story

A weed to some, a vegetable to us.

Quintonil

the amaranth green that grows wild along the rows of a milpa

We treat the native herb as the lead voice, not the garnish. Each plate is built around a single quelite or wild green, pressed and labelled in our minds like a specimen, then cooked just far enough to release what it already holds. The chilli, the masa, and the broth move around it. The herb stays in the centre.

Quintonil takes its name from the amaranth green that grows along the rows of a milpa, a weed to some and a vegetable to us. The kitchen begins each day with that plant and the company it keeps, the papalo, the hoja santa, the epazote, the verdolaga gathered young from the chinampas south of the city. We cook the valley of Mexico as a botanist would read it, by leaf and by season, naming each herb before we cook it and letting its character set the dish. Nothing arrives without a reason, and nothing leaves the pass that the garden did not first suggest.

A chinampa garden plot beside the canal in the early light

We begin in the gardens, before the city is warm.

The leaf leads

Every dish is built around one native green. We name it, read it, and let it set the direction before any other flavour is allowed in.

Gather close, gather young

We source from chinampa and milpa growers we visit by name, taking herbs young and only what the day offers, so the gardens keep their rhythm.

Keep the record

We press and log every quelite that passes the kitchen. The herbarium is our memory, and it teaches the menu what the season already knew.

Mateo Arellano grew up between a market stall in Coyoacan and the chinampa gardens his grandmother still tends.

He trained through the dining rooms of Mexico City and a season of foraging in Oaxaca before returning to build a kitchen around the native pantry of the valley. He keeps a pressed herbarium in the pass, a working record of every quelite and wild green the gardens have sent through the seasons, and reads from it the way another cook reads a recipe. The food is precise and quietly Mexican, an argument that the most overlooked leaf in the field can carry a whole plate.

Mateo Arellano

Chef and Owner

From a small Polanco room to a garden table.

2012

A small room opens in Polanco with a menu built around native greens.

2016

We begin working directly with chinampa growers in Xochimilco.

2020

The pressed herbarium is started in the pass, one leaf logged each service.

Now

A single garden table of forty seats, cooking the valley by the leaf.

The hands that tend the room and the gardens.