Xiquita Restaurante y Bar

Xiquita builds its case on masa, and it wins that case dish by dish. The duck taco is the anchor — shredded duck done carnitas-style, a slick of mole casero underneath, sweet potato crema on top — and it's the kind of bite that justifies its own existence before you've touched anything else. The tortillas, sopes, and tamales all come from nixtamalized corn made in-house, and that commitment shows up as texture and depth rather than as a talking point.

The bar keeps pace instead of just filling out the menu. An Old Fashioned built on corn whiskey fat-washed with sweet potato, stretched with corn liqueur and mezcal, is doing the same work as the kitchen — corn as structure, not garnish. The menu itself is printed in Spanish, English, and Indigenous languages, a detail that signals a real point of view rather than a marketing flourish.

This has landed on local best-of lists from Westword and 5280, plus a national one, and none of it reads as inflated. Xiquita isn't chasing novelty. It's making a serious argument for what corn and duck and mole can do together, and it backs that argument up on the plate.