Think you can’t get good Mexican food? You haven’t been to this Newtown one-hatter

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While it’s up for debate which country has the best canon of vegetarian food – although India makes a very strong case – I’m certain that Maiz is the best place to sit down for a meat-free lunch or dinner in Sydney’s inner west. If you can’t get your head around the concept of a meal without beef et cetera (hi, Dad), the kitchen can still facilitate a respectable steak, but to skip the plant-based stuff would be to miss many of chef Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez’s most delicious dishes.

Negrete Lopez, who went to culinary school in Puebla in Mexico before moving to Australia, launched Maiz in 2020 with his sister, Marissa, at Summer Hill’s Flour Mill Markets. The original food stall specialised in sopes – thick, crisp masa discs with crimped edges to hold all manner of fillings – and quickly became popular enough for the duo to open a brick- and-mortar location near Newtown’s Sandringham Hotel on King Street. Two years ago, they shifted north to the former Hartsyard site on Enmore Road.

It’s a tight-packed space that fills quickly on weekends, but eggshell-white walls keep things from feeling too cramped. Indigenous Mexican masks proudly decorate one side of the room and bar seating is available if you just want a quick artisan mezcal on the way elsewhere. Cocktails, such as a margarita made with coconut- and pandan-infused tequila, will tickle anyone into agave, spiced syrups and lime.

But you don’t really come here for the drinks alone: Enmore Road is already ripe with excellent small bars. You come to Maiz for the blanco mole. Onion, garlic, sesame seeds, macadamia and pine nuts are simmered into a sauce that comforts like childhood memories of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken and fist-pumps with flavour. You can have it covering every millimetre of confit duck carnitas wrapped in a hand-pressed tortilla. A darker poblano mole for the rich carnitas is also offered, made with cacao, ancho chilli and 40 or so other ingredients, but it’s so well-balanced that no one element demands your attention.

Several dishes rouse and nurture like this in equal measure, and Negrete Lopez is skilled at reformatting regional dishes from Oaxaca, Puebla and Baja California. Start with esquites, a corn sort-of salad served from food carts across Mexico. The starchy, savoury white corn traditionally used isn’t exported to Australia, so the kitchen uses sweet corn and slow-cooks it in a broth of epazote (a pungent, minty, oregano-adjacent herb) and the umami is boosted by a mayonnaise harnessing 10 types of chillies.

Flautas (that’s “flutes” in Spanish) are fried, rolled tortillas typically plated with lettuce, sour cream, cheese and salsa. Negrete Lopez used to do that, too, but the Maiz flautas have evolved to be filled with potato and red guajillo chilli adobo sauce, and come with avocado salsa and almond cream. Tomato and jalapeno salsa provides an upbeat baseline for the flutes, neatly aligned and spangled with a crunchy mix of amaranth, pepitas and sesame seeds. There’s always a sope to acknowledge the market stall days, and the current iteration is based on machaca, a type of dried and shredded beef preparation, but uses spanner crab boosted with refried beans and chipotle and tops it with silky corn espuma.

The best dish, however, might be the tetela: a triangular corn pocket stuffed with confit fennel, braised chayote (read: choko) and a pepita-based green mole – bright with tomatillos, coriander and epazote oil – that speaks to the central valleys of Mexico.

Anyone who says, “You can’t get good Mexican food in Sydney” hasn’t been paying attention to the new wave of talent infiltrating restaurants such as Maiz, Olotl and Lottie. And if anyone tells you vegetarian food is boring, you can tell them they’re a drongo who doesn’t know what they’re on about and send ’em straight to 33 Enmore Road.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine