A Spot That Should Be Hotter

“You have to help me understand,” a friend emailed recently. We’d run into each other at Dolores, the Bed-Stuy taqueria that routinely quotes two-to-four-hour waits. On weekends, it’s hard to secure even the rickety garden chairs on the sidewalk for drinks, and it took me over an hour to find a spot at the bar wide enough to set a napkin. “Is this normal now? Is it a TikTok thing?” my friend wrote. “HELP!!!!”

Why is Dolores the spot of the moment? It has a modish, kitschy-cute look and comes from the team behind Winona’s, a wine bar–small platery with a durable following. It might be these bona fides, or it might be something else: Right now, the town’s gone taco.

A number of new Mexican places have opened their doors over the past few months: Comal on the Lower East Side, Olmo in Bed-Stuy from Cosme and Pujol alums. Pujol itself, the grande dame of CDMX destinations, is coming to the city for the first time for a pop-up in November. You could add to this list Vato, the soon-opening tortilleria and coffee shop from the Corima team, and Santo Taco, serving better tacos, I’m sorry to say, than La Esquina, its host space, ever did.

One dish I haven’t stopped thinking about recently isn’t even a taco. It’s listed, inconspicuously but intriguingly, as “hazelnut mole” on the small menu of Frijoleros, which opened in July in Greenpoint. Frijoleros doesn’t have the faddish cantina décor, and it doesn’t have the lines. It’s not even really, or at least primarily, a restaurant. Fabiola Juarez, who grew up in her family’s Lower East Side Mexican restaurant, opened it as a cocktail bar (it has a generous hora feliz), and the drink offerings dwarf the food. And even still! The dark, chocolaty mole that most of us are familiar with is just a “phase-one mole,” a bartender told me. “There are as many moles as colors.” This one, with creamy hazelnuts, garlic, and tomato, swoops around a pile of lengua, confited to tender, colalike sweetness in duck fat and piled atop a black-bean-stuffed tamal.

Juarez and chef de cuisine Cesar Bermejo (formerly of Chavela’s) don’t bother translating their menu for neoyorquino sensibilities, so you’ll have to ask if you don’t know “lengua” is tongue, and as for the chapulines in the ruddy salsa macha dribbled over guacamole — those grass-hoppers are on a need-to-know basis.

That’s not to suggest that Frijoleros (the name means “bean growers”) is a paragon of tradition. There are authentic ingredients and deliciously inauthentic additions and fascinating plays between the two. Its adopted tagline is “un poquito de acá, mucho de aya” — a little bit from here, a lot from there. I loved a summer salad of tomatoes layered with bruise-colored plums, gooseberries, hibiscus, and queso añejo and a hamachi aguachile served in a vivid magenta bath of prickly pear, cucumber, jicama, and — a bright current of sugar — strawberries. The cocktail menu likewise leans into layered pairings and cross-cultural exchange. An unholy-sounding colada called the Dazed & Chartreuse features tequila, matcha, banana, avocado, pistachio, coconut, and lemon along with its namesake liqueur.

You could groan at Dazed & Chartreuse or laugh. I did the latter. There may be a marble icon of the Virgin Mary in the niche by the bathroom, but Frijoleros isn’t one of the self-serious foodie temples awash in hush. It’s a place that wants everyone to have fun. It’s hard to open a Mexican spot, much less a Mexican cocktail bar, without a frozen margarita, for better or worse. Here, the machine churns a watermelon marg that’s served with a bracing floater of the French aperitif Byrrh. It’s called “Fuck ICE,” and it’s a big seller, the bartender told me. “Is the popularity due to the name or the recipe?” I asked. “I think it’s both,” he said. “People ask for them when they’re not here.”

There’s a horny slow-jams soundtrack in the background (D’Angelo and India.Arie, interspersed with Mexican cumbia and Colombian vallenato pop), and weekend dinner is served until 11 p.m. You could stumble to the birria truck after the bar — or you could stumble into Frijoleros for hazelnut mole and charry-tasting head-on shrimp whose coating of carbonized chiles and glaze-thick beurre blanc make other restaurants’ wan $36 shrimp cocktails look like timid little ghosts.