RA! clads Mexico City taco restaurant with broken tiles

by : Jane Englefield

Local architecture studio RA! took cues from Latin American art deco design when creating the tiny interior of Los Alexis, a small taqueria in Mexico City’s Roma Norte neighbourhood.

Los Alexis is a taco eatery – or taqueria – in Roma, a famed district in Mexico City, which features examples of art deco architecture.

RA! drew on the “vibrant personality” of the area when designing the single 15-square-metre room restaurant, housed within a former beer depository.

“One of the most important requests of our client was for this tiny space to shine among the rest of the retail premises on the street,” said studio co-founder and designer Pedro Ramírez de Aguilar.

RA! clad the floors and walls in a mosaic of broken tiles

RA! clad the walls and floors in a distinctive mosaic of broken ceramic tiles with green joints as an ode to Barcelona, where chef Alexis Ayala spent time training, the designer told Dezeen.

A curved bar finished in slabs of ribbed green material fronts the open kitchen, which is positioned on the right of the small open space.

Utilitarian materials, including the tiles, were chosen throughout the restaurant for their “endurance and fast cleaning processes”.

White-painted steel breakfast-style stools line the bar, which has a top made of steel – selected for its resistance to grease, according to Ramírez de Aguilar.

The studio decided to preserve the space’s original, peeling ceiling “to create a wider contrast [within the eatery] and to remember the old premises”.

Informal seating lines the pavement just outside of the taqueria where customers can eat and socialise.

Other than a small bathroom at the back of Los Alexis, the one-room restaurant is purposefully defined by its bar and open kitchen.

“Typical ‘changarros’ [small shops] in Mexico City are all about the conversation with the cookers, so we tried to have this interaction between people as a main objective,” explained Ramírez de Aguilar.

Founded in 2017, RA! previously created the interiors for a restaurant in the city’s Polanco neighbourhood with a bar counter shaped like an inverted ziggurat.

DOT Coffee Station is another hole-in-the-wall cafe in Kyiv, Ukraine, which YOD Group designed with a similar floor-to-ceiling mosaic of tiles.

The photography is courtesy of RA!