"Where Mexico City's most discerning insiders go when they want to surprise someone. Chef Lucho Martínez speaks two culinary languages and has invented a third."
Em is the kind of restaurant that Mexico City's most knowledgeable diners bring their most important guests. It operates with an almost wilful absence of noise — no celebrity chef PR, no conquest of global ranking lists, no visible ambition beyond the plate. What is on the plate, however, is extraordinary.
Chef Luis "Lucho" Martínez opened the restaurant in 2018 under the original name Emília, and from the beginning it was clear he was working in a register unlike anything else in the city. The cooking merges Japanese precision and sensibility — delicacy, restraint, the primacy of the single perfect ingredient — with the deep flavour vocabulary of Mexico. A taco becomes a study in umami. A caldo is as clear and purposeful as a Japanese dashi. A dessert built around corn and miso should not work, and yet it does, completely.
The Michelin inspectors agreed in 2024, awarding one star in the inaugural Mexico City guide. Time Out gave five stars. Neither distinction surprised anyone who had already sat at Martínez's counter and eaten through the tasting menu.
The room is intimate and considered — a small dining room in Roma with a counter bar that offers one of the city's great solo dining experiences. The light is low and warm. The service is attentive in the Japanese mode: present when needed, entirely invisible when not. This is a restaurant that understands that the greatest hospitality is allowing guests to feel entirely at ease in a room where everything is exceptional.
Em is the table that signals genuine, discerning taste rather than the performance of status. Pujol and Quintonil are known globally — taking a client there says you have excellent taste and excellent connections. Taking them to Em says something more specific: that you know the city deeply, that you have done more than research the rankings, that you are plugged into the actual fabric of how Mexico City eats at its highest level. That is a more seductive signal. The meal will deliver everything the occasion demands.
The counter at Em is one of Mexico City's great solo experiences. Eight seats facing the kitchen. The tasting menu unfolds at your own pace. Staff who talk to you as a serious diner, not a solitary one in need of management. This is where food professionals eat when they are in the city alone and want to taste something that will genuinely surprise them. That is the highest endorsement a counter can receive.
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