Five Dishes That Define Almacén El Gallo’s New Takes on Mexican Classics
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Adrian Burciaga couldn’t shake the feeling something was off the night before his first restaurant opened. After working in hospitality for 30 years, he knew the potential of a problematic electrical connection to ruin opening night, so he drove back to downtown Fort Worth’s First on 7th Building to find an unpowered kitchen. He remained alone in the empty restaurant until the next morning, flicking the breaker every 15 minutes and wondering if the custom-built rosa morada tables and chairs would arrive from Guadalajara at 8 a.m., as promised.
Two months later, the smart-casual Mexican restaurant shows zero evidence of the opening-day scramble. By day, the 110-seat dining room designed by Yucatán architect Carlos Núñez operates like the fondas that inspired it, offering comida corrida meant to serve downtown workers within 50 minutes for around $20. At night, it settles into the slower rhythm of a cantina, with cocktails and mains like a 14-ounce wagyu strip loin with roasted bone marrow salsa for $115.
Burciaga’s decision to introduce what he describes as accessible Mexican cuisine “at the level it deserves, which is elevated,” but also affordable, was based off nearly 20 years in fine dining before branching out last year in 2025 to found Burciaga Hospitality Group. He opened Almacén El Gallo with co-founder Martin Quirarte on July 27 around a deceptively difficult goal: To serve ambitious Mexican cooking without turning it into an out-of-reach luxury.
To deliver the idea, he called on chef Rodrigo Rivera-Rio, who came onboard with a menu of familiar dishes touched by the precision and flavor logic of his lauded tasting menu restaurant, KOLI, in Monterrey, the showpiece of his four restaurants in Mexico. For Rivera-Rio’s first project in the U.S., the chef’s goal isn’t Tex-Mex, a rigid traditional menu, or even an imitation of somebody’s grandmother’s cooking. Rather it’s that a guest from Mexico would taste the food and think, This is what I would expect from a restaurant in Mexico. The result, executed by local chef Carlos Capistran, adds acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and smoke to food that remains recognizable yet indulgent.
Here, Rivera-Rio details five dishes that showcase how Almacén El Gallo makes the classics feel new.
The Resy Rundown
Almacén El Gallo
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Why We Like It
Warm and extremely likeable, restaurateur Adrian Burciaga is the unofficial mayor of Cowtown: Everyone seems to know him. So, we couldn’t be happier about his first restaurant endeavor, one we already want to revisit as much as possible. -
Essential Dishes
Guacamole; flautas de papa and aguachile verde; jaiba al pastor taco; short rib en chile Mixe; and pavlova de fresas con crema -
Must-Order Drinks
The El Maíz is a roasty, creamy corn-on-corn concoction of aged charanda, Nixta, and atole syrup, finished with damiana. For something bright, puckery, and non-alcoholic, try the Cantarito with guava, orange, and lime juice balanced by tamarind and chipotle and made fizzy with Squirt.
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Who and What It’s For
Anyone and everyone wanting to experience high-technique Mexican cuisine — without a showstopping price tag attached. -
How to Get In
Reservations drop six months in advance on Mondays at 11 a.m. -
Fun Fact
Burciaga credits his impressive people skills to his mother, an educator in Mexico, and to his first hospitality job at The Walt Disney Company, where regularly scheduled discussions revolved around how to create more “magical moments.”
1. Guacamole
Here, Mexico’s most famous dip goes from staple to standout with lightly smashed avocado intensified by pumpkin seeds, pico de gallo, goat cheese, and cilantro criollo, a more mature and aromatic herb than the usual supermarket edition. Avocado leaves burnt tableside release the restaurant’s signature smoky scent, and those ashes join cacao nibs that counterbalance the avocado’s richness with bitterness. The contrast reflects Rivera-Rio’s broader philosophy: “For me, the best bite is when you put all your tongue to work,” he says. “If you have acidity, bitterness, and sugar, you have everything.”
Rivera-Rio’s precocious curiosity for taste began on his family’s farm and ranch in Hidalgo, when his father gave him an early-season tomato, then asked him to taste another a month later. The change from acidic to sweet sparked a lifelong, almost scientific curiosity about the factors that shape flavor. “For me, bitterness is beautiful,” he says, because it signals intense, smoky flavors difficult to replicate elsewhere.
2. Flautas de papa and aguachile verde
Every dish at Almacén El Gallo plays with contrast, notes Rivera-Rio, but none captures its everyday-meets-luxury premise better than flautas de papa with aguachile shrimp verde. Smashed potatoes are rendered in pork chorizo, rolled into housemade corn tortillas, and fried until they crackle. The antojito is then graced with lightly poached Pacific shrimp and an emulsion of tomatillo, cilantro criollo, lime, vinegar, and chiles. As if it needed more, shaved cucumbers, herbs, jalapeños, sesame seeds, and furikake pile on the freshness. “We’re trying to balance the things we eat every day, like flautas, with more expensive or glamorous items, like aguachile,” explains the chef, adding, “sometimes common things are the most valuable.”
3. Jaiba al pastor taco
Among the tacos ranging from $9 to $13, the whole fried soft-shell crab taco is most likely to stop conversation. Inspired by Mexico’s iconic tacos al pastor, Fort Worthians quickly caught on to the paragon with crispy little legs protruding beyond a handmade tortilla, demanding more than 60 of the tacos a day.
The marvel starts by rubbing the crabs with lime and salt, dredging it in achiote-seasoned flour, then frying it whole. Beneath it, an iceberg lettuce leaf does double duty by adding a crunch while creating an “impermeable” layer that prevents the crab’s juices from breaking the tortilla. Next, Rivera-Rio gets imaginative with pineapple, including tangy tepache mayo, made from fermented pineapple, and a pineapple relish sharpened with lime, vinegar, super-fine-chopped onion, and dill. A squeeze of charred lemon and some dabs of chile morita salsa complete the bite with all the logic of al pastor, but without the pork or trompo.
4. Short rib en chile Mixe
Fort Worth and Hidalgo, where Rivera-Rio passed much of his childhood, are similar in that both towns truly enjoy meat. Rivera-Rio’s understanding of meat cookery shows up with restraint, as he bypasses premium wagyu and choice cuts because they’re too gratuitous and marbled for an already rich cut and a long braise. Instead, High Choice beef short rib delivers a better meat-to-fat ratio after getting a hard sear and then spending the night in an 185-degree oven, resting in fondo madre, its own mother broth. The cooking liquid is reduced and carried over from one batch to the next, because “the idea is to have better flavor — more intense and more intense,” says the chef.
The bone-in hunk of meat is further tenderized with the broth’s addition of green tomatillos and apple cider vinegar, which provide acidic relief from the meat’s richness. A chile Mixe sauce, built on smoked pasilla chiles cultivated in the Mixe region of Oaxaca, adds smoke, along with tortilla and onion ash. Pickled onions and watercress deliver more acidity and freshness, and confit potatoes are served on the side. A steak knife accompanies the plate, but the dish doesn’t need it, and if two people wanted to share it to save room for more tacos and esquites, that would be a wise plan.
5. Pavlova de fresas con crema
A hollowed-out meringue filled with Papantla vanilla-pastry cream, port-deglazed strawberries, and strawberry ice cream is the recommended way to end a meal at Almacén El Gallo with a smash and a bang. Rivera-Rio describes his fresas con crema inspiration as a “grandma flavor,” but the skill came from a vulnerable time in the chef’s career, after closing his Italian restaurant and needing work while his wife was pregnant. He fibbed to a hiring manager in Monterrey seeking a pastry chef, and he found the ladies in the kitchen unwilling to cooperate with the guise. So he accepted a deal from a baker to help with bread from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. in exchange for pastry education. The four months were a valuable reinforcement of the motivation driving him from the time he tried that ranch tomato: “I love food, but to be honest, I love the process more.”
Almacén El Gallo is open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m., and Sunday from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Amanda Albee is a Dallas-based food and drinks writer whose work has appeared in Texas Monthly, The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, Chron, Thrillist, and more. Follow her on X and Instagram. Follow Resy, too.
