Taco Belle

A SHOWSTOPPING NEW MEXICAN RESTAURANT MAKES A DRAMATIC DEBUT

BY HEATHER PLATT

THE ENTRANCE to Mírate, the modern Mexican restaurant from the team behind Beverly Hills’ Mírame, is meant to disguise what lies ahead. Make your way up a candlelit staircase to the the bar that leads out to the mezzanine dining patio. “You can literally watch people’s jaws drop when they round the corner of our bar, and they see what’s kind of hidden behind the storefront,” says co-owner Matthew Egan.

The massive, 7,500-square-foot multilevel space is indeed stunning. “We have an upstairs agave bar that is a little bit more quiet and dark. Downstairs, we have what we’re calling Bar Mírate, which is more lively. And then we have a mezzanine dining deck with a roof that opens up. It’s an open-air dining deck with wraparound patio seating throughout the rest of the restaurant,” says Egan, who left a career in the film industry to open Mírame in 2020 with chef Joshua Gil, whom he discovered in a cookbook and subsequently befriended.

Now, after traveling all over Mexico together (Gil grew up in Rosarito, Baja

California), the two have opened their second project, founded on the same principles as their first: sustainability and the desire to bring the kind of upscale Mexican food they’ve eaten in Mexico to the U.S.— inventive food that tells a story.

At Mírate, where the menu centers around the mezcal-heavy cocktail program of star barman Max Reis (previously of Gracias Madre), this means tacos you wouldn’t find anywhere else, like skewered spicy oyster mushroom tacos arabes with ground toasted corn and sesame salsa on house-made flour tortillas.

The restaurant grinds its own masa for tortillas and uses grain from the Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project. Thick-cut yucca fries come drenched in cheesy, meaty queso. Generous bowls of hamachi aguachile ceviche with black lime and tomatillo is fresh and bright, and pairs nicely with a frothy sour papaya tequila cocktail. Every spirit on Reis’s menu comes from Mexico.

“One of our core values is that anything on our menu has to tell a unique story,” says Egan. “We always put our spin on everything we do.”

1712 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz, mirate.la.