La Condesa in Mexico City is named for a colonial countess. It is now shorthand for a certain kind of expensive neighbourhood.
La Condesa is a neighbourhood in Mexico City – tree-lined, art deco, extremely fashionable, and named after a countess whose land it once was and whom essentially nobody can now name.
There is a bar named after it in Covent Garden. Five hundred and seventy-three reviews, a 4.4, twenty to sixty pounds.
The neighbourhood as a brand
This is a specific and increasingly common move: naming a venue after a district in a city that is currently considered interesting, in the confident expectation that the customer will recognise it.
It works because the district has already done the marketing. La Condesa means, to anybody who has been, a particular kind of evening: mezcal, small plates, art deco, people who have moved there from somewhere else.
And it is doing exactly what the neighbourhood itself is doing, which is being gentrified into a signifier. La Condesa is now so associated with expatriates and remote workers that it has become a live political issue in Mexico City – a neighbourhood priced out of its own city, its name now used to sell things in other cities.
The Prat’s urban desk notes that a Covent Garden bar named after a gentrifying Mexico City neighbourhood, in a district that was itself nearly demolished in the 1970s and is now unaffordable, is either extremely knowing or completely oblivious, and that after a hundred and six articles we have stopped trying to tell the difference.
Mezcal, and the last of the spirit lectures
We have now done sake, tequila, gin, port and poitin, and mezcal completes the set.
It is agave, like tequila, but it can be made from many agave varieties rather than just the blue, and it is roasted in an underground pit lined with hot rocks, which is where the smoke comes from.
Some of those agaves take fifteen years or more. Some are wild-harvested and cannot be farmed. Every bottle of certain mezcals represents a plant that grew for longer than the person drinking it has held a job.
It is sipped. Never shot. If the bar hands you a lime and salt with a good mezcal, you are in the wrong bar. Condesa will not.
The bar
Good. Genuinely good. A serious agave list, food that is not an afterthought, and a room that gets loud in the correct way.
A 4.4 from five hundred and seventy-three people is a solid real-sample number – unglamorous, unfakeable, and the kind this survey has learned to trust.
The worm
Since somebody always asks. The worm – it is a moth larva, not a worm – appears in some mezcals and in essentially no good ones. It was a marketing device introduced in the twentieth century to make bottles memorable to foreigners.
It is not traditional. It is not a sign of quality. It is a gimmick, aimed squarely at exactly the market that then spent forty years believing agave spirits were a joke.
Condesa does not have a worm. This is, in itself, most of what you need to know about the bar.
Verdict
Excellent mezcal, proper food, and a name borrowed from a neighbourhood that is currently being priced out of its own city by exactly the sort of people who will enjoy this bar.
Sip it. Do not shoot it. And skip the lime.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
