CHEF in 86-year-old restaurant | Instant food eaten immediately Chef Gra...

Inside, the music blares, and customers sit on metal folding chairs at beer-branded tables, dabbing housemade seafood sauce onto fresh-shucked almejas chocolatas (chocolate clams) and digging into jet-black aguachile, tart with tannins from cacao ash, blanketing plump raw shrimp. Unmolded tableside, the Señora Torres, a six-inch-tall tightly packed stack of scallops, raw and cooked shrimp, octopus, yellowfin tuna, onions, cucumbers, and avocados, drenched in morita chile sauce, teeters on the edge of absurdity, pushed safely back to pure impressiveness by the quality of the fish and precision of the flavors.

Mi Compa Chava opened in June 2021, and it was "a lifesaver for this pandemic," says owner Salvador Orozco. The Sinaloan chef always dreamed of someday opening a seafood restaurant, so when he left his job after more than a decade with Bull & Tank restaurant group, he hit fast-forward on that plan. "I have always been very inspired by the figure of the mustachioed marisquero who cares for you, who pampers you, who hugs you, who knows what you like," Orozco says. In creating the restaurant, he intended to transport the classic beach-town seafood cart to Mexico City.