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CRITICS’ PICK

There are restaurants that innovate, that push our understanding of cuisine forward. There are places that cater to our need for comfort and community. And then there are those that do one or two things – perhaps familiar things – so well that they change the standard of a city.

In recent weeks, for professional reasons, I’ve eaten at restaurants whose names are recognised internationally. Places with multiple accolades from this masthead and others. Places where dinner costs more than half of my monthly rent. But the best single bite of food I’ve had in weeks, the most memorable, the most soul-quenching, was a barbacoa taco at El Columpio in Fitzroy.

There are caveats here. Plenty of people who have never worshipped at the altar of Hildago-style barbacoa (Hildago is a state in Mexico) may not feel similarly ardent, though I think they’d be hard-pressed to deny it’s a damn good taco.

But if you’ve spent time trawling the trucks and stands and restaurants of Mexico and Los Angeles, good barbacoa becomes a part of your diet that you find hard to live without.

The slow pit-cooking process makes the meat tender and flavourful, imbued with aromatic spices; it is often served with a chilli-spiked consommé on the side for dipping and sipping.

At El Columpio, the barbacoa estilo Hidalgo ($28) is a weekend special that comprises three tacos and a small bowl of rich consommé. Topped with diced onion, a shower of coriander and a deeply flavoured red salsa, it looks like plenty of other tacos you’ve had.

But the quality of the lamb, the simplicity of the toppings, the focus on texture and careful spicing, sets it apart. This barbacoa is next level, and these are likely the best tacos Melbourne has ever seen.

It’s one of a few dishes this small restaurant serves that has either been hard to find in Melbourne, or that we haven’t yet seen done particularly well.

El Columpio opened on Johnston Street in March, the dream of Ricardo Garcia Flores, a native of Mexico City who has worked in Melbourne kitchens and wanted to introduce Australia to more traditional-style Mexican cooking than he’d been able to find.

The small shopfront is sparse but colourful, with cowboy boots and Mexican tchotchkes serving as decoration; service is friendly but haphazard; music ranges from traditional corrido or banda singing, when Flores is on-site, to wildly loud house music when his young servers are controlling the vibe. Occasionally, a live mariachi band shows up.

All day, including at breakfast at weekends, you can get chilaquiles ($20), fried tortillas layered with chicken, salsa, crema and coriander, and served here with refried beans; and pozole ($20), a soup that is, among other things, one of the world’s great hangover cures.

The light broth is full of hominy (maize kernels), chicken or pork or a combination of the two, and topped with shredded lettuce, sliced radish, chopped onion and oregano. You’ll need to doctor the seasoning to your tastes with the supplied lime and hot sauce, but from there, it is nothing short of miraculous.

In the afternoons, the menu expands to include a small selection of tacos ($8 each), including a vegetarian version using nopales, a cactus that has been a staple of the Mexican diet since pre-Columbian times.

The mixiote – pork cooked in maguey leaves – sings with the slight fruitiness of guajillo chillies, garnished with green salsa and charred pineapple.

At weekends, you can pre-order tamales ($10 each or five for $45), the corn husk bundles stuffed with a changing roster of fillings, such as Oaxacan pork.

And on special occasions, the restaurant serves a $55 set menu with dishes that aren’t on regular rotation. I was particularly sad to miss the mole verde chicken that was part of the Mother’s Day menu.

But I get the feeling that these items will eventually become part of the regular offering – Garcia Flores is smart to be starting small, offering only what he knows he can execute perfectly and consistently.

The funny thing is, the restaurants we fawn over in the media and beyond are sometimes short-lived, forgotten within a year or two, or replaced by something shinier.

But places like El Columpio tend to have a lasting legacy, whether or not the actual business makes it. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it can’t be put back. Once we’ve had tacos this good, the whole taco game of our city will rise as a result. Once we’ve had pozole, how could we ever live without it?

El Columpio is a small, modest restaurant where the food is the focus. But it will have an outsized influence on the way we think about Mexican cooking, and, more importantly, how we eat and enjoy it.