On Wednesday night in Lima, Quintonil was named No. 4 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for 2026. It was the only Mexico City restaurant in the top 50.
The restaurant, run by Jorge Vallejo and Alejandra Flores, takes its name from a quelite: one of the wild greens that grow among Mexico’s crops and have fed its people for centuries. It’s a fitting name for a kitchen whose cooking begins with the country’s own ingredients.
Why It Matters
Some of those ingredients travel a short and very old road. When we spoke with Pablo Usobiaga last year about reviving Mexico City’s chinampas, the floating gardens of Xochimilco, he described how Arcaterra de Chinampas now links more than 70 restaurants, Quintonil among them, with over 50 farming families keeping these ancestral practices alive. The knowledge in those canals survived centuries of disruption. This week, part of what it grows was served at one of the most celebrated tables in the world.
Pablo told us that naming the people behind the food is what changes how we eat: “When you name someone and tell their story, you create a relationship.” Rankings come and go. What matters about a moment like this is whether it points back to the growers, the fields and the plants that made the meal possible.
On the backs of Baldío’s staff T-shirts is a line that could caption this week’s news: El Futuro es Ancestral. The future is ancestral.
Support This Work
→ Read our conversation with Pablo Usobiaga
Quintonil, Mexico City
