UNDER THE TORTA BUENO

How Mexico City’s bars have an intoxicating effect on a visitor’s discrimination Calum Marsh

You arrive by taxi at the address disclosed to you in the email: a nondescript torta restaurant on an inconspicuous corner in Colonia Juárez. Inside the empty eatery a server sweeps idly and doesn’t raise her head when you enter – nothing about this place suggests a hidden bar. Suddenly from nowhere appears a man cloaked in sleek bouncer- black. You offer your name, which he repeats into a walkie-talkie. He nods and duly vanishes.

In a moment a slim woman i n an expensivelooking suit walks in from the street: right this way, she nods, and guides you back through the kitchen, past supplies and equipment, behind a thick black curtain and into a kind of antechamber – pitch dark, no bigger than a closet. The woman taps a passcode into a keypad on the wall, to which the wall responds by gliding open with quiet grace.

The Hanky Panky Cocktail Bar is thus revealed to you in all its clandestine splendour. It is, as now seems clear, Mexico City’s best secret bar.

I enjoyed some of the finest cocktails of my life at Hanky Panky. Head bartender Gerardo Hernández is a virtuoso with shaker and strainer, and his signature libations – I recommend the Saint Michel, a formidable concoction of white tequila, rum, chartreuse, manzanilla, Saint Germain, volcano salt and grapefruit juice, served over crushed ice in a brass tumbler – are well- worth the obligatory hassle in reconnaissance.

But, of course, for the eager holidaymaker the cardinal appeal of the bar is its mystique. As a stranger in a strange land I was seduced not so much by Hanky Panky as by its rituals of entry and the intrigue they enkindle: it is an interesting, eccentric, highly exclusive bar; one whose air of mystery makes an ordinary night out feel like an adventure. It’s the sort of place that does more than merely charm its visitors. It dazzles them.

I was often dazzled by Mexico City’s bars and restaurants. There was much to be dazzled by: the world- class libations served at Licoreria Limantour, for i nstance, which seem engineered to startling perfection; or the fish at Contramar, so exquisite as to hardly seem real. But while I had made a concerted effort over the course of my week-long vacation to dine and drink discerningly – and while I had solicited friends more familiar with the city than I for their most judicious recommendations – the frequency with which I seemed to be not simply pleased with my culinary and alcoholic experiences, but seriously astonished by them, began to cast my taste and judgement in doubt.

Was some touristic bias in favour of food and drink abroad i nspiring i n me undue waves of affection? Were my critical faculties, so inflexible at home, weakened by the Latin air?

I shouldn’t like to think so – or at least, not completely. The ludicrously inexpensive rum and Cokes I savoured one evening at Hamburguesa Mataleón, a charming UFCthemed hamburger bar by the Fuente de Cibeles, were perhaps the sweeter for the holiday mood in which I had them; much as many of my other favourite haunts, from Bosforo Mezcaleria to Azotea Acapulco, seemed to impress themselves on me more acutely than had I stumbled upon identical bars back home.

In Toronto, portraits of mixed martial artists on the walls of a neon-lit dive might strike me as a bit tacky, but in the middle of Colonia Roma on a brisk August night? I couldn’t imagine anything more stylish. It seemed, in fact, precisely the sort of place I adore but never seem to find in my usual stomping grounds.

It seems apparent to me now that travel has an intoxicating effect on one’s discrimination. Indeed, this is one of the reliable pleasures of drinking abroad: a voyage afar tends to amplify the most attractive qualities of bars and restaurants while minimizing, in some cases even eradicating, their flaws. Anonymous pubs appear to the tourist’s eye appealingly mysterious; sordid taverns seem beguilingly fraught; even a nominally elegant wine bar or taproom looks like a paragon of unimaginable luxury.

This is what vacationing does to the curious drinker. Prudence gives way to the enthusiasm of the excursion. Spirits (in both senses) run high. In short, bad bars strike the tourist as pretty good. And good bars seem plenty better.

This is not to say that Hanky Panky Cocktail Bar is anything less than marvellous. It remains, after the initial rush of the pilgrim’s fervour has faded, a sight to behold and an experience to relish – and in my now-sober view the place still clinches the title of best secret bar in Mexico City. Perhaps because of the way you leave it: after more cocktails than is probably advisable for someone alone in a foreign country, you pay your hefty bill and indicate that at last you wish to depart, through, you presume, the discrete vestibule and kitchen once more. But the hostess directs you elsewhere.

Instead you make your way down the bar toward the far side of the room, where a small door frame, no larger than a refrigerator, stands curtained. You step forward, open a door, and leave the Hanky Panky – through what you now see is a Coke machine in the torta restaurant, a camouflaged exit. Talk about being dazzled. This is the sort of thing even a local would find irresistible.