End your suffering at Guadalajara’s hippest mezcal bar

Pare de Sufrir is one of Guadalajara’s most popular bars.

Hidden away on a quiet side street in central Guadalajara, Pare de Sufrir is a small bar with an unremarkable facade that gives no indication of its status as a haven for mezcal lovers.

Inside, though, the walls are lined with striking murals of a majestic agave plant and a hippie-style bus. Mustachioed DJs spin eclectic mixes of funk, mambo, cumbia, boogaloo, and dancehall in between live sets by rockabilly outfits and experimental sound art bands. And at the center of it all, beneath a chaotic wooden sculpture strung together with nails and fairy lights, stands a bar stocked with probably the greatest mezcal collection in western Mexico.

Named after a slogan from a Brazil-based Christian denomination, the bar’s full title “Pare de Sufrir. Tome Mezcal” is a nod to the agave-based spirit’s famed curative powers. It means “Stop Suffering. Drink Mezcal.”

Pedro Jiménez keeps his bar stocked with about 70 different mezcals at any given time.

While this smoky spirit’s popularity has skyrocketed in recent years, it took a degree of audacity for owner Pedro Jiménez to open a mezcal bar in Guadalajara, the heart of Mexico’s tequila-producing region, back in 2009. Yet Jiménez, a bearded 41-year-old filmmaker who grew up in Mexico City, tells me his primary motivation was simply to get hold of quality mezcals for himself and his friends in a city where the drink was hard to come by…

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