The maple burger is the jewel in the Pig’s Pearls’ crown. All photos by Ulises Ruíz Basurto.
Like most visitors, when I first moved to Mexico in 2009 I was endlessly fascinated by the diversity, the complexity, and the incredibly bold flavors of the local cuisine. But after a few months away from home, you sometimes just want a nice meaty burger and a crisp pint of ale. That proved hard to find, with most places merely offering thin, tasteless patties with plastic cheese squares in overly sweet or crumbly buns, alongside bottles of commercial lager. Mexico’s burger game was lacking.
Two years later I found salvation in a former bookshop on a quiet street corner in Guadalajara’s trendy Americana neighborhood. Sensing an opportunity to broaden the city’s culinary horizons, Carlos Barba and his cousin Oscar “Iguano” Martín had just opened their own burger joint and crammed six or seven tables into this tiny space. It was called Pig’s Pearls and they served the best burgers I’d ever tried. They were also among the city’s first advocates of Mexico’s nascent craft beer scene.
The restaurant was so popular it soon expanded to a converted warehouse.
Now celebrating it’s fifth anniversary, Pig’s Pearls has established itself as a local institution and helped usher in a gourmet burger boom. It constantly flits between first and fifth in TripAdvisor’s ranking of the top 816 restaurants in Guadalajara and was recently named the city’s best burger joint in a survey of 21 chefs, critics, and food bloggers…
Authorities confirm one of El Chapo’s sons has been kidnapped
Leaked CCTV footage shows the moment cartel gunmen burst into the restaurant.
Jesús Alfredo Guzmán, a son of the jailed Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, is among a group of men abducted at gunpoint from a swanky restaurant in the Pacific resort of Puerto Vallarta early on Monday.
Eduardo Almaguer, the attorney general for the western state of Jalisco, named the 29-year-old Guzmán among the four victims he said the authorities have been able to identify so far with the help of footage from cameras around La Leche restaurant, testimony from witnesses, and evidence found in the luxury cars left behind.
Almaguer did not give any information about the other two men also missing after around seven gunmen went into the restaurant and broke up a birthday celebration that also included nine women who, he said, were not harmed…
The men were dining in Puerto Vallarta’s La Leche restaurant when they were abducted.
Mexican authorities say gunmen abducted between 10 and 12 people from a high-end restaurant in the resort city of Puerto Vallarta, with initial investigations suggesting they belonged to a rival drug cartel.
Eduardo Almaguer, the attorney general in the western state of Jalisco, said about five armed men entered the gourmet La Leche restaurant in the resort’s hotel zone at about 1am on Monday morning.
He said they rounded up the men who appeared to belong to a criminal gang and drove them away in a Toyota Tacoma and a Chevrolet Suburban, leaving four female witnesses behind unharmed…
The Tequila Files 