El Mexicanito, Ixelles: Actual Mexican Food in Brussels

Finding authentic Mexican food in Europe is genuinely difficult. Most of what presents itself as Mexican in European cities is TexMex, all hard-shell tacos, fajita platters and nachos with orange cheese sauce, which is its own thing and not the same as Mexican cooking. El Mexicanito on Rue Saint-Boniface in Ixelles is an exception, and a notable one. The food is the real thing: proper mole, slow-cooked meats, the salsas and flavour profiles that actually come from Mexico rather than from a casual-dining franchise manual.

The Rue Saint-Boniface neighbourhood in Ixelles is worth knowing, a street and surrounding area with a density of good independent restaurants, a few good bars, and enough variety that it is a reliable destination for dinner when you do not want to commit to a specific cuisine before arriving.

The keto situation

Mexican food presents a specific challenge on keto because corn and beans are foundational to the cuisine. Tortillas, corn or flour, are how a lot of dishes are delivered, and rice and black beans appear as standard accompaniments. These are not negotiable components in the way that frites are at a Brussels brasserie.

What does work is the meat cookery. Slow-braised pork, chicken prepared in mole or salsa verde, carne asada: the proteins at a proper Mexican restaurant are excellent and genuinely interesting in a way that grilled chicken at a European restaurant usually is not. The complex dried-chilli sauces, mole negro, mole rojo and salsa verde, do have some carbs, but in reasonable quantities they are not the problem.

The approach is to order the meat dishes, ask for the tortillas and rice on the side or not at all, eat the protein and the sauce, and accept that you are eating around the format rather than with it. At a restaurant this good, eating the braised pork in mole negro without the tortilla is still an excellent meal. It is just not a taco.

Guacamole is fine. Ceviche, when available, is fine. The salsas are fine in reasonable quantities.

An honest note

Part of what makes El Mexicanito worth going to is the experience of eating Mexican food the way it is meant to be eaten, with tortillas, with rice, with the full context of the cuisine. A Brussels resident whose family has lived in Mexico City will tell you this is the closest thing in Europe to the real thing, and eating it in a deconstructed keto-friendly way is slightly beside the point.

This is one of those restaurants where the right call might be to eat properly and take the evening off from strict keto, rather than to reconstruct the menu around your macros. That is a personal decision, and the restaurant is good enough to justify it.

Rue Saint-Boniface 29, Ixelles. Worth checking current opening hours, as the post-Covid situation has affected a lot of Brussels restaurants in ways that have not fully stabilised.