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Rosa Mexicano
Rosa Mexicano opened in 1984 on Manhattan's Upper East Side, founded by restaurateur Josefina Howard, who built the restaurant specifically to introduce upscale, regionally authentic Mexican cuisine to New York diners at a time when most Mexican food available in the city leaned heavily toward a more generic Tex-Mex format. The restaurant's tableside-prepared guacamole, mashed and mixed directly at the table using a traditional molcajete mortar in front of diners, became its single most recognized signature, a genuinely theatrical presentation that's been widely imitated at other upscale Mexican restaurants across the country since. Rosa Mexicano expanded from its original Upper East Side location into a broader multi-city restaurant group, bringing that same tableside guacamole ritual and regionally focused Mexican menu to additional locations while Howard continued overseeing the brand's culinary direction until her death in 2007. Rosa Mexicano's combination of Josefina Howard's pioneering push for regionally authentic upscale Mexican dining in New York and its widely imitated tableside guacamole presentation has made it one of the most influential Mexican restaurant concepts in shaping how American fine dining came to treat the cuisine.
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El Cholo
El Cholo traces back to 1922, when Alejandro and Rosa Borquez opened a small eatery on Western Avenue originally called the Sonora Cafe. As the story goes, a customer sketched a figure on the menu in 1925 and the nickname stuck, and the restaurant was rechristened El Cholo — a name a family restaurant built for a broad Los Angeles audience, rather than a specific immigrant neighborhood, has carried for a century since. It's now run by the sixth generation of the Borquez family, one of the oldest continuously operating Mexican restaurants in the city, with the Western Avenue location still its flagship. The green corn tamales are the restaurant's most specifically beloved dish — a seasonal item, made only when fresh corn is available, wrapped and steamed the traditional way, that regulars plan visits around rather than treating as just another menu item. The restaurant's margarita program has built its own separate reputation, cited for decades as among the best traditional margaritas in the city. Rather than the corn-tortilla street format that defines most modern taquerias, El Cholo's tacos and broader menu sit closer to a classic American-Mexican and Tex-Mex tradition — flour tortillas, combination plates, and a full sit-down dining room service, the kind of format that shaped how generations of Americans without a personal connection to Mexican regional cooking first encountered the cuisine. El Cholo has grown into a small group of Los Angeles-area locations over its long history, but it's never abandoned the Western Avenue original or the format that built its reputation in the first place — a rare thing for a restaurant nearing its hundredth year in business.
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