I rarely eat breakfast. It’s not that I don’t like breakfast. It’s more that it doesn’t like me. You see I’ve always been a pudgy guy and I’ve never liked being a pudgy guy. Not only that, my favorite breakfasts all contain a huge quantity of two of my favorite things to eat…calories and carbs.

Today I did eat breakfast, a very good breakfast, though I will admit the bells of the parroquia had already chimed twelve. It was Susan York who recommended where I ate. Susan is San Miguel’s better recommender of restaurants. You will find her very informative blog at cupcakesandcrablegs.com along with lots of food snippets on her Facebook page.

Susan York is more of a pictures first, words second person. Don Day is more of a words first, pictures second person. So I think her intro might have been because she felt there was more to be said about the restaurant and its chef than Susan usually writes.

Susan and I strolled through the jardin and turned the corner up Recreo to 21A, to what was once a quaint, 19th-Century place to live and was now, obviously, a place to eat and drink. There was a quick introduction: “Mariana, this is Glenn. Glenn, this is Mariana” and Susan was off to work on a San Miguel guidebook that she’s developing.

The sign on the restaurant reads El Cafe de La Mancha and I quickly learned it’s been there for about four years. The chef is called Mariana Gonzalez Gutierrez and I quickly learned she’s been there for about four months.

It’s a postage stamp of a place but, with only one of the twelve seats in La Mancha occupied (though there are quite a few more upstairs), it was quiet enough for Mariana to join me for a few minutes at one of the four tables. For a 20-something, this woman already has a long and illustrious resumé.

Chef Mariana is from Tijuana and, after completing culinary school, she just happened to get an internship at Pujol, considered to be one of the world’s top 20 restaurants and headed by the world’s most celebrated Mexican chef. I know people who would walk on hot coals all the way to Mexico City to work at Pujol.

From there it was back to Tijuana, then off to the west coast, to Merida.

“I’m fascinated by the food of the Yucatan. It’s such an interesting cuisine. It was so enjoyable learning how to make cochinita pibil, sopa de lima…”

There was another return to Tijuana…

“You make good money there. It gave me a chance to save for a vacation…for my next food adventure.”

…that was followed by a stint in the kitchen of Restaurante Zandunga, the Querétaro restaurant specializing in Comida Oaxaqueña.

“It’s owned by two guys who are totally dedicated to producing the best of Oaxaca. It was an opportunity to be immersed in the cuisine, my mole period.”

Then finally, and thankfully for us, about three years ago, Mariana Gonzalez Gutierrez landed in San Miguel de Allende.

“Aperi had only been open about four months. I got an appointment with Chef Matteo Salas. I had heard about his reputation. I just wanted to be there, to watch him, to learn from him. He agreed that I could just hang around and help then, three weeks later, he hired me, full-time.”

“All of us who worked there learned so much from him…not just about being a better chef but about being a better person.”

I asked Mariana if she missed Aperi.

“They were a great two years but I’m glad they’re over. There I had a job. Here I have a job and a life.”

When husband and wife Christian Diaz and Paloma Montes (it was Paloma’s day off when I was there) opened El Cafe de la Mancha, the focus was on coffee, pastries, paninis and pizza.

Though coffee and cake (baked by Paloma) are still a big part of La Mancha, Chef Mariana, who is a one-third partner in the cafe, has put the emphasis on breakfast, a very Mexican style breakfast with eggs in the form of huevos rancheros, huevos revuelto and huevos a la Mexicana plus some fancy toasts and quesadillas.

“I wanted to keep things simple but very well made. I am proud of everything on the menu and I want to share my pride with our customers. I don’t want my kitchen to be a factory like some of the new restaurants in San Miguel.”

Now I already knew what I was going to order because, recently, after publishing a list of my favorite things to eat in San Miguel, a reader called Roz Sobel suggested the chilaquiles at Café de la Mancha might be missing from my list. I checked the menu and there they were, at the bottom (save the best to last) and, not only that, there was something below them on the menu that had me instantly humming a little ZZ Top (She’s got legs, she knows how to use them). A choice of chorizo, chicken or chamorro. Chamorro? Shank? Beef shank for breakfast?

“It’s Matteo’s influence. He used shank a lot.”

Unless you include it squeezed into a 3:00 am taco after three too many glasses of wine, I don’t think I’d ever eaten shank in the morning but why not. Along with cheeks, tail and short ribs, it is one of the fabulous four of tender and tasty beef cuts.

“I brine it for twelve hours…in just salt and water. Then I give it two hours in the pressure cooker.”

The composition of Mariana’s chilaquiles is very similar to the traditional recipe. It starts the day before with the production of homemade tortillas.

“They have this wonderful flour at the mercado, yellow corn or blue corn.”

The dried tortillas are then crisped in a pan and covered in a red (or green) sauce and an egg is started in a separate pan.

After the crisps are plated, there’s a squirt of crema, that fall-apart shank, avocado slices, crumbled manchego cheese and a rasher of bacon.

“The butcher cuts it not too thick, not too thin, so it crisps up perfectly.”

The chilaquiles come to the table with one more thing, a bowl of salsa macha. I’m not sure if it’s a recipe that Mariana learned while working in the Yucatan but it’s a little different than most.

“I use chile morita. It’s not very hot. I think you’re going to like it.”

Mariana was correct. I liked the sauce. I liked the chilaquiles. I liked having breakfast. I liked Mariana. I’d like to go back to El Cafe de la Mancha soon.

El Cafe de la Mancha is located at Recreo 21A in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. They are open Monday through Saturday from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm.