It’s been more than 30 years since JJ Casteñeda first walked into the California Culinary Academy and started a career in the restaurant biz. It’s been more than three years since he brought that career to San Miguel de Allende.

JJ’s first stop in San Miguel was at the lost and greatly lamented Casa Blanca. Some of my fondest food memories were sitting in the 18th Century courtyard of that hotel on an early evening, sharing five of JJ’s Mediterranean/North African/Middle Eastern creations (at a very affordable price) and taking in the classy but comfortable atmosphere.

JJ then moved up in the world, to the roof of Casa Blanca, to a restaurant called Fatima. The relationship, unfortunately, didn’t last and Fatima has, unfortunately, never been quite the same. Thankfully, JJ carried on.

I thought he’d be gone but, as he told me last week, “A lot of people figured I’d be outta here but there’s no way. This is my place. San Miguel is my home.”

Next stop for JJ Castañeda was Mercado del Carmen, one of those international food court concepts that were popping up almost everywhere ten years ago and sometimes popped and exploded not long after. JJ called his kitchen Marrakesh and kept the same cuisine he’d introduced at Casa Blanca but brought it down a notch in complexity and price. The food was good, very good, but, like so many of these upscale food courts, the traffic wasn’t there.

“Somedays there’d be one, maybe two customers, total, all day”, said JJ, “It was time, overtime, to shut it down.”

“I knew Irving was looking for a chef. I didn’t have two pesos to rub together but he agreed to make me a partner, give me some equity…sweat equity…in his place, which is what I really, really wanted.”

Irving is Irving Barraza, the former general manager of Casa Blanca. His place is W Cantina. The cuisine is traditional Mexican. And, as it seems to be wherever JJ Castañeda goes, the food is good, very good.

As San Miguel de Allende has drifted…or maybe that should be soared…up the price ladder in recent years, we’ve seen very few new traditional Mexican restaurants. The places to go twenty years ago…El Pegaso, La Posadita, El Correo, La Alborada…are still the places to go today. So a new arrival is welcomed and a new arrival that takes those Mexican classics up a notch is very welcomed.

Not sure how to word this without sounding sexist but when I think of traditional Mexican I think of an inappropriate amount of food and, when I think of a lotta food, I think of men, so it was four guys who got together last week at W Cantina to sample as much of the menu as we could in one single sitting.

Traditional Mexican absolutely always starts with guacamole and, after 20 years of eating mainly Mexican, I never quite get tired of it. JJ Castañeda offers a choice of two, what I’d call red or green, what JJ calls traditional or al tomatillo. 

We split the vote on which guac was best. Jack and Richard put their hands up for red. Stan and I chose the green. It wasn’t just the pleasantly sour taste of the tomatillo that swayed me, it was the addition of the avocado leaf and epazote.

“These corn chips are worth mentioning, too”, said Richard. “You don’t always get good chips.”

Now traditional Mexican restaurants rarely feature a salad. Salad is something usually including iceberg that shows up, whether you like it or not, on the side somewhere. But W Cantina isn’t quite as traditional as most Mexican restaurants.

Chef JJ puts a salad front and center on the menu. He takes beets, apples and arugula, wraps them in some wonderfully tasty lettuce (yes, I did say tasty when talking lettuce) leaves, tops them with goat cheese balls dusted in seeds, and paints the top with zucchini flowers.

Plus there’s something very special about a salad that you can eat with your fingers.

Next up, pork, pulled pork tacos. JJ uses a tortilla that includes nopales (cactus paddles) in the masa. He tops it with generous quantities of moist, slow-cooked shoulder and tops it with cilantro, verdolaga (purslane), cabbage, radishes, onions and squash blossoms. A roasted habañero dipping sauce provides some nice heat.

There are four sides offered at the bottom of the menu: Drunken beans with chunks of bacon and chorizo. Fried rice a la Mexicana with peas, carrots and cilantro. Refried beans with cotija cheese. White rice with fried plantain.

We tried two with the tacos and two with our next course. The winner, the unanimous choice, was the frijoles borrachos, the drunken beans.

My favorite Mexican cut of pork and my favorite Mexican sauce were combined in Cantina W’s next course, chamorro al pibil. I knew it was a must when JJ Casteñada showed off his kitchen to me and it was simmering on the grill.

One order was quite enough for the four of us with the essential pickled onions part of the topping. I don’t think you could find the tiniest fleck of meat left on the shank.

We were stuffed, well 99% stuffed. There was just room for one piece of key lime pie so we could all try a forkful.

The cream was not to sweet; the crust was an appropriate graham cracker style; the candied orange slice added that little something extra.

As always, when JJ Casteñada has manned a kitchen in San Miguel, the food was good, very good. If you ever fancy a Mexican feast as we did, I can’t think of a better place in town.

So we obviously loved Cantina W’s food. But what didn’t we like?

Well, we were disappointed that the decor doesn’t exactly say cantina. Irving Barraza opened the restaurant about a year ago as an English Pub called Wellington’s and, once you get past the tacky tablecloths and papel picado on the exterior, the look still very much shouts pint of bitter and a bag of crisps.

“We’re changing”, said JJ, “a little bit at a time. The signage will be next.”

Before the four of us waddled our way out of Cantina W, I asked the guys if there was anything else they’d change. There was.

Our taste for tacos arrives well before Cantina W opens at 2:00 pm and, occasionally, a while after it closes at 10:00 pm. We recognize that might mean adding an extra shift to the staffing but cocina tradicional mexicana this good needs to be available overtime, not just eight hours a day.

Cantina W is located at Salida a Celaya 6, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The restaurant is open from 2:00 to 10:00 pm, Tuesday to Saturday; Noon to 8:00 pm, Sunday.