Mesa Verde

It’s not as if Melbourne is wanting for a lack of Mexican restaurants, however when you add in top notch cocktails and an award-winning rooftop garden, Mesa Verde stands a little highera among the sombreros.

Opening quietly in mid 2013, this unassuming restaurant has quietly been plugging aways and kicking goals. Located on the sixth level of Curtin House (just below Rooftop Cinema) Mesa Verde takes its name from the town in A Fistful of Dynamite.

Extending the spaghetti western theme, Mesa’s interior has a bling meets cowboy motif going on with skulls, oil lanterns and splashes of colour offset with baked enamel crockery. It’s pretty fun and netted Mesa a nomination for bar design at the recent Eat Drink Design Awards.

The bar’s also stocks a fair whack of Mexican beers and offers a flight of tequila for booze boffins. Or if you can’t choose there’s a beer and tequila matching at $40 for two people.

Over in the kitchen they aren’t re-inventing the wheel, but serving a fresher, lighter style of Mexican dishes like smoked and cured ocean trout tostada with avocado and granny smiths ($17) and the watermelon, beets, pomegranate and mint seeds salad ($14).

Many of the meals come courtesy of the rooftop garden that supplies hard to find ingredients such as epazote, a herb used in many Mexican dishes. The garden is also home to Australia’s only rooftop worm farm, that gets all the kitchen scraps so nothing goes to waste.

And in a nod of neighbourly love, Mesa has a pretty sweet deal going with Rooftop Cinema. For $45 you get a pre-movie meal for two including four tacos, a main, a salad and two margaritas.

No word on whether any of these well-fed worms end up in the tequila.

MESSA VERDE
Level 6, Curtin House
252 Swanston St, Melbourne
9654 4417
Bar: Tues – Sun 5pm till late
Kitchen: Tues – Thurs 6pm till late, Fri 5pm till late, Sat 6pm till late
mesaverde.net.au