[dropcap size=big]T[/dropcap]he best pozolería in Mexico City has no features meant for you to find it from the street but one. It is a single button on an intercom panel at the metal door of a gray stucco-covered apartment building. The button reads “pozole.”
You press the buzzer and someone buzzes you in. Down a tiled hallway, a wonderland awaits that takes the concept of “home-style” to its most hardcore level. The eatery known as El Pozole de Moctezuma sits in an actual converted apartment, and has been in that same spot for more than 70 years. It offers pozole verde, arguably the most "baroque" version of the dish from the currently troubled state of Guerrero, Mexico.
This restaurant in Mexico City makes it so extravagantly, you'd think there'd be a line out the door of the spot daily for the green pozole inside. But instead, Pozole de Moctezuma remains a neighborhood lunchtime-only place, catering to the same cadre of buttoned-down bureaucrats and office workers from the relatively nearby offices of Mexico's federal tax agency, foreign relations headquarters, and the Bank of Mexico, which maintains the country's reliable inflation rate.
Pozole de Moctezuma is found on a street so short it would barely qualify as a pathway between buildings anywhere else. And while it might no longer be as low-pro as it must have been for decades (it is marked on Google Maps now, as seen below), the place still tends to grab newcomers with the jarring sight of a uniquely foreboding entrance in a city of tens of thousands of restaurants.