Biko

At its peak, Biko held a place in the top ten of The World's 50 Best Restaurants — ranked tenth in 2016 — a credential that positioned it alongside the most closely watched fine-dining rooms on the planet, and one that reflected how seriously the international culinary community took what Basque chefs Mikel Alonso and Bruno Oteiza were doing on Presidente Masaryk in Polanco. Their project was specific: apply the modernist technique of the Basque Country to Mexican ingredients, not as a novelty exercise but as a sustained, rigorous cooking philosophy executed across a tasting menu format. The kitchen's approach produced dishes that moved between the familiar and the disorienting. Bacalao and jamón appeared alongside preparations that treated prawns and foie gras with the kind of textural transformation associated with avant-garde Spanish cooking — the sort of work that required a brigade trained in both traditions. Gerard Bellver contributed to the technical side of the operation, and the cumulative effect was a menu that read as neither purely Spanish nor Mexican but as something that required both lineages to make sense. The room matched the ambition. Reviewers consistently described the interior as sleek and refined, with polished service to correspond. Polanco, the wealthy district of Miguel Hidalgo where the restaurant sat, provided a fitting address: the neighbourhood has long housed Mexico City's most formal dining rooms, and Biko occupied that tier without apology. Tasting menus were priced at approximately 985 pesos at the time of documented reviews, placing it at the high end of the local market while remaining accessible by the standards of comparable tasting-menu restaurants in Europe or New York. Biko is permanently closed. What it documented, across its years on Masaryk, was a particular argument about what Mexican fine dining could absorb from European modernism without losing coherence — an argument made at the highest competitive level, and one that shaped how the city's serious restaurant scene understood its own possibilities.

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