A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel de Allende.
Euskera for spark. Chef Emiliano Ayala’s first San Miguel restaurant puts an open grill at the heart of the dining room, wood-fired rice at the center of the table, and a designer’s strip-down by BALLISTA around all of it.
Before the room has a name it has a temperature. Ash-gray walls with a rough hand-troweled finish, burnt wood underfoot, a mass of oxidized steel at the back where the grill throws its light forward into the dining room. Terracotta, volcanic stone, fiberglass. Nothing in the palette is trying to charm anyone. The heat arrives before the menu does.
In Mexico, and in San Miguel de Allende in particular, the fastest way to signal a restaurant’s ambition has usually been to soften the room: lower the lights, hang the textiles, place the talavera where the camera will find it. This one goes the other way. It strips down to clay, ash, steel, and flame, and then puts a long red communal table at the center of all of it and asks people to sit together.
The restaurant is called PINDA, Euskera for spark. Not the fire, the thing that starts it. It opened September 5 on Calzada de la Presa, inside the Live Aqua hotel, in the space that used to be Spice Market. It is chef Emiliano Ayala’s first restaurant in San Miguel and his own operation rather than a hotel program, which matters to how it behaves. Interior design and spatial creative direction come from BALLISTA, the Mexico City platform founded by curator and editor Mario Ballesteros. Visual identity is by Goodish Studio. The building is a hotel. The restaurant is not acting like one.
Ayala was born in Morelos and trained in Spain, at the Escuela de Hostelería de Leioa in Bilbao. What followed reads like a slow apprenticeship in heat: Asturian and Basque kitchens, time alongside Marcos Morán at Casa Gerardo, then Eneko Atxa at Azurmendi. Those are one and three Michelin stars respectively, though the stars are less interesting than what he says he took from them, which is a near-religious posture toward the ingredient and a patience with cooking as a physical act.
Back in Mexico came Tzirio and Trasdós, then Planta Alta in 2017, his first project with total freedom, where he hosted Diego Gallegos, Pablo Salas, Atzin Santos, and more than twenty cooks who passed through. In December 2019 he paused Planta Alta for Olinka in Querétaro, a creative kitchen built around local and sustainable producers. Bárbaro Asador de Campo and Sotto Ristorante followed, alongside consulting work in Mexico and abroad.
“Each stage gave me a different language,” he says, “but there was always a thread connecting them: the interest in understanding where what I cook comes from, not only how it is prepared.”
He chose San Miguel because he thinks the town has earned the argument. “San Miguel is a place that has learned to take gastronomy seriously, with an audience that travels, that eats well, and that recognizes when there is intention behind a proposal.”
Ayala calls PINDA a brasero mexa/vasco, and he is careful about the distinction.
“What we do at PINDA is not fusion. Fusion mixes and reinvents things that arrive from separate worlds. What we are after is mestizaje: starting from two culinary traditions that, although they were born in different territories, share the same soul around fire and around sharing the table.”
The claim is that Basque and Mexican cooking were never actually strangers. Both organize themselves around live fire. Both treat seasonal product with something close to reverence. Both understand a meal as a social form rather than a service. So PINDA does not take a Basque technique and graft it onto a Mexican ingredient. It lets the two traditions recognize what they already had in common.
Underneath the theory is a simpler position. “We have a country where the product is among the highest quality in the world, and that is the real starting point for everything we serve, more than any technique or trend.”
The rices are the axis of the menu, and the reason is social rather than culinary.
A rice arrives at the middle of the table. It cannot be plated for one. It forces the meal to become collective, which is the thing Ayala actually wants to build. Ask him what he hopes becomes synonymous with the restaurant and he does not name a dish, he names a behavior: the table as a meeting point.
The house version is the arroz a la leña, cooked over wood and sent out to be divided. Around it the menu makes the same argument plate by plate, rarely announcing it. Cantabrian anchovies with garlic butter. Kampachi tiradito under a jalapeño emulsion. Blue shrimp off the grill with chintextle. A prime rib eye aged twenty days, octopus over the fire with pak choi and fermented chile, gnocchi in huitlacoche. Dessert keeps the same double citizenship: a tart of smoked regional cheese, rice pudding foam with dulce de leche, tuna sorbet against a pet nat.
The wine list follows the logic too. Built with the restaurant’s sommelier, it leans toward small and often family-run bodegas with a story behind them rather than recognizable labels, plus a short selection of Mexican and Bajío wine. Wine here is conceived as a component of the meal rather than a separate document the guest consults alone.
A note from the editor
We went in with the SAVANT team and let the kitchen decide, and what came out was a procession. It opened with the ensalada de radicchio y endivias, César dressing and croutons, which is not the plate anyone expects a fire restaurant to lead with and is exactly the kind of confidence that tells you what you are in for. Then the ventresca de atún aleta azul with heirloom tomatoes, garlic, tender onion, and olive oil: the Basque half of the argument, made without a word of explanation. Both were show-stopping.
Then the arroz a la leña arrived, 300 grams of it, with a 500-gram rib eye and a coffee alioli, and the table went quiet. That is the thesis working in real time. The rice in the middle, the fire doing the heavy lifting, everyone reaching across everyone else. Order it that way.
BALLISTA’s brief was not to redecorate. The previous space was crowded with disconnected objects and references, theatrical lighting, and very little relationship to San Miguel or to the food that was coming. So the studio stripped it.
Fire became the organizing logic and then the vocabulary: embers, firewood, smoke, soot, ash, heat, burnt matter. An open kitchen and a large grill, neither of which existed before, became the physical and conceptual starting point. The monumental kitchen hood, developed with Pedro Arturo Ruiz in Michoacán, was treated as architecture rather than hidden as infrastructure. Outside, a chimney repeats the gesture at lower intensity. Hood and chimney are the same idea in two registers, fire carried from the heart of the kitchen out into the building.
The studio describes the result as a warm brutalism, heavy in materiality and intimate in scale, and it draws the line clearly: the intention was never to mark out which part of the space is Mexican and which is international. “The space doesn’t need to look like a Mexican restaurant to be shaped by Mexico at every level.”
That is a pointed thing to build in a city where Mexican is so often rendered through a narrow set of decorative codes. PINDA works with encacahuatado walls, reinterpretations of the equipal, abstractions of Pre-Hispanic forms, shou sugi ban burnt wood, bent tubular steel. The references are real and the iconography is absent.
The list of who built it is the argument, not the credits.
Mosaics and enamels from Cerámica Antique in Dolores Hidalgo. Pots commissioned through Boteo from the workshop of master Genaro Cortez Ayala in San Felipe Torres Mochas, one of the region’s oldest pottery centers, doing work that is getting rarer. Furniture from young designers and workshops in Mexico City, Jalisco, and Michoacán: Axoque, En la Superficie, Taller Nacional, Mexa, Daniel Uranga. Latticework, shingle roof, tilework, and finishes executed by hand by local teams.
Time and budget pressure, BALLISTA notes, only reinforced the logic. Every limitation sent the project back to the same principle: strip down, reveal, and let material and craft carry the character.
The centerpiece is the red table. Modular, it splits into smaller tables or comes together as one surface for more than fifteen people, facing the fire. It functions as sculpture and as social infrastructure at once, and its scale mirrors Ayala’s own cooking: generous, direct, unruly, built on gestures that are large but still familiar.
PINDA is not the only independent operation making its case inside Live Aqua. Bekeb, Fabiola Padilla’s agave-and-herbolaria bar, moved onto the property in 2025 and sits at number 24 on North America’s 50 Best Bars 2026, with four consecutive years of Spirited Awards recognition for Latin America behind it. Padilla, formerly of Enrique Olvera’s Cosme in New York, named the bar for the Tzotzil word for seed and built her menu around Mexican plants, flowers, roots, and traditional elixirs.
So: two projects on one address, one named in Tzotzil for a seed and the other in Euskera for a spark. Neither is named in Spanish. Neither behaves like a hotel amenity. That is a specific model, and San Miguel now has two working examples of it at one address.
Ask Ayala to compress the whole thing into a sentence and he does not reach for a technique.
“PINDA is cooking with fire, ingredients that are respected, and sobremesas that are shared.”
Ask him what he wants people to carry out the door and it is the same answer from another direction. “More than any particular dish, I hope they leave with the feeling of having shared something, that the table was a meeting point and not just a place to eat.”
The restaurant has been built to make that outcome likely rather than to request it. The fire is in the middle of the room. The rice arrives at the center of the table. The table itself can be pulled apart or pushed together depending on how many people showed up. Everything in the space is arranged around the possibility that dinner runs long.
In a town that has learned to be photographed, PINDA is betting on the part of the evening that happens after the plates are cleared. A spark lasts an instant. What it starts can run all night.
Chef: Emiliano Ayala. Interior design and spatial creative direction: BALLISTA / Mario Ballesteros. Architectural team: Víctor Luna, Jorge Díaz. Construction: COMSARQ / Pedro Mendoza. Hood and special elements: Pedro Arturo Ruiz. Ceramics and mosaics: Cerámica Antique, Dolores Hidalgo. Pots: BOTEO / workshop of Genaro Cortez Ayala, San Felipe Torres Mochas. Lighting: MASM Desarrollo / Martín Leal. Visual identity: Goodish Studio. Photography: Alejandro Ramírez Orozco.
A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel.
