Living in a globalized world is paradise for anyone who likes to try new flavors – and a piece of home abroad for anyone living abroad. I won’t lie: the Mexican restaurant scene offers fantastic food and adapts remarkably well to the conditions here. But I have to tell you: most of them don’t quite get it right.
It’s no secret that foreign cuisine needs to be adapted when sold in another country. That’s a difficult mission because you want to offer the original, but if it’s too unusual, people might not like it. Globalization and the internet have made this cultural barrier easier – or rather, they’ve made people from other gastronomic cultures curious. Unfortunately, you can’t always bring the authentic taste with you.
The biggest hurdle for a Mexican restaurant in Europe is getting proper nixtamal tortillas – sometimes even the right corn. In Germany and the rest of Europe, most corn varieties are different from those traditionally used in Mexico for tortillas, and even if you track down suitable corn, preparing tortillas from fresh nixtamal requires specific equipment and know-how that are hard to recreate outside Mexico.
Today there are plenty of tortilla brands on the market, some produced in Mexico, others in Europe, but they usually come in vacuum-sealed plastic so they keep longer – and this small detail already changes the texture and flavor a bit.
Besides nixtamal tortillas themselves, let’s look at a few concrete dishes to see how they are prepared differently in Germany – and why.
Carnitas: The Art of Braising in Its Own Fat
Carnitas consist of various pork parts braised for hours in their own fat with spices and chiles – traditionally in copper pots or cazuelas de cobre in Spanish. This dish belongs on the street; the most popular version comes from the state of Michoacán. The traditional version uses all parts of the pig, which are chopped before serving.
In Mexico, you can order specific parts: including trompa (snout), maciza (lean meat pieces with little fat), or cueritos (soft, gelatinous pork skin pieces). The mixture of everything is called surtido. Mexican restaurants in Germany can make delicious carnitas, but they don’t offer the complete experience – at least I haven’t found one that does. The problem? German guests aren’t necessarily ready to see pig snout or gelatinous pork skin in their tacos – and some don’t even know exactly what a real taco is (spoiler: not a crispy, pre-made shell, but a soft tortilla made from nixtamalized corn). Even though these parts taste fantastic.
Cochinita Pibil: The Dish Everyone Gets Wrong
Cochinita pibil is very popular in Mexican restaurants in Germany, and unfortunately, most haven’t quite understood it correctly. But don’t worry – even many restaurants in Mexico City don’t make it traditionally, and it still tastes good for mexicans and amazing for foreign people.
The original dish comes from Mayan culture in southern Yucatán and uses pork, recado rojo (a red Mexican or Mayan spice paste), and the region’s typical bitter orange, which is hard to find elsewhere. Some recipes add achiote – even though it’s already in the recado rojo – to intensify the red color.
The main characteristic is actually in the name: pibil means roughly “cooked underground” in Mayan. The “pib” was an underground oven of that culture, which gives the dish a unique smoky and earthy note that’s hard to reproduce. In Yucatán, you find cochinita pibil on the street in tacos and tortas. Some shops sell it exclusively or together with lechón, while in established restaurants it’s a common dish – served as panuchos, tostadas, or on other traditional nixtamal products.
In Germany? The oven is missing, the bitter oranges are missing, and often important spices from the recado rojo are left out – some restaurants just use achiote paste to get the red color, but that’s like a painting without shading. But hey, it’s still delicious, just more of an interpretation.
Tacos al Pastor: Without a Trompo, They’re Not Real
Let’s stick with pork: this dish is emblematic of Mexico City, though it was allegedly invented in Puebla by a man with Arab roots. For tacos al pastor, thin slices of pork are used, marinated in an adobo made from guajillo chiles, sometimes mixed with onion slices, and then stacked on a spit – just like shawarma or döner kebab.
The meat is cooked on a vertical grill, ideally over coals. The shape of this meat tower reminds you of a traditional Mexican toy called trompo, which has this special cone shape and is topped with pineapple. A slice of grilled pineapple completes the taco al pastor, which is served with lime, onions, cilantro, and salsa – optional but highly recommended.
Here’s the thing: if you don’t see a trompo, you’re not getting real tacos al pastor. Period. Many Mexican restaurants in Germany serve marinated pork with pineapple and call it “al pastor,” but without the vertical spit and slow roasting, something essential is missing. This isn’t criticism – it’s just a different preparation, more like carne adobada (marinated meat in adobo), which is tasty but tastes different.
Birria: The New Star That Actually Works
Birria is a relatively new addition to Mexican restaurant menus in Germany, and it seems to be becoming the standard for authentic Mexican food. Unlike the previous dishes, birria uses meaty beef or goat parts – specifically those with bones and fat.
Birria is cooked in liquid, a mixture of broth and adobo, made by combining chiles like guajillo, ancho, pasilla, morita, and cascabel, plus many spices that let the meat simmer for hours until it falls apart. This dish can be reproduced in Germany with good precision because the ingredients are easy to find and it requires a common cooking technique.
The dish comes from the state of Jalisco and is fairly spicy, but its flavor is worth the effort of getting used to hot food. Of all the dishes on this list, birria is probably the one closest to the original – and you can taste it.
These Are the Most Common Tacos You’ll Find in Authentic Mexican Restaurants in Germany
Now here’s the key to these dishes: besides ingredients and preparation, it’s the quantities cooked that enable deeper flavors. When you cook different parts of an animal together – ideally from the whole animal – fat, collagen, bones, and lean meat blend into a flavor you could never achieve with just one kilogram of shoulder. Plus, some spices dominate a dish when you cook in small amounts, but in large amounts they harmonize perfectly. The problem with cooking large quantities? You have to sell everything to make a profit – and here Mexican restaurants struggle.
Producing large quantities means a risky investment in a market that’s not used to these flavors – and add to that Germany’s strict regulations, bureaucracy, and hygiene standards that don’t exist in Mexico. The rents are higher, labor costs are higher, permits are more complicated.
Let’s not forget that the boom in international cuisine in Germany has a short history. I remember seeing some Mexican restaurants in 2010 that cooked brilliantly but didn’t survive. The problem? Many Germans only knew Mexican food from cheap Tex-Mex chains that sold poor interpretations. When authentic Mexican restaurants then charged realistic prices, they seemed expensive – even though they just reflected real costs. So a vicious circle formed: authentic Mexican food remained unknown and was perceived as overpriced.
Why I’m Telling You All This
A lot has changed since then. Germany’s food scene has become more open and experimental. More people travel to Latin America, more people are curious about authentic flavors. And yes, more Mexican restaurants dare to cook more traditionally.
But here’s my point: when you visit a Mexican restaurant in Germany, don’t expect Mexico. Expect an interpretation, an adaptation, an honest attempt to bring flavors across the Atlantic that weren’t really meant for export. Some dishes like birria work brilliantly. Others like carnitas or cochinita pibil lose something along the way – not because the cooks don’t want to, but because the conditions are different.
Appreciate the effort. Enjoy the food. And the next time you’re in Mexico, look for the street corners, the taquerías without names, the copper pots, and the trompos. Because some flavors you have to experience where they were born.
Until then: enjoy your meal – or as we say: ¡Buen provecho!
