Puerto Prendes has been feeding Mexico City since 1892, and its latest chapter is a handsome one. The beloved seafood institution, long tied to family gatherings and recipes that blend Spanish and Mexican traditions, has opened a new location inside the renovated Palacio de Hierro Plaza Satélite shopping centre — and the design, by Mexico City studio Talo Atelier, is worth a detour in its own right.
The studio faced an unusual brief. Its first Puerto Prendes project, in the historic Roma neighbourhood, worked within an existing building that already had character. At Satélite, the space was brand new, so the challenge was to invent a sense of history from scratch — without resorting to a theme-park version of the past. The answer draws on 1940s Cuba, suggested by the owners early on, filtered into a restrained tropical look: Art Deco touches, plenty of greenery, curved forms, brass and bronze metalwork, natural stone, and lighting warm enough to feel nothing like the mall outside.
The centrepiece is the bar. Talo Atelier commissioned Mexican artisans to produce a backlit bar front in fluted green blown glass — a custom process involving testing, specialised cutting and assembly — so that the bar itself glows from within. Paired with a marble countertop and a soaring back bar, it acts as the hinge of the whole dining room. Elsewhere, mirrored ceilings stretch the space upward, custom Mexican alabaster fixtures soften it back down, and a relief wall made of marble dust quietly nods to the menu with a motif based on the structure of a fish.
There's also a terrace, dressed with tropical planting, green-striped awnings, wide ceiling fans and woven lights, where white-tablecloth tables and woven-back chairs carry the indoors out. A double-height mezzanine hides the storage, keeping the dining room open while handling the operational demands of a restaurant this size.
For travellers, this is a good excuse to look beyond the usual eating circuit. Satélite, in Naucalpan on the city's northern edge, rarely tops visitor itineraries, but a meal here pairs well with a visit to the nearby Torres de Satélite — Luis Barragán's famous coloured towers just across the way. The restaurant is aimed squarely at the long lunch: the design deliberately encourages you to settle in from the bar to the terrace over an unhurried afternoon or evening, in the spirit the brand has cultivated for more than 130 years.
Seafood is the draw — the kitchen's heritage runs through Spanish-Mexican classics served in a room that feels like a contemporary hacienda rather than a mall fit-out. If you're the kind of traveller who books a table partly for the interior, put this one on the list: few restaurants anywhere have a bar quite like it.
