For over three years, the restaurant Xokol in Guadalajara operated out of a no-frills 890-square-foot space in the working-class neighborhood of Santa Teresita, serving some of the most exciting, sophisticated, and deeply rooted cooking anywhere in Mexico. Chefs and owners Xrysw Ruelas and Oscar Segundo had a total of five staff members, 20 seats, and a loyal clientele that, over time, came to include neighbors and visitors; artists, architects, and designers; carpenters, ceramists and, of course, fellow cooks. Their food, from the surprising and elaborate to the deceptively simple—a sweet-and-sour apple mole, say, or a pale-yellow tortilla folded over a tangle of wild garden greens—spoke to the concentric circles of community that make projects like Xokol possible: farms and farmers (foremost among them Segundo’s own family in Mexico State, 230 miles southeast of Guadalajara), city and neighborhood, clients and friends.

By 2019, though, Xokol had outgrown itself. “Projects like ours should always be evolving,” Segundo says, and, so, when he and Ruelas, who grew up in Guadalajara, found a 2,280-square-foot space for rent less than a block from the restaurant, they drew on the communities that had made Xokol a success to bring the project to life. That process began with architects and longtime clients Alejandro López, principal at Guadalajara-based firm ODAmx, and Rubén Valdéz, originally from Guadalajara, who runs his eponymous practice out of Lausanne, Switzerland. “We’d always appreciated sitting at the bar, seeing the complex processes that went into the food,” says López, “and that experience was the center of the project we ended up developing together.”