Zapote

Two critics ate the same beef tartare taco with roasted bone marrow here: one called it smoky, fresh and impossibly butch, the other gave it 11 out of 20 and said it needed seasoning.

Why go

Yahir Gonzalez ran the Spanish kitchen at Aqua Nueva on Regent Street for about a decade before opening this in February 2023, cooking the food of the country he is from, with Tony Geary, a former Sketch manager, as co-founder (Harden's). The room is the concrete shell the short-lived St Leonards left behind, 65 seats with a streetside terrace. The thing the kitchen does that most London Mexican rooms do not is press its own tortillas daily, using traditional method and heritage corn, which Harden's survey respondents single out. The mezcal list is long and the house build, a Zapote 70, is tequila, mezcal, orgeat and lemon. In late 2025 the team opened a twelve-seat taco bar called Chicozapote inside the same address, which this entry cannot yet tell you anything about.

Order this / avoid

• Order: the seafood end. Scallop ceviche, left almost whole in blood orange and kumquat with chilli. The yellowfin tuna and spicy crab tostada, which the harshest critic in the file called the best dish of his meal. Crispy baby artichokes in pipian verde. The pistachio doughnut with morello cherry jam.
• Avoid: ordering two dishes that both arrive under pipian verde. A conversation you need to hear, because the hard surfaces carry. Assuming the sharing plates share, since one critic was told to order two of the same dish instead.

What locals & experts say

• Leonie Cooper, food and drink editor at Time Out London, four stars out of five: "A beef tartare taco with roasted bone marrow was smoky, fresh and impossibly butch; like St John on a vacay to Tulum." On the ceviche she wrote that the scallops were "the most beautiful bivalves we've seen all year". ref
• Andy Hayler, scoring dish by dish out of 20 and unimpressed: the scarlet prawn tostada dressing was "wildly acidic... as if no one had ever tasted the dish" at 10/20; the cauliflower quesadilla "had little flavour" at 10/20; the beef tartare taco "had limited flavour and needed more seasoning or spice" at 11/20. His best dish of the meal was the yellowfin tuna and spicy crab tostada at 13/20. ref
• Harden's survey respondents, rating it positively across three write-ups: "Gorgeous plates" of "authentic and original" Mexican food, "verging on fine dining", with tortillas "freshly made every day using traditional methods and heritage corn" and staff who deliver "a very well-paced meal, with plates brought out in a thoughtful order". Their complaint is the room: "industrial vibe", "far too noisy". ref
• The split, as Harden's itself records it: The Guardian's Grace Dent is a fan and thought it "a date-night kind of place, or for dinner with a client you'd actually like to talk to", while the FT's Tim Hayward called it "a modern Mexican muddle". Both of those reach us through Harden's rather than from the original pieces. Dent's praise is for the occasion rather than the cooking, which is worth noticing before reading it as a verdict on the plate. ref

Good to know

• Where: 70 Leonard Street EC2A 4QX, on the Shoreditch backstreets, around the corner from Santo Remedio.
• Rooms: the main dining room seats 65. Since late 2025 there is also Chicozapote, a twelve-seat taco bar inside the same building, which nothing in this entry covers.
• Booking: recommended. There is a streetside terrace for warm evenings.
• Wine: 35 labels running from 24 to 175 pounds, median 52, at an average of 2.9 times retail, which Andy Hayler describes as not bad by current London standards.
• Noise: two independent sources say the hard surfaces make it loud, one of them at a near-empty lunch.
• Hygiene: no FSA record could be located on 1 August 2026, after searching by business name nationally, by four address forms and by a one-kilometre radius around the postcode. That is a gap in the lookup and nothing more; the queries are written down in the research log so the next pass can go to Hackney council directly.

Jeff's take (his words)

Nothing from Jeff. The saved-places export carries this row with an empty Note column, so jeff_note stays empty.

Verdict (Chef Jeff ladder)

could-visit — Go if Shoreditch is where you already are. Yahir Gonzalez spent a decade running the Spanish kitchen at Aqua Nueva before opening this in the old St Leonards shell in February 2023, and the parts of it that work are specific: tortillas pressed fresh every day from heritage corn by traditional method, a scallop ceviche Time Out called the most beautiful bivalves of the year, and a mezcal list long enough to be the reason to sit at the bar. The wine list is 35 labels at an average of 2.9 times retail, which Andy Hayler rates as fair for London. What stops it climbing is that the food evidence pulls apart at dish level. Leonie Cooper gave four stars and described a beef tartare taco with bone marrow as smoky, fresh and impossibly butch; Hayler ate the same dish, scored it 11 out of 20 and said it needed seasoning, having already found a prawn tostada wildly over-acidified and a cauliflower quesadilla with little flavour in it. Tim Hayward's line, as Harden's quotes it, is that the place is a modern Mexican muddle. Grace Dent likes it, and read what she actually praises: a date-night room and a client dinner where you can talk. That is atmosphere, and craft carries more weight than atmosphere does. One thing this row cannot yet judge: in late 2025 the team opened Chicozapote, a twelve-seat taco bar inside the same address, and a counter is often the better send than the dining room it sits in.