Olla

Lincoln Road's best dish is littered with bits of cow, pig, and chicken feet. It's gently spiced with Mexican oregano and guajillo chilies. There are meaty, bouncy bits of tripe that, along with a fried egg and a basket of warm, flaky tortillas, packs luxury and modesty into the same bite. Find it within the confines of Scott Linquist's Olla, nestled into the space that once held Altamare but today pulls flavors from every corner of Mexico's vastness. Much of the menu comes from the years Linquist spent bouncing between the U.S. — where he was the executive chef for the Mexican chain Dos Caminos — and small Mexican villages where he and fellow cooks would beg locals to teach them their recipes. And that's what populates Olla's menu. There's chichilo, a burnt-chili-seed mole that deploys the pricey chili called chihuacle negro, once used as currency in pre-Columbian Mexico. It fetches a whopping $130 per pound online today. Glass jars are filled with everything from roasted grasshoppers (called chapulines), slivered Marcona almonds, cucumbers, and avocado to lamb tartare sprinkled with shallots and capers and crowned with a quail egg. Yet among the best dishes is the lamb barbacoa, a plate that Linquist picked up while visiting Zaachila, another speck of a village beyond Oaxaca City’s limits, where each Saturday, crowds gather around a troupe of Zapotec women who at 11 a.m. exhume a banana-leaf-wrapped lamb from a charcoal-and-dirt grave where the meat had just spent hours roasting into supple submission. Perhaps Miami will see that whole roasted lamb soon.