People love to grumble about the quality of Mexican food in Vermont, and for a long time, I’ve agreed with them. Our tacos have been Americanized to a level beyond Tex-Mex, and nobody needs them to be filled with mushroom chorizo. There’s been little hope of a well-made mole, let alone a blush-pink mole rosa.
That’s starting to change. Over the past couple of years, a new crop of Mexican restaurants and pop-ups has increased Vermonters’ vocabulary: We’ve got conchas at farmers markets, posole that made the Seven Days food team’s year-end list of best bites, birria everywhere — and, sometimes, even a little heat.
Two of the latest Mexican spots in the Burlington area, Doña Esa and Taquería Don Richard, are serving some of the best food yet, including regional home-cooked dishes and handmade tortillas. And they’ve set up shop in some unlikely places: a cocktail and vinyl bar on Pine Street and the food court of South Burlington’s University Mall. When I checked them both out recently, I was as pleasantly surprised by the food as I was by the low-key charm of their locations.
Taste of Home
Doña Esa at Doma Bar, 388 Pine St., Suite 2, Burlington
When it opened in November 2025, Doma Bar immediately felt like a cozy living room. Now, it’s also a dining room — but still one that feels like it’s inside a friend’s house.
Doña Esa, the homestyle Mexican food biz owned by Ada Martínez, has used Doma’s kitchen to serve takeout lunch since April. On September 12, Martínez and her three children, Azul, Alan and Adrian Hernández, expanded their offerings to dine-in dinner service every night Doma is open, Tuesday through Saturday. Last week, they added lunchtime seating.
The menu changes daily. It usually includes tacos, “because we want to have sales,” joked Alan, who runs the front of house.
But the heart of Doña Esa — the dishes Vermonters should get most excited about — is less familiar cuisine: rich soups; stew-like guisados; chiles en nogada, a celebratory roasted poblano dish in the colors of the Mexican flag made to mark the country’s Independence Day; and that mole rosa, which gets its pink color from beets and hibiscus.
“Our goal is to eventually only sell homestyle dishes,” Alan said. “Most of these dishes people have never heard of.”
Martínez lived in “four or five” of Mexico’s 31 states and traveled or visited family in many others before moving to Florida and then Vermont, she said. Customers from Mexico don’t always recognize the specific regional dishes she cooks, Alan said, highlighting poc chuc, a citrus-marinated grilled pork dish from the Yucatán, and carne polaca, a stew-like dish from Tabasco, where he grew up.
“The name is translated to ‘Polish meat,’ but it has nothing to do with Poland,” he said with a laugh.
Even the tacos, Alan said, aren’t always what you’d find at a taqueria: Doña Esa’s versions feature meats eaten at home such as tinga — shredded chicken seasoned with tomato, onion and chipotle — or chilorio — shredded pork seasoned with dried guajillo and ancho chiles, tomato, onion, garlic, cumin, and oregano — rather than the typical carnitas or al pastor you’d get from a street-taco vendor.
Alan writes descriptions of the history and ingredients for each daily special and staple dish on Doña Esa’s website. It’s all part of the family’s approach: “We’re not just a restaurant,” he said.
On a recent Tuesday morning, Martínez had placed sheet trays of painted sawdust throughout the bar, which had just gotten a fresh coat of paint itself. With a translation app, she told me that it was part of her preparation for Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday on November 1 and 2 that honors the dead.
The sawdust will become an elaborate carpet, called a tapete, in front of an altar, which Doma will display from mid-October through early November — longer than usual, Martínez said, “to give customers more time to see it.”
“I’m not a professional,” she said, showing me elaborate tapetes on her phone and tempering my expectations. “But we want to share our culture, and we don’t want to lose our traditions here.”
Doma is still a self-identified sapphic bar where DJs spin records and revelers of all orientations sip daiquiris, sink into a booth or get up to dance. But Doma and Doña Esa have a shared spirit and, as a duo, make a lot of sense.
“I see a lot of Mexican culture in our idea of hospitality,” Doma owner Sadie Williams said. “We just want to show people a good time and have fun.”
Williams and bar manager Tatiana Bruno built Doma’s cocktail menu based on their own family connections and heritage — Spanish, Mexican and “white Vermonter” for Williams, she said, and Puerto Rican and Haitian by way of New York City for Bruno. It translates to a lot of rum-based drinks, all of which pair excellently with Doña Esa’s food.
Williams, who lived in Mexico City for five years, is a big fan of the central Mexican-style tostadas and sopes Martínez makes — especially with the bar’s velvety Pine Street Daiquiri ($18).
On my first evening visit, my friends and I did the expected: We ordered tacos ($15 for four), chips and guacamole ($13), and enchiladas verdes ($14 for four). The enchiladas were smothered in a bright tomatillo-jalapeño sauce, rolled like fat cigars and stuffed full of chicken tinga. I balanced their zing with a Puerto Rico Libre ($14), a simple and sweet cocktail of Puerto Rican rum, lime juice and Mexican Coca-Cola.
On a return lunch visit, I took Martínez’s advice: “All seasons, it’s soup.”
The day’s special, sopa de albondigas con verduras (meatball soup with vegetables, $20) was a rich yet mild broth filled with big chunks of potato, half an ear of corn and perfectly round meatballs; it reminded me of an Italian wedding soup, without the pasta.
I also ordered chilorio ($17), a shredded pork guisado — a stew-like entrée — from Sinaloa in northwest Mexico. The reddish pork was fragrant with the aroma of dried guajillo and ancho chiles, but the dish was not particularly spicy until I added a healthy pour of Doña Esa’s hot salsa. Served with corn tortillas and two sides (rice and fried plantains for an extra $1), it filled me up for lunch and left enough for dinner.
Doña Esa’s tacos are great, but Martínez can count on me to contribute to the sales of everything else now, too.
Meet Me in the Mall
Taquería Don Richard, University Mall food court, 155 Dorset St., South Burlington,
@taqueria.don.rich on TikTok
Taquería Don Richard is an unusual Vermont business in a couple of ways: It’s in a mall food court, and it’s big on TikTok.
In fact, TikTok was the only web presence I could find for the new Mexican restaurant in the University Mall in South Burlington; there, owner Ricardo Santamaria talks animatedly to the camera, showing bubbling pots of carnitas, trays of crispy chicharrones and, occasionally, the Victoria’s Secret storefront across the way. Some of his videos, which he’s been posting since the taqueria opened in late summer, have tens of thousands of views. Comments, in a mix of Spanish and English, give rave reviews.
“By far the best tacos I’ve had on the East coast,” one commenter wrote.
“You guys rule,” commented the official account for the band Guster.
If anything is going to get me to the mall in 2026, it’s good tacos. And, after scrolling way down on Taquería Don Richard’s first TikTok, another tip sealed the deal: “Las tortillas están hechas a mano y eso hace toda la diferencia,” it said. The tortillas are handmade, and that makes all the difference.
The commenter, along with everyone else who’s been praising the new spot, was right. When I arrived at the U-Mall for a Saturday lunch, the line was long, and at least two dozen people were already eating in the sprawling food court, where the only other businesses are a rebranded Sbarro Pizza and the Tropical Yogurt smoothie stand. Most diners had tacos — or empanadas, quesadillas or plates combining two of the three, which are the best deal on the menu.
I introduced myself to Santamaria, who beamed as he took orders at the register with the open kitchen bustling behind him. “I’m Richard,” he said, pointing to the sign above him. “Thank you for supporting my family business.”
We didn’t have time to chat more, as the line grew even longer behind me.
The taqueria was out of birria that day, which would have been my first choice. But after a quick re-scan of the menu, my backup plan was a more than suitable substitute: a combo plate ($16.50) with a taco al pastor, an empanada filled with tinga-style marinated chicken, and rice and beans. My husband opted for two tacos ($7.75 each), and my preschooler, skeptical of most food but especially tacos in a mall, got a plain quesadilla made with mild Oaxacan cheese ($7.75).
“I’m trusting you,” the 3-year-old said, as I told him I thought the quesadilla would be good.
As we waited briefly for our food, we reminisced about the food court’s storied past — particularly, my husband’s high school memories of growing up in Burlington and frequenting the Taco Bell, which was on the opposite side of the food court from where Taquería Don Richard is now, he recalled. As the mall has scaled down, that whole row of former food stalls has become a mural.
Santamaria soon brought over our cafeteria trays, carefully balancing the tamarind and mandarin Jarritos sodas we’d selected ($3 each). We stopped talking and dove in — even my jaded, skeptical kid.
The al pastor was loaded with pineapple, cilantro and onion, but the flavor of the smoky, red-orange pork punched through. It even had a little heat, though I added more with a kicky, smooth green salsa — an element I hadn’t been sure about, based on the AI-generated photo of it on the menu. The real thing, as always, was better.
Comparatively, the tinga inside the empanada was a little bland, but the empanada was fried to a golden crisp and served with generous slices of avocado. I still enjoyed it, though I’d stick to other fillings — and tacos — next time, because the commenter was right: The handmade tortillas make all the difference.
Pliable and structurally sound, they didn’t fall apart the way a mass-produced tortilla often does. As with the regional dishes at Doña Esa, the tortillas tasted like something you’d eat at home.
But then I remembered, This place is in the middle of the mall. I don’t imagine that I’ll be stopping into Victoria’s Secret anytime soon, but at least the U-Mall is getting me through the door now. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Comida Caliente | The Burlington-area Mexican food scene grows in unexpected places”
This article appears in October 14 • 2026.
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