There is a particular kind of confidence it takes to name a restaurant after the sea and then actually deliver on that promise. Mexico City sits nowhere near a coastline, and yet Polanco has no shortage of places claiming a maritime soul. Casamarena is the one making good on it, and it has become the address locals reach for when they want the Pacific and the Gulf without leaving Campos Elíseos.
Casamarena: A House Between Two Seas
Casamarena opened in 2025 under chef Israel Aretxiga of Grupo Zeru, the team also behind Zeru Lomas, and the concept is right there in the name. Una casa entre dos mares, “a house between two seas,” is the idea that Mexico’s coastal cooking isn’t one tradition but several, and that a kitchen in the capital can hold the Pacific’s brightness and the Gulf’s depth on the same menu without either one feeling like a guest appearance. It’s a distinction that matters more than it might sound: Sinaloa’s cooking is bright and citrus-forward, built around raw and lightly cured seafood, while the Gulf’s is deeper and more adobo-driven, leaning on the grill. Most restaurants pick a side. Casamarena’s whole premise is refusing to.
The dining room leans into that duality with quiet, considered design: coastal textures, woven light fixtures, and a calm palette that reads more like a well-kept beach house than a themed restaurant, which is precisely the point. Nothing here is trying too hard to convince you you’re by the ocean; it simply behaves as though it already has been for years.
The Food: Coastal Mexico, Done Just So
The menu is built around what’s genuinely fresh, and it shows. The callo de hacha, prepared Sinaloa-style, has become something of a signature: clean, briny, and served with enough restraint that the shellfish itself stays the star, not the garnish around it. The huachinango a la talla, char-grilled and rubbed with adobo, is the kind of dish that argues for itself without needing embellishment, while the crisp tostadas de atún and the pescado zarandeado both come recommended by regulars for good reason. Ceviches, aguachiles sinaloenses, oysters served over hot coals, and a rotating selection of rice dishes and cuts round out a menu that moves confidently between the casual and the considered, equally suited to a solo lunch at the bar or a full table working its way through several courses.
Dessert deserves a mention too, particularly a tarta vasca that closes the meal on a properly indulgent note, its scorched top giving way to a custardy centre. It’s the kind of detail that signals a kitchen paying attention past the main course.
A Terrace Built for Lingering
Casamarena’s terrace is the room’s best-kept open secret: a stretch of Polanco reimagined as a small pocket of beach, shaded and unhurried, built for the kind of two-hour lunch that starts as a work meeting and ends as something closer to a holiday. Inside, the space works equally well for a discreet celebration or a table of friends catching up over cocktails, with enough room between tables that conversation never has to compete with the one next to it. Capacity is limited by design, which means the restaurant rewards a booking made well ahead rather than a walk-in on a Saturday night. It’s a restaurant built, deliberately, for lingering rather than turning tables, and it shows in everything from the pacing of service to the way the light moves across the terrace as the afternoon goes on.
A Dining Experience Worth the Trip
In a city landlocked by geography but never by ambition, Casamarena is proof that the best seafood in Mexico City doesn’t have to choose a coast. It belongs to a newer generation of CDMX restaurants treating coastal Mexican cooking not as a novelty import but as a serious culinary language in its own right, with the technique and sourcing to match the ambition. What makes it worth returning to isn’t any single dish, impressive as several of them are, but the sense of a kitchen that knows exactly what it’s doing and a room that never rushes you through it. It’s the rare restaurant where the concept, the cooking, and the setting all pull in the same direction, and none of them feel like an afterthought.
More at casamarena.com and on Instagram at @casamarena.mx.
Foto in header: Casamarena
