The food conversation in this town rarely makes it south of the Trinity, which is how a restaurant like Mi Sazon can cook honest Mexican food on South Polk Street for the better part of two decades without the attention it deserves. The regulars have never needed anyone’s permission to fill the place. The rest of us are late.
Mi Sazon Mexican Restaurant sits at 3505 S. Polk Street near Kiest Park, a small, colorful room with walls crowded with Mexican art and a kitchen working from the home-style end of the repertoire. This is not Tex-Mex. The menu reads like a Sunday table in Jalisco: caldo de res thick with corn and zucchini, caldo de pollo, menudo, pozole, and a caldo de camarón that arrives the color of a sunset, alongside birria, mole poblano, gorditas, sopes, flautas, tortas, and tamales.
Mornings are their own event here. The doors open at 9 on weekdays and 8 on weekends, which is menudo hour in any serious Mexican kitchen, and the breakfast list runs from chilaquiles rojos and verdes topped with eggs to huevos rancheros and a breakfast huarache that will hold you until dinner. The seafood side brings coctel de camarón and ceviche tostadas, and for a table with decisions to avoid, the parrilladas handle everything at once.
Save room for the endings, because they tell you who is cooking. There is pan de elote, the sweet corn cake found at family gatherings more often than restaurants, and jericalla de Jalisco, the burnished custard from Guadalajara that lands somewhere between flan and crème brûlée and almost never appears on a Dallas menu. Any kitchen that bothers with jericalla is not phoning anything in.
There is a bar with margaritas frozen and on the rocks, and a weekday happy hour that runs from 3 to 6:30 p.m. for anyone who understands that the late afternoon is a civilized time for a drink and a plate of queso fundido con chorizo.
Mi Sazon is open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. It serves the neighborhoods that already knew about it, from Oak Cliff to Duncanville to DeSoto. Now the secret belongs to everyone.
