Corazon De Maiz

The pork that fills the burritos at Corazon De Maiz is Cochinita Pibil, braised for hours before it meets a tortilla, and the salsas lined up behind the counter are made in house, cooked down one batch at a time. It is a counter-service Mexican restaurant in Ottawa's ByWard Market, compact and built for a fast lunch, but the cooking that feeds it runs slower and more deliberate than the format suggests. The name translates to heart of corn, which is also the literal base of the plates — the corn tortillas, the chips, the tostada shells.

Burritos are the anchor, and they are differentiated by protein rather than by a single sauce ladled over everything. The pork is the Cochinita Pibil; the beef is Barbacoa Norteña-style; the chicken is breast marinated in lemon, herbs, and a house spice mix; and the vegetarian build swaps meat for sautéed cactus, mushrooms, spinach, corn, and peppers. Each arrives layered with refried beans, rice, crema, cheese, pico de gallo, and guacamole. Around the burritos runs the rest of a tight menu: quesadillas folded over a triple-blend cheese, nachos built to share, soft tacos and tostadas, and a tortilla soup that leans on chipotle and dried pasilla instead of a plain broth. Horchata — rice milk with cinnamon, vanilla, and sugar cane — is what to drink alongside it.

The salsas are where the kitchen shows off. There are seven or eight — Salsa Verde, Sweet Chipotle, Morita, Garlic Jalapeño, and a rotating handful like Brava, Diego, and Diablo when they are made — built to sit alongside the food rather than bury it. Each is cooked down in house, which is why the heat reads as layered rather than blunt: the smoky ones built on chipotle and morita, the sharper ones on garlic and jalapeño, a range a regular learns to order by name. They are the cheapest way to make the same burrito taste like three different meals.

The menu is short on purpose. Nothing on it strains to be more than it is, and the trade-off is that the few things offered get made properly: the meat braised, the salsas cooked down, the guacamole smashed to order. It is also quietly accommodating — meat, vegetarian, and vegan paths all exist, and the burrito bowl runs gluten-free, none of it pushing a diner into a higher price tier. For a market lunch, that range is the difference between a place a group settles for and one a group can actually agree on.

The restaurant opened in December 2011, and the story behind it starts in Mexico City, where Mariana Torio Sosa trained in cooking before she and Erick Igari moved to Ottawa and took the ByWard Market storefront. According to local reporting, Mariana is the one who makes the salsas, mixes the spices, and braises the meat for hours — the slow work the counter format keeps out of sight. The two run the place as a family kitchen, with an open pass where the cooking happens in full view of the line. That visibility is part of the draw: the food is assembled in front of the people waiting on it.

A decade and a half on, Corazon De Maiz is woven into the rhythm of the ByWard Market — the weekday pork burrito at the counter, the takeout order carried back out into the square, a constant in a quarter of the city that turns over fast. Its own line, Mexican Food Made From The Heart, is the sort of thing most restaurants paint on a wall and forget; here the cooking keeps backing it up, from the long braise to the cooked-down salsas. The corn the name points to is still the base of nearly everything that leaves the counter.