Malva Restaurante is a small location that seats only 24 people or so. The chef Roberto Alcocer has done a great job in developing this restaurant which is focused on food native to the Baja California area. The only difficult thing we encountered with the restaurant is that when you are coming to the entrance off of the main highway you need to take a left turn across a very busy and what looked like dangerous curve. Luckily for us there was no other cars coming down the hill so we were able to enter quickly and easily.

The restaurant is a very open layout with basically only one wall, which is adorned by some beautiful street art or murals, however you would classify it.

Beautiful Street Art on the only wall in the restaurant

More on the street art

The restaurant embraces the natural setting of the restaurant and there is only limited lighting. Since the restaurant was fairly busy I kept my flash turned off on my camera so the images are not of the highest quality that I would typically strive for, but I think they present the quality of the food and the artistic styling well.

We started with the Sopas de Carnitas.

Sopas de Carnitas

All of the soaps we’re awesome and the salsa of parsley was very good.

We then moved on to the Platon de Queso del Rancho (local cheese platter). The presentation was very artistic and the cheeses were excellent.

Platon de Queso del Rancho

The cheeses were very fresh, quite moist and flavorful. The smokey cheese had a dry mouth feel, but were equally good.

Platon de Queso del Rancho

I was looking forward to the Ash and Onion cheese, but this was the only one that did not exude much flavor, so it was a bit of a let down for me.

We then moved on to our main plates, where Jo Ann had the Pesca del Dia which was a MahiMahi on a bed of mushrooms. She really enjoyed the mail and felt that the salsa was outstanding. Sadly it was too dark for me to get a good photograph of this meal.

For my main course, I had the Castilla Carjada (Beef Short Rib). This meal was absolutely perfect and I do not rate mainly plates at restaurants as a 5 out of 5. Well done.

Costilla Carjada

We finished our meal up with a plate of ice creams which included Popcorn, Smoky, Rosemary and Goat Cheese. The smokey was very good, but the others were a little icy almost like a sorbet.

Plato de helado

The wine list was complete and represented a number of the wineries in the area. We did share a bottle of Amando IV from Viñas de Garza. The wine sold for MX$800 and was very good. However it really should have been decanted but we had to pour it from the bottle. The wine is very complex and a full body taste.

Overall I found Malva to be the best restaurant in the Valle de Guadalupe.

The service was great and I enjoyed being able to watch the line working away in the open kitchen.

Direccion: Km 96 carretera Ens Tecate, 22755 San Antonio De Las Minas, Baja California, Mexico

Reservas: +52 (646) 155 30 85 / (646) 190 72 78 o por correo a ralcocer07@gmail.com

Facebook: MALVA Cocina de Baja California