In Guadalajara’s Centro Historico - parts of which after sundown are semi-abandoned moonscapes of dark, silent streets swirling with dust and lined with terribly neglected but graceful colonial architecture - a few old hunks of coal refuse to die out, warming the bones and spirits of the loyal drinkers clustered around them.
There’s Cantina La Fuente, aka, La Bicicleta, smack dab in the center. A ten-minute walk to the northwest is Los Famosos Equipales. A brisk jaunt of 20-minute due south from there and you arrive at Bar Morelia. These sturdy old crones are mutually distinct in character, atmosphere, and service style. Choose the bar that fits your overall disposition or current mood.
Los Famosos Equipales
Los Famosos Equipales is the Queen Victoria of old Guadalajara cantinas, but Vicky after having sluffed off the dew of youth and gone slightly to seed. Bar owner Doña Catelina, a stout woman in late-middle age, presides over her enterprise at the end of the bar, her back against the buildings east wall as she and her staff of gracious waiters clad in baggy white dress shirts and black pants hand bills and coins back and forth to and from the ancient cash register she wields like a Stradivarius.
Catelina’s abuelita started selling glasses of red wine and coffee with cinnamon out of a small storefront a few blocks away on the corner of Gonzalez Ortega and Angulo in 1920. Then in 1940, her sons, including Catelina’s father, moved the business to its present location, a 150-year-old former shoe factory made of solid adobe on the corner of Mariano de la Bárcena and Álvarez.
Since moving to its current spot, Los Equipales has been a gathering place for artists, bullfighters, sportsmen, assorted professionals and politicians. In the 1960s and 70s, players from Chivas, Guadalajara’s dominant soccer team, were regular occupants of the namesake equipales (Jalisco-crafted chairs made from pig skin and rosewood), imbibing and eating carne con chile and tortas ahogadas. Bar patrons can pass the time perusing the countless pieces of faded Chivas-related memorabilia posted above the rows of bottles.
Augustin Lara, an internationally recognized Mexican composer and singer, was among the illustrious creatives who called the cantina home, along with numerous bullfighters, the rock stars of their day.
The very embodiment of courtly graciousness from bygone centuries, longtime Los Equipales waiter Gustavo Gonzalez explained what he thinks sets his place of employment apart from other establishments in Guadalajara.
“The most important thing,” said Gonzalez, polishing glassware behind the bar, “is our rapport with our clients. We respect our clients.”
He noted in particular the special care they take to make women who come in by themselves for a drink feel they can relax and not have to fend off men who take their lack of accompaniment as a tacit invitation.
“It’s a place where when you enter, you breathe in an atmosphere of tranquility,” asserted Gonzalez.
If tranquility makes you anxious – and by the way, “tranquility” is clearly a relative concept, seeing as Los Equipales has a much-patronized jukebox stocked with rock and piercing ranchero music – then Bar Morelia is your ticket to sweaty sensory overload, complete with intimate articles of feminine apparel hung above rows of smudged bottles behind the bar.
Bar Morelia
If Los Equipales is Queen Victoria a bit past her prime, then Bar Morelia is singer Siouxsie Sioux in the throes of an epic late-70s Lower East Side drug and alcohol bender.
The story of the bra-donation tradition’s inception, by the way, was only fuzzily sketched by the property’s owner, Miguel Nuño. The issue wasn’t pressed; sometimes, origin stories are best left vague, better to titillate one’s imagination.
The history of the bar itself is (somewhat) easier to draw a bead on, though. At some point in the middle 1950s, Nuño’s great-uncles, owners of a successful furniture store, opened Bar Morelia in the Mexicaltzingo neighborhood just a few blocks southwest of the cathedral and around the corner from the Agua Azul Park. Little has changed since, according to Nuño.
The hygiene at Morelia, while as riotously entertaining as a punk rock singer in debauched dishabille, isn’t for the squeamish. Therefore, the only food it’s safe for the Guadalajara Reporter to mention are the churritos, a ubiquitous bar snack of pinkish, crunchy puffed starch paired with a cold beer or a shot of grog.
If you had to pick a famous woman to place on a horizontal axis between a slightly frowzy but dignified Queen Victoria and glorious downtown disaster Siouxsie Sioux, you might nominate Billie Holiday, the perfect avatar for the sine qua non of Guadalajara cantinas, La Fuente.
La Fuente
Occupying an enviable position just north of Plaza de la Liberacion and surrounded by august-looking edifices housing politicians, journalists and musicians, La Fuente – also known as La Bicicleta after the ancient black bicycle sagging with dust perched in an alcove above the 20-odd seat bar – is the most atmospheric of the city’s cantinas, redolent of a society bound up in a complex web of chivalric codes and closely observed manners. It’s also easily the largest, with tall ceilings and copious floor space.
Providing La Fuente’s only soundtrack is a piano on a raised platform in the center of the massive, drafty room, providing accompaniment for songs of longing, betrayal and revenge interpreted by succession of usually middle-aged-to-elderly gentlemen, amateur and professional alike.
La Fuente was a family affair from 1921, when it was opened by Don Florencio Lopez Mariscal, to 1983, when current owner Rogelio Ignacio Corona bought the property and business from Mariscal’s descendants.
The grey-haired and taciturn Jesus Conrique, a wry presence behind the bar, is most often seen holding minimal court as he dispenses little else but beer and tequila to the gallery of regulars jostling for space along the slab of tenderized flotsam and trying to get his attention.
In addition to a spartan selection of spirits and beer, a small selection of regional classics is brought out to tables from a tiny kitchen in the distant rear of the establishment, day and night.
One of the thrills of nursing a drink at La Fuente is knowing that you might be treated to an impromptu selection of operatic arias from a member of the city’s opera company taking leave for a moment of a table of friends and admirers, his voice powerful enough shiver glass and raise water in the eyes of amazed onlookers. This sort of unexpected display of expressive and technical bravura is generally greeted by longtime locals with feigned – or no doubt real, in some cases – indifference.
But anybody is welcome to stumble up the five steps to stand behind an iron rail and belt out a number to the hoi polloi below. The piano accompanists seem to know or are able to fumble elegantly through almost anything the amateur or professional songbird throws at them.
While there are many other fine cantinas to be frequented in Guadalajara, a city with a keen taste for celebration, Famosos Equipales, Bar Morelias and La Fuente are unapologetically themselves and together represent a range of what the cantina has to offer in Guadalajara, from Old Vic to Siouxsie Sioux to Billie Holiday, from reserved poise to dangling brassieres to lyrical, tequila-sodden bohemianism. Pick the one that suits your state of mind, enter through the swinging saloon doors, forget and have fun.