At KOLI, thirteen courses draw a line from dried beef to winter grapes

KOLI's official site displays three pairs of small bites across a pale round support, a dark plate and a charcoal-filled wooden tray. Official restaurant photograph.[1]

A tasting menu called Geometry invites the eye to get there before the appetite. One expects circles, straight edges and immaculate spacing—the familiar visual grammar of tweezers and white plates. KOLI, in San Pedro Garza García within metropolitan Monterrey, does offer the shapes. Its own introduction to the season talks about proportion, texture and temperature; its photographs are full of spheres, arcs and small compositions held inside larger ones.[1] But the menu becomes interesting only when those forms stop behaving like decoration and start organizing the food of Nuevo León.

The opening course is the clue. In Humberto Ballesteros's July account, what appears to be a foamy coffee and doughnut turns out to be dried-beef tea with a barbacoa doughnut, foie gras and oregano from Higueras.[4] The trick is playful, yet the nouns underneath it are stubbornly local: carne seca, barbacoa, oregano. Geometry has not erased the food's accent. It has given the accent a disguise.

KOLI publishes nine- and thirteen-course Geometry menus. As checked on September 9, 2026, the full menu costs 2,500 MXN before drinks and runs from Principio to Invierno; the shorter one is 2,100 MXN.[2][3] This walkthrough follows the thirteen-course document, checked against a critic's report of the same progression. It is not a claim to have eaten the meal, and it is not a promise that every preparation will remain unchanged: KOLI works in named seasons, while Michelin's description appears to preserve details from another iteration.[1][4][5] Think of it as a close reading of the menu KOLI has chosen to publish now.

I–IV: A joke opens the argument

Principio does more than begin dinner. It sets a rule: recognition may arrive one beat after sight. Dried beef becomes something sippable; barbacoa takes the silhouette of pastry; foie supplies luxurious richness without replacing the regional reference beneath it.[2][4] The course sounds witty on paper. More importantly, it tells the diner how to read what follows—first notice the construction, then ask what memory the construction is carrying.

Tierra brings three small pieces named only as Meteorito, flauta and cabuches.[2] Meteorito is a returning KOLI signature, according to Ballesteros, who describes the cabuche component as a tiny, intricately assembled tart.[4] The word arrives without a glossary, an early example of the menu trusting a northern ingredient name rather than translating everything into generic luxury. KOLI's move is not to claim discovery. The move is to make that ingredient legible inside a tasting-menu scale.

Then Mar interrupts the land: sea urchin tamal, trout and bluefin tuna, presented as three distinct bites in the published review.[2][4] This is a useful complication. KOLI says it explores northeastern Mexican cuisine, but the current menu does not pretend that every prestigious product has a Nuevo León address.[1] Instead, a familiar form—the tamal—holds one marine idea while trout and tuna make two more. “Origin” here is a way of structuring reference, not a certificate that every ingredient was harvested nearby.

The fourth course, Arte, is Geometry at its most literal: melon, cucumber, pipián and quinoa arranged, in the critic's description, as twelve differently colored spheres on rice paper.[2][4] It risks becoming the plate one admires more than one remembers. Yet its position is smart. After the savory disguises of dried meat, barbacoa and sea products, fruit, seed sauce and cucumber clear a bright space before the menu turns toward fire. The circle works because it is a hinge, not the whole thesis.

V–VII: The line thickens around the cookfire

The middle begins with an odd couple. Asado joins shrimp and squash to frijoles con veneno, a name that carries the convivial weight of northern beans even when the serving is refined.[2][4] KOLI does not reproduce a family platter. It compresses the idea until one plate can hold shellfish, vegetable sweetness and the darker register suggested by the beans. The course expands the meaning of asado: not one trophy cut, but a meeting around cooked food.

Fideo Seco is even less obedient to category. Chorizo, butter, seasonal fish and mountain cheese share the line.[2] Ballesteros reads it as a field memory translated through the sea, and that is the most useful way to approach the collision.[4] Fish is not automatically “light” here, nor is chorizo merely a garnish announcing meat. Butter and cheese give the course weight; the seasonal catch keeps that weight from becoming the expected march toward steak.

With Mole de Cenizas, the sequence finally drops into a lower register: lamb, tomato, mezquitamal and requesón under an ash-dark mole.[2][4] Rodrigo Rivera-Río has described his current cooking as interested in long reductions and concentrated, bitter and herbal flavors; he identifies bitterness, acidity and herbal chile heat as essential to his picture of regio taste.[7] That statement helps explain why the menu does not progress simply by increasing the price of the protein. Its real escalation is concentration—ash, reduction, requesón, dark sauce.

VIII–X: Cabrito is a hinge, not the finale

By the eighth course, KOLI reaches Monterrey's most recognizable meat and declines to treat it as a grand closing roast. Cabrito en Salsa is paired with onion three ways: roasted, sharpened into vinegar and transformed into onion soy.[2] Ballesteros describes the portion as small but the flavor as forceful.[4] The restraint matters. Cabrito becomes the hinge between lamb and pork rather than the ceremonial endpoint, and the repeated onion gives one ingredient several jobs—sweetness, acidity, savor—without burying the goat beneath a catalogue of garnishes.

The current sequence then places Mole Neoleonés with suckling pig, goat cheese and plum.[2] Michelin's restaurant page also singles out KOLI's mole and cabrito, but attaches plum and foie gras to its reimagined goat course.[5] Those records should not be blended into one imaginary plate; they are separate public snapshots whose descriptions conflict. The current official document is the authority for this walkthrough: onion belongs with cabrito; plum belongs with the suckling pig. Whether the mismatch reflects a menu change or abbreviated inspector copy, it is a useful reminder to keep seasonal evidence inside its documented boundary.

Carne Asada closes the savory run with Mexican crossbred Wagyu, black garlic, cauliflower, pepper and salt.[2] The title is almost disarmingly plain after mezquitamal and onion soy. Carne asada is also one of the preparations featured by Nuevo León's official 200-year culinary survey, alongside barbacoa, cabrito and cabrito in mole neoleonés.[6] KOLI's version is clearly not the communal grill transposed intact; a composed Wagyu course cannot reproduce the social event. Keeping the old name nevertheless matters. At the point when the restaurant could retreat into a generic “beef course,” it lets the regional form remain audible.

XI–XIII: Dessert lowers its voice

The last three titles—Brasa, Silencio, Invierno—sound less like dishes than changes in the room's light. Brasa combines Cuna de Piedra chocolate, tuna tapona—a purple prickly-pear fruit—and ashes.[2][9] Ballesteros identifies it as a KOLI classic.[4] Here the menu's fire returns as residue: not flame in front of the diner, but ash named beside chocolate and fruit.

Silencio pares the list down to honey, milk and flowers.[2] After ten savory courses and Brasa's ash vocabulary, those three words read like a deliberate release. The plate no longer needs to announce itself through a famous dish name; its work in the sequence is the handoff from intensity to calm. That transition also makes sense in a restaurant where the three Rivera-Río brothers divide responsibility across Rodrigo's savory kitchen, Daniel's pastry work and Patricio's dining room and beverage service.[5]

Finally, Invierno gathers grapes, wine, almond, hazelnut and pistachio.[2] It is the least regionally declarative course on the page, and perhaps the right ending for that reason. The menu has already done the work of naming its ground. It can finish with season, fruit and cellar rather than one more emblem. Geometry concludes not with its most complicated figure, but with a cluster.

What the four additional courses change

The nine-course menu is not merely the same dinner in smaller portions. It removes Mar, Asado, Cabrito en Salsa and Invierno while preserving the other nine titles.[2][3] For an additional 400 MXN, roughly 19 percent over the shorter menu's listed price, the thirteen-course version adds four distinct pieces of narrative architecture: a marine interruption, the shrimp-and-bean bridge, the most explicit cabrito course and a third dessert.[2][3]

That arithmetic does not prove value. A PDF cannot reveal portion size, duration, appetite, service rhythm or whether a particular diner wants thirteen arrivals. It does reveal editing. The nine-course version still contains KOLI's core language—dried beef, barbacoa, cabuches, fideo, two moles, carne asada, ash and honey. The thirteen-course version makes the argument breathe. Sea and land pull farther apart; cabrito gets its own sentence; dessert has time to move from ember to quiet to winter.

For a first reading of KOLI, that makes the longer route the clearer text. This is not because more courses automatically mean more luxury, nor because the restaurant retained a Michelin star in Mexico's 2026 selection.[8] It is because the additions expose the structure Rivera-Río says he is pursuing: consistency built through a sequence of strong, controlled flavors rather than through one signature plate.[7]

Geometry could have reduced Nuevo León to circles and clever plating. KOLI's better achievement is the reverse. It uses shape to keep a long meal coherent while allowing dried beef, cabuches, frijoles con veneno, cabrito and carne asada to retain their rough-edged names. The menu begins in disguise, grows darker around the fire and ends among grapes. The line holds because the food never disappears inside the drawing.

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