James Beard-nominated chef Dionicio Jiménez to open a Mexican restaurant in Ambler

Philadelphia’s James Beard-caliber chefs tend to ply their craft in the city. Dionicio Jiménez of Kensington’s Cantina La Martina, a nominee last year for the James Beard award for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic, is heading to Ambler, Montgomery County, for his second restaurant.

Jiménez and his wife, Mariangeli Alicea Saez, are planning La Baja, a 30-seat, moderately upscale BYOB, where the cooking will fuse the northern Mexican border cuisine of Baja with Mediterranean and Asian ingredients. They hope to open in May, after Cantina’s Cinco de Mayo hubbub subsides.

La Baja, occupying a side-street storefront at 9 N. Main St. in the borough’s commercial district, promises to be a creative departure for Jiménez, who brought refined Mexican cooking to the heart of Kensington in 2022 with his debut as a restaurateur.

» READ MORE: Craig LaBan's 2022 review of Cantina La Martinez

La Baja will allow Jiménez to showcase the Italian cuisine he mastered in the early 2000s at the beginning of his Philadelphia career, notably the pastas he created over his years at Vetri Cucina.

Mexico’s northern border is important, Jiménez and Saez explained. It’s the crucible of modern Mexican cuisine, where foods from South and Central America pass through on their way to American tables. “There is that perception that there’s only bad things that happen at the border,” Saez said. “There’s the social aspect of [immigration] that needs to be resolved by both countries, but also there’s so much good that also happens and contributes to the economy of this country.”

The climate also resembles parts of the Mediterranean.

The menu includes truffled huitlacoche risotto, a melding of Mexico and Italy. There’s also a hummus sampler including dips made of sikil pak (a Maya dish made of pepitas), beet, green pea, and avocado tatemado (a roasted avocado). There will be yellowtail tiradito with yuzu, red jalapeños, and watermelon radish; uni tuna tostada with preserved black lime; mole negro with buffalo mozzarella; grilled octopus with black garlic aguachile; boneless goat with pistachio pipian; duck breast in a pomegranate mole; pork chop in a smoky fig glaze; and — in a particularly advanced Puebla-Italian matchup — papalo fettuccine with wild boar Bolognese.

Jiménez’s story is common among many Mexican-born workers in the United States. A native of Puebla, he crossed into the U.S. illegally in 1998, walking thousands of miles until he arrived at a relative’s house in Philadelphia. He started work as a dishwasher, juggling days with chef Philippe Chin at his restaurant at the Locust Club and nights at Vetri, new at the time.

Marc Vetri promoted Jiménez through his kitchen stations before appointing him sous chef and helping him become a U.S. citizen. Michael Solomonov, also a Vetri alumnus, hired Jiménez as his first head chef at the Head House Square fine-dining restaurant Xochitl in 2007. Stephen Starr hired him away in 2010 at El Rey near Rittenhouse Square. He left in 2021 to build out Cantina La Martina, a cheery oasis beneath SEPTA’s Somerset stop of the Market-Frankford El.

Jiménez’s trip to his hometown of San Mateo Ozolco was the subject of a Craig LaBan story with evocative photos by Jessica Griffin.

La Baja is adding to an already stacked Mexican restaurant scene in Ambler Borough, with the casual El Limon and Taqueria El Habanero to be joined midsummer by Cantina Feliz, moving in from nearby Fort Washington.