Starting Tuesday, November 3, Azul opens at 11:00 AM, every day, for lunch. The lunch menu is served from 11 to 3, and it’s on the menu page.
La comida
What Americans call lunch, Mexicans call la comida, and it is the biggest meal of the day. It usually starts in the early afternoon, somewhere between two and four, and it gets the best ingredients and the most time. Breakfast can be eaten standing up, and dinner is often something light, a sweet roll and coffee or a few tacos. The real cooking is saved for the comida.
It tends to come in order. Soup first. In a lot of homes the next course is rice, which Mexicans call sopa seca, “dry soup,” even though there’s nothing soupy about it. Then the main dish, with beans and tortillas, and something sweet if there’s time, a flan or a piece of fruit. In many houses nobody starts until everyone is home from school and work.
When UNESCO added traditional Mexican cuisine to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010, it described a whole way of living with food, from planting corn to sitting down to eat it, and said the knowledge behind it helps “reinforce social bonds.” The nomination held up the traditional women cooks of Michoacán as its living example.
After the plates are cleared comes what Mexicans call the sobremesa, literally “over the table”: coffee, maybe a drink, and talk that can run for hours. The word comes from Spain, and in Mexico the custom runs deep. Getting up the minute you finish can come across as cold, as if you had somewhere better to be.
Changing, even in Mexico
The daily family comida is under pressure there too. Work schedules don’t line up, and the TV and phones stay on through the meal. In a 2022 study, mothers in San Luis Potosí told researchers that the big shared meal was moving to the weekend. As one put it, in translation: “we eat together on the weekends because on weekdays some of us work.”
Lunch at Azul
On a weekday, lunch at Azul can be a real midday meal instead of something eaten over a keyboard. Bring a colleague for tacos (al pastor, suadero, carnitas, lengua or birria) and eat properly before going back to work.
On Saturday and Sunday, it can be the comida: the family at one table and a long sobremesa afterward. The menu works in the old order, too. Start with tortilla soup or seafood soup, then enmoladas or enchiladas verdes, both served with rice and beans.
| Lunch | |
|---|---|
| When | Every day, 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM, starting Tuesday, November 3 |
| Where | 120 River Street, Hackensack, NJ 07601 |
| Menu | Lunch menu |
Reserve online for parties of up to 8, or call or email for larger groups and same-day bookings. Walk-ins are always welcome.