Hungry City: Carnitas El Atoradero in the South Bronx

The plastic cups arrived on a terra-cotta plate, one cup filled with a pickled pig’s knuckle, another with a hank of goat sloughed off the bone and unraveling. There were sips of soup, too, shining with fat, and a dark sauce that tasted like smoke incarnate.

“Samples,” explained Denisse Lina Chavez, the chef and owner of Carnitas El Atoradero in the South Bronx. “I always give, because people might not know the food.”

Ms. Chavez grew up in Atlixco, at the foot of Popocatépetl volcano in Puebla, Mexico, where her father and his father before him planted coffee. She came to New York in 1984, at age 16, hungry for work. Three decades later, she has become an evangelist for her native country’s cuisine, presiding over Carnitas El Atoradero with pale hair swept tightly in a topknot and two strokes of eyeliner — maize and turquoise — on each lid.

The restaurant could be just another tiny taqueria, with electric-lime walls, a galley kitchen and four tables at the back. But the decorations speak to Ms. Chavez’s heritage: pots carved to evoke pineapples, from Michoacán, her husband’s home state, and a rock-poster-like picture of the Aztec warrior Popocatépetl, head haloed in feathers, before the gods turned him into Puebla’s great volcano.

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Next door is an equally tiny bodega that Ms. Chavez opened in 2004. There, three years ago, she started cooking carnitas on weekends in a caldron on a portable burner set on the floor, often selling out by noon. Last December, she took over the adjacent space and began serving, out of a proper kitchen, the Mexican dishes that she believed had been underrepresented in New York.

Daily specials may include mole poblano, red-black and voluptuous in its bitterness, made not with chocolate but with cacao beans, and pipian verde, a profound sauce of roasted pumpkin seeds, peanuts and almonds, shot through with epazote and yerba santa, herbs that gesture toward mint and tarragon, camphor and root beer. Goat is roasted over avocado criollo leaves until it takes on their licorice-like scent and flavor; the bones are rendered into soup so rich that it lolls on the tongue.

Ms. Chavez’s repertoire is deep: On my visits, I encountered pig trotters stuffed with Oaxaca cheese, the gelatinous meat and cheese melting as one; albóndigas (meatballs) enrobing hard-boiled quail eggs, in a sauce smoky-sweet from two kinds of chipotle; mole de olla, a thin stew loaded with rounds of corn on the cob, still crunchy; pozole with dark crescents of pig ear and hominy kernels that seemed to expand like ghostly balloons; and a debris of chiles that turned out to be salsa in its most primal form, more bitter than hot, and humbling.

After such heights, the everyday taqueria menu is a bit of a letdown. Still, it’s worth leaving room for a cemita (sandwich), magisterial in scale, with the bulging bread for once not overshadowing the meat. (Get chorizo, violently red and seasoned in-house.)

As for the carnitas that started it all, they are simmered forever with mezcal, beer, Fanta and Coca-Cola. They are meant to come out juicy rather than in charred nubs, as typically found around town. But when I ordered them, I got mostly gristle, with jags of bone.

Be warned: Sometimes only one or two specials are available. Weekends bring more, with a chance for dessert — maybe a sweet tamale, the hull of masa stained pink from hibiscus, with pineapple hidden inside.

Ms. Chavez used to drive down to Mexico every three months and bring back goods to sell in her bodega. Then, last year, she and her husband were hijacked and held at gunpoint by one of the country’s most dangerous cartels. Now her sister ships her herbs and spices, the most important being indigenous oregano, which has more swagger than the Mediterranean variety.

“I want to show blanquitos” — white people — “the real food,” Ms. Chavez said on a recent evening. The plate of samples at the beginning is an invitation, at once generous and uncompromising. It is Ms. Chavez’s way of saying: “Forget the other Mexican food you have known. Come follow me.”