We stopped for a meal during our tour of maguey-growing, mescal-making country at the excellent Restaurante Donají. They present themselves as purveyors of comida tradicional oaxaqueña. Targeting Norteamericano, Europeo and urban Mexicano visitors, this place has managed to avoid the cheesy tourist-processing feel typical of restaurants dependent on travelers.

Walking from the parking area, the first sight greeting us was this woman making tortillas.

We knew right away we were in for a treat. She's patting the masa (tortilla dough) out by hand. Nobody does that anymore.

Handmade tortillas, rare in their own right, are usually made with the aid of a tortilla press.

Photos: gourmetsleuth.com

But for my money, tortillas made with a press aren't as good as the ones patted out by hand. They lack the imperfections and tenderness of the truly handmade. They have a sharp rim that detracts from the mouth feel of the ones shaped in the cook's palms.

Restaurante Donají makes tortillas the hard way, the traditional way, the centuries-old way. Dried corn is soaked and boiled in lime water, the softened kernels ground in a mill (their one concession to modern times), patted to shape one at a time and cooked on a sheet of iron over a charcoal fire. I can't emphasize enough, how different, how much better these are from any factory-made tortillas. We're talking mom's buttermilk biscuits vs. Wonder Bread.

The restaurant is famous for its moles; that's MOE-lays, not the little critters that burrow under your lawn. Brown, red, yellow, green mole; the variety is endless. Most moles contain chiles and chocolate, the latter unsweetened of course. No respectable mole has fewer than eight other ingredients.

English-language recipes for mole offered online are disappointing, listing commercial chile powder and unsweetened Baker's chocolate as ingredients. I wouldn't eat that stuff. Restaurante Donají, befitting it's traditional approach, begins with fresh chiles and cacao beans, roasting them in a wood-fired oven.

They make the best mole I've ever eaten. (Excepting, of course, that made by our cook, Rosario. It takes her two days to make her sauce, using her grandmother's recipe.)

A big, open kitchen is where it all comes together. It looks a little questionable, but everything in there is spotless.

Chicken is grilled, sauced and served from there. A boy runs outside to the tortilla lady to get fresh ones just before serving your order. As you eat in blissful satisfaction, you gaze at a bucolic mural of a mercado as it looked in the last century.

Today, a hundred years after the period depicted—the mountains, the mercado, the sellers, the produce, the stilt walkers, the costumes—look exactly the same as today. Maravilloso ¿no?

Like all good Mexican businesses, Restaurante Donají is more than a restaurant. For example, they raise ostriches...

... although they don't serve them.

They weave traditional Oaxacan rugs when business is slow.

As if that's not enough, a family member makes furniture in a shop out back.

That's an electric bandsaw on the left; pretty sophisticated for woodworking in these parts. Note also that the shop serves as a dormitory. A couple of hammocks provide perfectly satisfactory sleeping arrangements in this warm country.

Restaurante Donají has been a fixture for decades. Oaxaqueños who have cars and can afford to eat in restaurants (a minority) make the one-hour drive out of the city for a special afternoon.

If you English speakers want to enjoy a meal here, you're gonna have to brush up on your Spanish. But the friendly owners are used to Norteamericanos. They may address you in Spanish, but they speak slowly and articulate clearly. Talking with them was one of those rare experiences for me, where I understood everything they said.