Form + Matter

Workstations built before the drink

David Rocha sets the work at bench height as co-founder and bartender at Form + Matter in Roma Norte, Mexico City, where the bar begins with the station, not the garnish. David Rocha arrived with more than thirteen years in hospitality behind him, including drinks programmes at Luciferina, Pata Negra and Brujas, then four years as head bartender at Handshake Speakeasy. At Form + Matter he works with José Olivas, also co-founder and bartender, whose route passed through Vancouver before a return to Mexico City and creative development at Handshake Speakeasy. Olivas won CANIRAC Mixologist of the Year in 2022, a credential that sits here less as decoration than as time on the tools. Po Tsai, co-founder and restaurateur, brought nearly two decades in food and beverage, including two cocktail bars in California. Together they shaped the room as a hospitality-led cocktail laboratory, with low-waste thinking, experimentation and purpose-designed workstations folded into the daily method.

A bar program held in the apparatus

The published outline of the drinks does not give recipes, cocktail names or a spirits architecture, so the clearest reading of the program comes through the way the bar has been built. Custom stainless-steel stations sit at the center of the room, giving the bartenders a working language of reach, temperature, rinse, build and pass. The official menu is presented through separate Spanish and English entry points, a small but useful signal in a bar designed for local regulars and visitors to read the same work from different directions. Form + Matter opened in 2024, and the project has already been recognized by The World’s 50 Best Bars with a number 13 ranking. Those figures matter here because they attach to this address, this team and this young program, not to a borrowed reputation from elsewhere.

Stainless steel under close light

The room sits inside a modern apartment building in Roma Norte, hidden enough that arrival feels compressed before the bar opens out. Stainless steel catches the light first. Then the back bar, the hands, the measured exchange between guest and bartender. The mood is lively, but the scale keeps the work close; a small room asks the pass to carry both theatre and discipline without letting either get loose. Rocha and Olivas work from the guest side of precision, where the gesture needs to read as care rather than display. Tsai’s part in the house shows in that calibration: the bar is designed around movement, service and sightlines, not only the drink in the glass.

The next measure is the room itself

There is no named release or seasonal drink to point toward, so the useful close stays with the craft now in motion. Watch how the three founders keep a laboratory from becoming cold, one station at a time, under the stainless steel of Form + Matter.