El Bajío is a group of eighteen restaurants in Mexico City which are run by Carmen Ramírez Degollado, noted for their colorful decoration and traditional cuisine from central Mexico which has received awards and praise from notable food experts.

Carmen has become a notable chef in her own right, giving classes and demonstrations in Mexico and abroad as well as writing about 20 books.

El Bajío consists of eighteen restaurants in Mexico City which are dedicated to preserving traditional Mexican cooking, with no aims of reinventing the food or making it haute cuisine.

[5][6] The colorful décor of each restaurant is based on fine examples of Mexican handcrafts and folk art of which the owner and head chef, Carmen Hernandez Oropez, is an avid collector.

[8] However, Raul began with an initial investment of 200,000 pesos, partnering with friend Alfonso Hurtado Morellón.

[3][9] She varied the menu, adding traditional dishes from her home state of Veracruz, as well as from Michoacán, Oaxaca and Puebla.

[8][10] The restaurant grew and its success allowed her to send her children to the best private universities in Mexico.

[8] In 2006, a second restaurant under the same name was opened in Parque Delta in the Benito Juárez borough, followed by Polanco, Lindavista, Reforma 222 and Tezontle in 2006 and 2007.

[13] Today, Carmen is recognized as an important chef, being head of El Bajío for over thirty years.

She has traveled throughout Mexico and parts of the world to talk about and share traditional Mexican cooking.

[1][8] It also prompted the Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma company and the Asociacion Mexicana de Restaurantes to acknowledged her contributions to Mexican cuisine in 2003.

[14] The New York Times named her of the "matriarchs" of Mexican cooking along with Patricia Quintana of the Izote restaurant in Polanco.