'Modern Mexican' steps into the spotlight

Rosio Sánchez, a Mexican-American chef who lives in Copenhagen, makes the best tortillas in Scandinavia.

That, she admits, isn’t necessarily saying much – like laying claim to the best pizza in Indonesia.

“It was so much worse,” she said, describing the state of Mexican food when she arrived in 2010 to work as a pastry chef at the celebrated restaurant Noma. “Imagine the worst Tex-Mex food in America, and imagine that being passed on like a game of telephone, by people who have no idea what real Mexican food is.”

That is beginning to change, and not only in Copenhagen, where Sánchez has opened a taqueria with freshly ground, hand-pressed corn tortillas.

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It goes far beyond tacos and tortillas, though: Mexican cuisine has made the leap to the global stage of fine dining. Restaurants like Pujol, Rosetta and Quintonil in Mexico City; Laja and Malva in Baja California; Origen in Oaxaca; and Hartwood here in Tulum all produce creative, world-class menus from the lush variety of fruit, fish, vegetables, herbs, grains and flowers that grow around them.

In places like Barcelona, London and Melbourne, as well as Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, food lovers are seeing the cuisine of Mexico in a bright new light.

Chefs are making house-cured chorizo in Toronto, and Michelin-starred chilaquiles at Punto MX in Madrid. Last week, the Houston chef Hugo Ortega, who began his working life as a shoeshine boy in Mexico City, received the James Beard Foundation’s award for best chef in his region: a first for a Mexico-born chef.

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“Everywhere, I see a new respect for Mexican culture,” said Martha Ortiz, a celebrity chef in Mexico who is opening a warmly elegant restaurant, Ella Canta, in the InterContinental London Park Lane hotel this summer. Ten years ago, when a taco in London might easily have contained canned baked beans, the idea of a Mexican restaurant in a posh hotel would have been mystifying.

“Our traditional food has always had a high value at home, and there is a lot of respect for the women who produce it,” she said. “But for people internationally to be excited about it and willing to pay for it? That is new.”

The pop-up restaurant Noma Tulum, an extension of Noma in Copenhagen that is also known as Noma Mexico, is up and running here, built by the innovative chef René Redzepi, along with Sánchez, more than a hundred employees and dozens of local carpenters, metalworkers, farmers, ceramists and cooks. Until 28 May, dishes like octopus sealed and steamed in fermented corn husks and a spicy-sweet dried pasilla mixe chile stuffed with chocolate sorbet will be served under the stars by a cadre of earnest young people in linen uniforms and matching Birkenstocks.

Is this the “authentic” Mexican food that many admirers of the cuisine have tried to recreate? No. But the struggle over authenticity may be giving way to something more rewarding: a worldwide conversation about Mexican food that is respectful and inquisitive.

How did Mexican food, often viewed by those beyond the country’s borders as cheap, dull and heavy, move to being seen as artful, fresh and fascinating?

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“It began with more Mexican people being able to travel, with the internet, with a younger generation who started to care about food being fresh and healthy,” said Gabriela Cámara, the chef and owner of several influential restaurants in Mexico City and Cala in San Francisco.

Cámara had no culinary training when she opened the restaurant Contramar in 1998 at age 23, to bring fresh seafood from the coasts to landlocked Mexico City. At that time, the most ambitious restaurants in the capital were French or Italian. “Even Montezuma had fish from Veracruz carried to him in relays,” she said. “We only had frozen fillets from the Mediterranean.”

Chefs were taught to prefer mediocre European ingredients, like frozen fish and dried morels, over excellent local ones.

“Even in Mexico, only European cuisines had been able to reach high stature,” said Daniela Soto-Innes, a chef at Cosme and Atla in New York. “Mexican chefs did not have enough pride in their own food to go out and learn about it.”

Much of the shift is due to her mentor, Enrique Olvera, who opened the ambitious restaurant Pujol in Mexico City in 2000, went to New York to open Cosme and Atla, and has become an international avatar of the possibilities of Mexican cuisine. Like Redzepi in Denmark and David Chang in the United States, Olvera is a chef who pushed his country’s fine-dining transition from stuffy, Eurocentric and strict, to creative, local and informal.

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There are plenty of complex, elaborate dishes in Mexico, like chiles in nogada or mole poblano, but Olvera decided long ago not to translate them into high-end restaurant food.

“If you are going to cook those things, you’d better get it right,” he said. “It’s like a cover of a really good song: when you’re listening to it, you’re really craving the original.”

Setting out to learn everything from real Oaxacan moles to traditional Aztec chocolate would have been impossible, he said – and for most customers, meaningless.

“‘Authentic’ has become a very unimportant and irrelevant conversation for me,” he said.

Instead, Olvera took the training he had absorbed at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and began spinning his own threads of flavour, memory and technique. His most famous dish, cobia al pastor, recombines a traditional taco filling of fatty pork grilled with pineapple into a plump local fish fillet that is marinated in chile paste, then sautéed in butter, served with a purée of caramelised pineapple and a crisp, palate-prickling dice of raw onion, cilantro and serrano chiles.

Outside Mexico, Olvera’s influence is greatest in the United States, where many young chefs, particularly Mexican-Americans, have made pilgrimages to his kitchen and are building on his style.

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At Taco María in Costa Mesa, California, the chef Carlos Salgado produces a daily meditation on the classic dish aguachile (“spicy water”) – tangy liquid used to dress super-fresh raw fish just before eating it, preferably on the boat or the beach. A recent bowl held a fat Hokkaido scallop, cucumber and avocado bathed in jalapeño, lime and orange juices, but even when the ingredients change, the effect is the same. “You are looking for an extremely aggressive but uplifting liquid of spice and acid and sweetness,” he said. “That’s the essence of the dish.”

Val Cantu, the chef at Californios in San Francisco, serves a tightly assembled menu of more than a dozen tiny, complex dishes based on Mexican ingredients. His homage to beans includes corona bean mousse, cranberry bean purée and black bean broth, topped with a dot of caviar and gold leaf. “I like the contrast of the humble and the luxurious,” he said.

Not everyone does. Both restaurants have sometimes had to placate confused or outraged customers. “We’ve had people get up and leave halfway through the meal,” Cantu said ruefully. “They say that this isn’t Mexican food.”

But is it? “I try to think of it the way the artist Bruce Nauman did,” Cantu said. “He said, ‘If I’m an artist, and I am in my studio, the work I produce there is art.’

“If I am Mexican, and I am making food, that is Mexican food.”

© New York Times