Food
Mix Masters
Three trend-setting Mexico City restaurants defy tradition by blending native and European cuisines.
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In her long, white chef’s apron, jeans, and rolled terry cloth headband, Patiño looks very much the modern, casual, professional woman. A youthful 35, with delicate features and a mane of chestnut hair, she is one of a handful of female restaurateurs or chefs in the city. “I was twenty-two when I opened La Taberna del León,” she said shyly, referring to her first restaurant (now closed) in a resort at Valle de Bravo, outside Mexico City. Last December, she and her husband, Alberto Miguel Musi, opened La Galvia.
The restaurant, a month old when we visited, was going like gangbusters. It took a good ten minutes of pleading with the maître d’ to scrounge up an empty table at opening time on Saturday night, and at one in the morning, the dining room was still a quarter full of dalliers having a last cup of cappuccino. The modern decor—with terra-cotta walls, stout turquoise pillars, contemporary art—was part of the appeal, but Patiño’s cutting-edge menu was the drawing card. “I don’t have a name for my cuisine,” she admitted, “but it is French and Mexican and a little oriental. I cook the way I like. My style is without borders.”
On our first visit, Patiño’s menu included two noteworthy ethnically inspired dishes. The first, puntas de filete en caldillo, translated into beef tips in broth, with homey strips of chile poblano, kernels of sweet corn, and herbal epazote; it came off as a kind of Mexican boeuf bourguignon. The real knockout, though, was Patiño’s fried snapper taco—huachinanguito frito. Served whole, the marinated fish arrived in the company of thin, crêpelike tortillas, assorted greens (including a breath of mint), and pineapple sauce spiked with merciless chile de árbol. Picture perfect, the dish was almost too pretty to eat—but not quite.
Compared to Isadora, La Galvia lacks a certain poetic spirit, but it excels in modernity. The menu is, if anything, even more influenced by the tradition-busting tenets of nouvelle cuisine and new American cuisine. For another, the vegetables and herbs are grown organically by the restaurant, a practice unheard of in Mexico City. But the real key to the restaurant’s success is Patiño herself, a media-genic young woman who would clearly be a star in the United States.
The difference is that in Mexico, chefs are employees, not celebrities. They may have studied in France, and they may make good to excellent money ($1,000 a month in a nice Mexico City restaurant, $3,000 a month as an executive chef in a big hotel). But their names do not appear in gossip columns like those of young turks in the U.S. Nor do they turn out upon inspection to be former lawyers and dentists who switched to the glamorous job mid-career. Patiño is different. Not only has she studied in France at La Varenne and Le Nôtre as well as at three-star restaurants, but also she is well-educated (she speaks three languages) and articulate. Plus, she’s attractive, young, owns her own place, and she’s a woman. In the U.S., she would be hailed as a new Alice Waters, the well-publicized owner of Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California. In Mexico, she just might be the first person to bring a dash of charisma to a workaday profession.
If Isadora is the most poetic and La Galvia the most modern of the Mexico City restaurants dabbling in cross-cultural cuisine, Los Naranjos is the most intellectual. Its chef and director, Alicia Gironella—a pretty woman of perhaps sixty with a regal bearing and extravagantly penciled eyebrows—is a founding member of the Círculo Mexicano de Arte Culinario, a group of eight socially prominent women who have taken it upon themselves to get Mexican cuisine the respect it deserves. Her mustachioed and bearded husband, Jorge De’Angeli, is a writer and professor of gastronomic history at the Iberoamerican University. Together they have collaborated on everything from cookbooks to restaurant criticism. At Los Naranjos, food is both a sensual pleasure and a field of inquiry.
Leaning conspiratorily over a magdalena (a tequila sunrise in the States) in her cozy restaurant in a commercial part of Mexico City, Gironella ordered us a sampler from what she calls her modern Mexican cuisine. Plates came steaming from the kitchen.
Of a score of dishes, three stood out. The chicken—rolled and sliced sushi-style, with a filling of ricotta cheese and the austere green called hoja santa (holy leaf)—was a gem that looked Japanese but tasted Mexican. The cabuches were a revelation. Tasting like a cross between artichoke, asparagus, and hearts of palm, the plump little cactus-flower buds came nouvelle style in dual sauces—cheese and tomato—with chopped epazote sprinkled on top. The marvel of Gironella’s sampler, though, was dessert: a trio of homemade tropical-fruit ice creams so exotic that they took our breath away. The guanábana and pumpkin were excellent, and the mamey was simply incredible. Imagine the juiciest, most heavenly peach you’ve ever eaten, then add to that the barest hint of mango. Once you’ve eaten mamey ice cream at Los Naranjos, your life will never be the same.
As remarkable as Gironella’s best dishes are, she has done more in the three years that Los Naranjos has been open than just achieve personal success. She has also bridged the chasm that exists in Mexico between men and women in the cooking profession. Female cooks in Mexico City are called mayoras (elders) and are, by and large, women of the lower class, frequently unlettered, who learned the art of cooking as girls. They run the kitchens of modest restaurants, and their food is invariably Mexican. Men make up the ranks of chefs, and they prevail in fancy restaurants, most having started out as pot scrubbers or busboys and worked their way up. The more ambitious go on to study in France or Italy (Mexico has no cooking schools that compare with Paris’ Cordon Bleu or New York’s Culinary Institute of America). Thanks to Gironella’s social class, writing, teaching, and association with the culinary circle, she had achieved the professional standing normally reserved for men. As De’Angeli observed, gazing admiringly at his wife, she is one of a kind.
Doors are opening in the world of Mexican cuisine, and these three restaurants—soon to be joined by the Villa Reforma, a famous old name going modern—are leading the way. Where as “European” was once equivalent to haute cuisine and “Mexican” to home cooking, today there is a common ground and a defiant mood that the gap can and must be bridged. A whiff of liaisons dangereuses pervades the experimentation—five years ago, who would have dared put chipotle in a classic French hollandaise?—but as the successes mount, timidity is changing to confidence. For much of its history, Mexico has thought that it must humbly learn at the knee of other cuisines; now it is discovering that it can teach as well.
Isadora, Moliére 50, Polanco district (520-7901 or 202-0604). Lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday.
La Galvia, Campos Elíseos 247, Polanco (203-4556 or 203-4419). Lunch and dinner. Closed Sunday.
Los Naranjos, Ejército Nacional 340, Polanco (254-7877 or 203-8250). Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Closed Monday evening, Saturday, and Sunday.
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