Best Food Writing 2015 (15 page)

The country's biodiversity seems to always be the topic of conversation here when it comes to food. You have tree resins that can be turned into gels and more naturally occurring fruits and freshwater fish than anywhere else on earth, but there's a spirit of culinary innovation here too. It has existed for as long as humans have walked the Andes, from the Incas finding ways to freeze dry potatoes to expand their empire to Japanese chefs in the '70s tweaking how long citric acid should be doused over raw fish for ceviche. Osso isn't just a butcher shop or a carnivore's paradise. It's another part of that story.

In Search of the Perfect Taco
In Search of the Perfect Taco

B
Y
J
EFF
G
ORDINIER

From the
New York Times T Magazine

          
Wide-ranging curiosity and enthusiasm enliven Jeff Gordinier's food and culture writing for the
New York Times
.
^*
*
Those qualities make him a perfect guide for this gastronomic road trip: cruising around Mexico with star chefs René Redzepi (Noma) and Danny Bowien (Mission Chinese).

          
“Closing my eyes

          
I open them inside your eyes.”

                  
—
Octavio Paz, “Across”

It happens on a Thursday morning in Oaxaca, and everyone at the table can see it. René Redzepi takes a bite of a breakfast dish that has been placed in front of him, and something passes across his face like a wave of light. Over the years there have been pilgrims who have traveled to Mexico to experience mind alteration with buttons of peyote, but for Redzepi, a man who is often referred to as the greatest chef in the world, transcendence comes in the form of enfrijoladas.

Admittedly, it doesn't look like the food of the gods. Enfrijoladas consist of little more than soft handmade corn tortillas that have been blanketed with a sauce made out of pulverized black beans. It's classic peasant food—simple and satisfying, with an aesthetic that suggests a
big smudge on a plate. But what ferries Redzepi through the portals of illumination is a leaf. The trailblazing Oaxacan chef Alejandro Ruiz, who is beaming at the head of the table at his Casa Oaxaca Café with his wife and son, has spiked this black-bean sauce with a hidden depth charge of flavor: patches of foliage from a local avocado tree. The leaves electrify the sauce with an unexpected thrum of black licorice. Suddenly it's clear that simplicity is only what we see on the surface. With one bite, layers begin to reveal themselves.

“You think you know what it's going to taste like,” Redzepi says. “This to me is the best mouthful I've had in Mexico. I can't believe the flavor of this leaf. Wow. I'm getting chills.”

“I never take pictures of food, but I have to,” mutters Danny Bowien, an American chef who has come along for the ride. “I have to, man.”

Redzepi has traveled to Oaxaca on something of a crusade. People who know about the chef's cooking at Noma, in Copenhagen, might be surprised to learn that the man who is cast as the charismatic godfather of the New Nordic movement that has transformed the global restaurant landscape has a gastronomic infatuation that's as far from the forests and fjords of Scandinavia as you can get. Redzepi is truly, madly, deeply in love with Mexico.

I learned about this one cold afternoon when I met the 36-year-old Dane at a coffee shop in downtown Manhattan. I figured we'd spend an hour or so murmuring in solemn Ingmar Bergmanish tones about the chilly wonders of the wind-blasted Scandinavian shore. Much to my surprise, Redzepi carried himself with a bright, self-effacing, surfer-like casualness. He seemed practically Californian. After a few minutes, he stopped talking about the New Nordic thing altogether. Instead, he drifted into a trance state about the flavors of Mexico and the great, game-changing chefs he had befriended all over the country. He mentioned Ruiz, Enrique Olvera, Roberto Solís. He got a faraway look in his eyes. He assured me that Mexico was the Next Place in the evolution of global gastronomy—a “sleeping giant” about to wake up with a roar.

He liked to say that for decades—centuries, really—the indigenous spirit of Mexican cooking had been muffled, like the ruins of a Mayan temple buried beneath a Catholic church put up by Spanish conquerors: “For many years in fine dining in Mexico, you had the cathedral on
top of the pyramid. With chefs like Enrique Olvera, the pyramid starts to become visible again.” After the innovations of Ferran Adrià's experimental cuisine in Spain and the New Nordic movement in Scandinavia, gastronomes have been amping up their interest in Mexico and Central and South America. In the United States, chefs like Roy Choi, April Bloomfield, Alex Stupak, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Wesley Avila and Bowien are finding ways to reinterpret the taco, and around the world there's a burgeoning sense that the culinary spotlight might be shifting to Mexico. Cloudberries and lumpfish roe? What Redzepi was really craving was a taco.

And so, for nearly a week, he planned to eat, talk and swoon his way through Mexico City, Oaxaca, Tulum and Mérida. The most influential chef on the planet was about to embark on the ultimate taco quest.

These days Noma occupies the top spot on the most attention-getting international ranking of elite kitchens: the annual list of the World's 50 Best Restaurants. It first landed there in 2010, propelled by Redzepi's aptitude for wresting deliciousness and color from the austerity of the surrounding landscape. Noma's cookbooks overflow with a bounty of nourishments that many of us didn't even know we could eat: musk ox and milk skin, sea buckthorn and beach mustard, bulrushes and birch sorbet, ramson leaves and rowan shoots, Cladonia lichen and Icelandic dulse, pig's blood and ants and hay. Somehow Redzepi brings out the stark beauty in his foraged, fermented, smoked and salvaged ingredients, and, perhaps even more impressively, he makes you want to pick them up with your fingers and place them on your tongue. He comes across as a man with a mission, and his overriding manifesto might boil down to this: Look more deeply. There is so much around us to relish.

On the surface, the cuisine of Mexico might seem like the New Nordic movement's chile-peppered antithesis. You don't find a lot of jalapeños in Denmark. What you do find there is the same thing you can scarf down in college towns around the United States: fat, bland burritos, watery salsa made with half-white tomatoes and cheap, cheese-gooey nachos that are about as far from the true flavor of Mexican food as Speedy Gonzales is from Emiliano Zapata. For most of his life, that's what Redzepi assumed Mexican food was. “I'll be honest with you,” he
says. “Back then, my idea of Mexican food was what we have in Europe, which is like a bastardized version of Tex-Mex. Everything's terrible. It's grease, it's fat, it's big portions. That was my impression.”

But in the summer of 2006, Solís, a cook who had interned in the kitchen at Noma, invited his former boss to the Yucatán Peninsula for a few days of cooking at Nectar, his pioneering restaurant in the sleepily mesmerizing city of Mérida. Redzepi soon found himself on a draining daisy chain of flights from Copenhagen to Mexico. “It was one of those stupid trips,” he remembers. “I was just so tired and bummed out.” He arrived in Mérida in a sour, foggy mood, and much to his annoyance, Solís immediately escorted him to Los Taquitos de PM, an open-air taco stand on a desolate thoroughfare. This is what Redzepi found: “Coca-Cola. Plastic chairs everywhere. Mexican music out of a loudspeaker.” Not exactly the French Laundry. Solís ordered three plates of tacos al pastor. In the dish, chunks of pork, stained scarlet after first being bathed in a chile sauce with achiote and other spices, are shaved off a spinning vertical skewer and placed on a bed of corn tortillas with strips of pineapple on top. It is said that Lebanese immigrants helped create the dish when they brought shawarma to Mexico, which means that tacos al pastor qualifies as a weird example of Mayan-Caribbean-Middle-Eastern fusion. But all you need to know is that when the gods find themselves hunting for drunk food after a bender on Mount Olympus, these tacos are what they want. They're that satisfying.

Redzepi had never seen such tacos before. He winced. Pineapple? he thought. Like on a bad pizza? Then he took a bite and his worldview trembled and reeled. “That first mouthful,” he says. “Soft. Tasty. Acidic. Spicy. It's like when you have sushi and it's great for the first time. I couldn't believe it. My virginity was taken. In the best possible way.”

From then on, Redzepi couldn't stop himself. It was as though he was caught up in an intoxicating affair. Even as he polished and perfected the New Nordic cuisine that would make him famous, he started slipping away for pilgrimages to Mexico. Back in Denmark he had to uproot flavor by yanking at tufts of sea grass and burrowing his fingers into the dirt, but here, in the massive open-air markets of Oaxaca and Mexico City, the bounty overwhelmed him. Walking through these markets was like spinning through an aromatic fun house.

Look more deeply, the country seemed to say to him. There is so
much around us to relish. In street carts as well as in high-end restaurants, Mexicans were cooking with ant eggs and fried grasshoppers and seeds and sprigs and pods and powders and more varieties of chiles than he could count. Every village and roadside stall felt like a new world. Redzepi might try to make enfrijoladas outside of Mexico, but even he would probably fail. “You have to have an avocado leaf,” he says. “From that little tree. On a hill. Near Oaxaca.”

“It's like a whole new energy enters your body when you come out to these parts,” says Eric Werner, the chef and co-owner of the Tulum restaurant Hartwood. As he says this, that energy is being delivered in the form of thunderous jolts to the spinal column. We're in a Jeep heading into the humid thickets of the Yucatán jungle, and the red-dirt road is turning into a thumping riot of dips and jags.

“This is where it gets worse,” Werner says.

“This is where it flips over,” Redzepi says.

The vehicle keeps tossing back and forth like a dinosaur's plaything. Redzepi is holding a Ziploc bag with an aloe vera leaf jutting out of it. Yesterday, on the beach in Tulum, he fell asleep on a lounge chair and ended up with a stinging sunburn. Every now and then he squeezes the spiny leaf and applies a dab of fresh goop to his face. The aloe fills the Jeep with a gamey scent. Flanking the road are thousands of teeming anthills. Redzepi starts wondering whether the ants are edible. Werner, a 36-year-old with the tangly beard and piercingly bright eyes of an Old Testament prophet, is an American, but in 2009 he and his wife, Mya Henry, uprooted their lives in a gentrifying New York City and headed for the shaggy-drifty refuge of Tulum. A year later, they opened Hartwood, which has quickly gained a reputation for the elemental beauty and purity of its food. Many of Hartwood's chief ingredients come straight from a milpa, a rural organic farm a couple of hours away from Tulum where the “crops” seem to sprout straight out of the surrounding wilderness.

It's that milpa that we're bouncing into now. When we get there, Redzepi enters another state of rapture. He darts around the rocky, weedy expanse with Werner and Antonio May Balan, the 54-year-old father of 10 whose family has tended this land for many years. (Balan and his wife, who come here a couple days per week, sleep in
hammocks that hang from the ceiling of a tin-roofed shed in the middle of the milpa; they speak to each other not in Spanish but in a Mayan language.) Redzepi approaches this land and its produce with the same voracious curiosity that he might bring to a sylvan glade back in Scandinavia, except that for him, being here is akin to being on Mars. There are dwarfish lime trees. There are pineapples that seem to be popping up from the ground like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” pods. There are chiles the size of Tic Tacs that, when plucked from a branch and placed on your tongue, unleash an instant conflagration of capsaicin. “I burrow into the rare ingredients,” Werner says. “I try to find what's most rare.”

“And how excited does that make a chef?” Redzepi says. “It's like a present. A new flavor.”

After a tour of the milpa and lunch in the shed, Werner presents Redzepi with a gift: a machete. “Look, I'm walking out of the jungle with a bag of mangoes and a machete,” Redzepi says. As we steel ourselves for the ride back out, Redzepi spots a long, green, Seussian fruit dangling from the branch of a tree. “This is the weirdest fruit I've seen,” he says. “This is like something from a Tim Burton movie.” Werner says he doesn't even know what to call it. Redzepi suggests “torpedo fruit.” (I later learn that it is bonete, which is papaya-ish and native to the region.)

If Redzepi were to shimmy up the trunk of the tree and lop off the torpedo fruit with his newfound blade, none of us would be the least bit surprised. His hunger for those new flavors borders on the pathological. On the way back to Tulum, we drop into a market and take a whiff of a sphere of flora that appears to be some kind of evolutionary prank: On the outside it looks like a pumpkin, but when you smell it, you realize it's as sweet as a cantaloupe. (Werner refers to it as a melón de milpa.) When top chefs get hold of these ingredients, the results can be consciousness-shifting.