LAT: Mexico City's new wave of chefs generates heat

latimes.com

Mexico City's new wave of chefs generates heat
By Corie Brown
Times Staff Writer

February 23, 2005

Photo 1:
http://tinyurl.com/3my45
Caption:
Avant Dish
Martha Ortiz, owner of Águila y Sol, is one of several Mexico City chefs
creating unconventional Mexican cuisine.
(Chris Vail / For The Times)

Photo 2:
http://tinyurl.com/6nbxr
Caption:
Making waves
Gabriela Camara, with Agustín Vazquez, at her restaurant Contramar.
(Chris Vail / For The Times)


Margaritas made with volcanic ash. Braised oysters with chipotle béarnaise.
Foie gras with habañero-spiked guava. There's a revolution afoot in this
city's restaurants.

The eyebrow reflexively shoots up. The first thought is globalization, that
creeping sameness that threatens cultural individuality when tradition fades
in favor of pop sensibilities.

But to understand what's happening with cutting-edge Mexico City cooking, it
is important first to understand what's happening in the Condesa-Roma
district, side-by-side Mexico City neighborhoods built at the turn of the
last century. Located on the southern side of Chapultepec Park, the city's
expansive green space just west of the old downtown, Condesa and Roma were
all but abandoned after the 1985 earthquake sent wealthy Mexicans racing for
the suburbs. The slide into decay was rapid in this crime-ridden city of
about 19 million people.

Twenty years later, Condesa and Roma are among the city's most exciting
neighborhoods as under-40 professionals embrace the city anew. These
upper-class young Mexicans, better educated and more worldly than their
parents, are tearing down rickety midcentury buildings to make room for
edgy, modern architecture; they're diligently restoring historic homes and
hotels. Bookstores and art galleries share the tree-lined streets with
sidewalk cafes serving cuisines from around the globe ‹ and Mexican food
that doesn't remind them of their mother's.

These professionals have a serious restaurant habit, says Guillermo Osorno,
the editorial director of dF, the capital's city magazine. The restaurant
scene is booming, with three times as many top-tier restaurants doing a
brisk business today compared with five years ago.

Going out for serious Mexican food is in itself a change in the culture. "In
Mexico City, we feel that the best Mexican food is what we have in our
homes. Mexican food in restaurants has always been a step down," says
Osorno. "Now we have a kind of Mexican food that you can only find in
restaurants. That's new."

This generation also has been eager to redefine what it means to be Mexican,
says Gabriela Camara, a 29-year-old entrepreneur whose Contramar seafood
restaurant is one of the most vibrant spots in Condesa-Roma. "These days,
Mexico is hot in the art world. We have our own fashion designers,
architects, musicians. Our actors are hot in Hollywood. Everything Latin has
enormous possibilities," she says.

And it doesn't have the old limitations. When Camara and a group of friends
fresh from university couldn't find a place they wanted to eat at, they
opened Contramar, the city's first "beach food" restaurant. And from that
moment seven years ago, business-suited professionals have lined up outside
its door waiting to snag tables.

"Traditionally, good food in Mexico City was expensive French or Italian or
Spanish, and then there were taco stands," says Camara, who now has seven
restaurants, including two tapas bars, an Italian trattoria and an
American-style diner. "My generation is willing to be Mexican without being
traditional."

Camara's attitude is reflected in her food. Tuna sashimi tostadas with
chipotle sauce and sautéed leeks are her signature dish: It's a simple
combination that brings Japanese and French sensibilities to a Mexican
standard.

A handful of women, including Camara, are making waves by treating
traditional Mexican cuisine with less reverence. At Águila y Sol, Martha
Ortiz, 38, turns heads with her flamboyant presentations and unexpected
combinations of common ingredients. And Monica Patiño, 50, is redefining
Pan-Asian dishes with the zip of Mexican chiles and herbs like epazote at MP
Bistro Café.

Even Patricia Quintana, whose 1986 "The Taste of Mexico" is the featured
cookbook for sale at the National Museum of Anthropology, is throwing
hibiscus flowers into her mole and wrapping up masa-less tamales at her
restaurant, Izote.

'Absurd' for some

Not everyone is charmed by the new Mexican cuisine. Diana Kennedy, the
British-born author of the seminal "The Art of Mexican Cooking,"
characterized it as "barbaric" in an issue last May of Mexico City's dF
magazine. "Ridiculous," she called Ortiz's dishes. "Absurd."

Kennedy, who has spent the past five decades chronicling the history of
Mexican cooking and compiling the recipes universally respected as
"authentic," was no kinder to Quintana, calling her new ideas "a horrible
distortion" of Mexican cuisine. However, she wasn't universally dismissive
of the movement: She proclaimed Camara's tuna sashimi tostadas to be "very
good." Kennedy was not available for comment.

"It's quite a challenge for these chefs," says dF magazine's Osorno. He
predicts that not all of this first wave of chefs will survive. Still, the
popularity of culinary experimentation appears to be growing. "These new
chefs have a public persona, like authors and artists. Their cookbooks sell
well. The most powerful people in the country are always in their
restaurants," Osorno says.

Of Mexico City's new-wave chefs, only Camara started in Condesa-Roma; the
other exciting restaurants are in Polanco, a chic neighborhood on the north
side of Chapultepec Park. If Condesa-Roma is Greenwich Village, Polanco is
Beverly Hills.

Patiño, who dares to serve Asian food with a Mexican flair at MP Bistro
Café, sees her food as part of a natural evolution. Kennedy gave Mexicans
the "treasure" of their culinary heritage, Patiño explains. "When we want to
know something about Mexican food, we go to Diana Kennedy. I can't read my
grandmother's recipes. She wrote down 'add chiles,' but she didn't say what
kind or how many." Now that the anthropological heavy lifting has been done,
anything is possible, she says. "Before you can break the rules, you have to
know them."

After establishing La Taberna del León as a standard-bearer among
traditional Mexican restaurants, Patiño opened MP Bistro Café to cater to a
younger crowd. That menu includes Mexican corn chowder spiced with curry,
braised oysters with chipotle béarnaise and dim sum infused with Mexican
herbs.

Walk into Águila y Sol and you're immediately struck by the décor, which
celebrates Mexico's traditional cultu A huge volcanic rock metate (a
traditional stone for grinding Mexican corn) sits near the door; antique
Xochistlahuaca clothing from the state of Guerrero graces the walls.
Upstairs in the stark white dining rooms, however, it's pure Nuevo Mexican:
A suspended ceiling lighted from above provides architectural drama.

With the seriousness of an academician, which she was, Ortiz explains, "I
really feel that Mexican cuisine is very sensual. It is made by women and
comes from a great heritage of Mexican women. I want to honor them by making
each plate an object of beauty."

Surrounded by the swirl of beautiful people who have made her 3-year-old
restaurant a center of excitement, Ortiz has a bodyguard by her side. He's
one of dozens in the restaurant, as well as on the street in front on a
recent Tuesday night. In Mexico City, the rich and powerful are plagued by
kidnappings, an economic more than a political crime in this stratified
society.

Even amid such chaos, the food commands attention.

She serves fideo (vermicelli) sauced with black mole, garnished with fried
chiles and queso panela and served with a spicy pasilla mole dipping sauce
on the side. Mole, of course, is traditional, as is fideo; what's
unconventional is serving them together. Even more radical is serving two
moles, one on top of the other. "I don't change the recipe for the mole,"
says Ortiz. "It needs to taste like smoke and earth, the taste of brutality.
I change the mix of the meats and the presentation." Sometimes she serves it
with steamed and shredded duck sprinkled with black Asian sesame seeds.



Changing times

Mexico has changed, says Ortiz, the author of eight cookbooks, bestsellers
in Mexico but not available in English. "We're starting to recognize that we
can vote in new governments, we can make changes and we can make mistakes,"
she says, referring obliquely to her disappointment with President Vicente
Fox. "Maybe the experiments won't take us to the best places, but we have to
try. We're exploring our culture."

One of her more startling experiments was an all-black Day of the Dead meal
that Ortiz created for a cooking class in Tepoztlán. Ortiz started the meal
with margaritas made with volcanic ash, then served dark huitlacoche (corn
fungus) quesadillas with goat cheese and black habañero sauce, duck in
smoke-scented mole and sea bass with chirmole, a mole darkened with charred
chiles.

Camara's simple seafood dishes at Contramar stand in stark contrast to
Ortiz's over-the-top creations and Patiño's Asian fusion. Camara isn't a
chef, nor has she written cookbooks. She was a history student following the
footsteps of her Harvard-educated parents when she veered off that path to
open Contramar in the then run-down western end of Roma. She and her friends
took inexpensive industrial space, stapled straw mats to the ceiling,
painted fish skeletons on the walls and opened a seafood restaurant to
remind them of lazy days at the beach. One of Camara's first creations was
the tuna sashimi tostada.

Camara gives her guests fresh-made corn and flour tortillas and a dazzling
assortment of seafood dishes to fill them with. Octopus and shrimp seasoned
generously with five different dried chiles. Thin slices of raw scallops
covered with raw red onions in lemon juice and olive oil with cracked pepper
and coarse salt. Sautéed soft-shell crab, roughly chopped with onions and
cilantro. The line outside Contramar forms when the restaurant opens at 1:30
p.m. and lasts until it closes at 6:30 p.m., Mexico City's traditional lunch
hours.

Most of the Nuevo Mexican chefs are women, says Camara, because women are
the cooks in Mexico. But that's changing too. Two new chefs to watch: Benito
Molina, who just opened a new seafood restaurant, Manzanilla; and Enrique
Olver, who is turning heads with his Spanish-Mexican experiments at Pujol.

"Each of these chefs is different," says Magda Bogin, a New York writer who
runs Cocinar Mexicano, the cooking school that featured Ortiz's all-black
menu. But as a group, they stand out in the topography of Mexican cooking.
"Upper-class Mexican food was always the blandest, dumbed-down Mexican
food," she says. "These women are changing that."

*

Contramar tuna tostadas with chipotle mayonnaise

Total time: 45 minutes

Servings: 4

Note: From Gabriela Camara of Contramar restaurant

Chipotle mayonnaise



1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 large egg

1/4 rounded teaspoon salt

1/2 cup light olive oil

1 chipotle chile

1. Put lemon juice, egg and salt in a blender. Slowly start blending the
ingredients, adding oil little by little, until the mayonnaise is thick and
you have added all the oil.

2. Add the chipotle chile and blend in. Makes three-fourths cup. You will
have some left after making the tostadas.

Tostadas



1 1/2 cups oil (for deep frying)

8 (3-inch-diameter) corn

tortillas

2 leeks (about 1 cup sliced)

2 teaspoons olive oil

Salt

10 ounces sashimi-quality tuna, sliced one-fourth inch thick then cut in
half, if necessary

1/4 cup soy sauce

1/4 cup lemon juice

1 Hass avocado, peeled,

pitted and cut into eighths

1/4 cup chipotle mayonnaise

1. Heat the oil in a deep skillet to 350 degrees. Fry each tortilla until
crisp, about 2 minutes. Drain between paper towels. Set aside.

2. Slice the leeks (white part only) into one-fourth-inch-wide julienne.
Heat the olive oil in a skillet over very low heat. Add the leeks, sprinkle
with a little salt and cook until soft but not browned, about 5 to 7
minutes.

3. Marinate the tuna slices in the soy sauce and lemon juice for 2 minutes.
Drain.

4. Spread 1 1/2 teaspoons chipotle mayonnaise on each tostada. Divide the
tuna among the tostadas. Top the tuna with the leeks and add a slice of
avocado to each tostada.

Each serving of 2 tostadas:

456 calories; 21 grams protein;

24 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams fiber; 32 grams fat; 5 grams saturated fat;
47 mg. cholesterol; 625 mg. sodium.



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