In Mexico City, no matter where you are, you’re steps from a taco. That unmistakable aroma of grilled meat, chiles, onions, and earthy corn tortillas may emanate from a busy street stand or hole-in-the-wall shop, its walls blackened by decades of smoke. Or maybe the scent is coming from a corner vendor hawking blue corn squash blossom quesadillas, or from a market stall known for its tacos de guisados (topped with saucy stews).

Tacos are an integral part of daily life from the Southwestern U.S. to Central America, but in Mexico, they’re so omnipresent that the phrase “echarse un taco” (to down a taco) is shorthand for “let’s grab a bite.” Much of Mexican gastronomy has been influenced by immigrants from Europe and beyond, but corn tortillas have been consumed here since pre-Hispanic times, and the idea of wrapping food in them precedes written history. The taco is ingenious—it is plate, fork, and spoon. Its three elements—tortilla, filling, and salsa—need to be well crafted and of high quality as balance is the key to a great taco.

Tacos were originally sold from carts or baskets by itinerant vendors, but the earliest taquerías (restaurants specializing in tacos) appeared around the turn of the 20th century.  Many of my favorite places go back to the 1940s and ‘50s. While the earliest venues usually specialized in the aforementioned guisados or simple grilled meats, the midcentury influx of Lebanese immigrants introduced the now iconic tacos al pastor, a fusion of spit-roasted shawarma with local ingredients. And recently, a new generation of chefs have begun highlighting local, seasonal produce that speaks to tradition and frequently incorporates foreign flavors. 

Even in the taquería mecca of Mexico City, not all tacos achieve greatness, but the ones served at these, my favorite haunts, always do. 

Taco de rib-eye at Taquería Los Parados

Monterrey 333, Roma Sur

Los Parados is, as its name implies, a standing-room-only hangout and a Mexico City institution. Tacosal carbón(cooked over coals)are the specialty, and the smoky aroma seduces patrons from half a block away. I’ve tried everything on the menu, but the rib-eye is the winner. Strips of tender, marbled meat come charred and juicy on a soft tortilla accompanied by ruby red tomato-guajillo and fresh green tomatillo salsas served out of big molcajetes (volcanic stone mortars). Local office workers congregate here during the day, while the late-night hours attract a motley cross-section of tired club patrons, off-duty workers from the nearby hospitals, and policemen who assiduously devour tacos by the plateful.

Taco de mole verde at Taquería El Jarocho

Tapachula 94, Roma Norte

This Colonia Roma landmark, in business since 1947, specializes in tacos de guisados. My repeat favorite is the mole verde: tender pork swathed in a luxuriant jade green sauce made with pumpkin seeds and the anise-like Oaxacan herb hoja santa. There are always a few vegetarian options as well, such as the old standards, poblano chiles in cream, or eggs in tomato sauce. While the prices are high for Mexico City, each taco comes topped with an extra tortilla, so it’s really a two-for-one. Rice-based horchata is the libation of choice.

Taco campechano of rib-eye and longaniza at Maizajo

Fernando Montes de Oca 113, Colonia Condesa

Maizajo, a Condesa hotspot, started out as a tortillería (tortilla factory) on a mission to promote fast-disappearing varieties of heirloom corn. In late 2023 it was expanded to become a restaurant, whose retro-tiled interior pays homage to taquerías of yore. The menu offers well-crafted versions of street-stand classics, including the campechano, a combination of sautéed rib-eye and housemade pork longaniza (a type of chorizo fragrant with chile de árbol). Heaped on a blue corn tortilla and garnished with chopped cilantro and onion, it’s best with a dollop of brick red salsa martajada (grilled tomatoes and chiles). Also worth noting is the grilled eggplant taco, a good plant-based option.

Taco de carnitas de costilla y buche at Amor y Tacos

Calle Corregidora 5 C, Centro Histórico
Calle 5 de Febrero 34, Centro Histórico

Amor y Tacos’ sign proudly proclaims its age: “Since 1958.” The beloved institution in the historic center recently relocated, but you’d never know it, thanks to the midcentury-style décor complete with sawdust-strewn floors and walls with slogans lauding taco culture: “Mexico is beautiful—Mexico is tacos,” proclaims one. The specialty here is carnitas, the Michoacán dish that’s now found all over the country (and the world). To make it, cooks boil a whole pig, viscera and all, in water perfumed with onion and garlic, then braise the meat in its own fat, confit-style. Tacos are then made to order according to the preferred cuts of meat. I usually order a combo of costilla (spare rib) and buche (stomach) because the ribs have all the flavor but can be dry without the succulent buche, whose melty texture is similar to tripe. Carnitas should be dressed with salsa, cilantro, onion, and an obligatory squeeze of lime.

Taco de jaiba suave at Siembra Taquería

Avenida Isaac Newton 256, Polanco

Siembra is the visionary project of chef Israel Montero, formerly of the acclaimed Raíz, who fronts this venue for restaurant versions of classic regional street tacos. The menu includes 20 options, many traditional, others creative, and all come atop tortillas made with local endemic corn. Popular are the cecina (salted dried beef) combined with housemade green chorizo; and the picaña con chicharron, grilled, juicy beef topped with crunchy cracklins. But the sleeper hit here is the deceptively simple jaiba suave (softshell crab), which comes tempura-fried, resting on its blue tortilla like a crispy little cloud. A drizzle of housemade Japanese-style mayo, a crown of shredded red cabbage, and a dash of salsa chiltepín—made from a tiny but potent chile—makes a great thing greater. The compact locale features pleasant outdoor seating under a shady wooden canopy.

Taco de chilorio at La Tonina

Serapio Rendón 27, Colonia San Rafael

In 1949, Tonina Jackson, a successful lucha libre wrestler, opened this restaurant to rectify the city’s dearth of cooking from the northern states of Sonora, Durango, Nuevo León, and Sinaloa. It was once the after-hours haunt of showbiz luminaries who frequented the spectacular Cine Opera, down the block and now in ruins. The restaurant may have lost its former glamor, but the food still sparkles. Flour tortillas—a rarity in the capital—are made from scratch and served fresh from the griddle. The fillings are beef-based as the north is cattle country. Chilorio, my favorite, reminds me of that Tex-Mex classic, chili con carne. A favorite in the markets of Sinaloa, it’s made with shredded beef, ají colorado, garlic, oregano, cumin, and vinegar.

Taco de chorizo verde at Ricos Tacos Toluca

Calle López 103, Colonia Centro

This open-to-the-street, standing-room-only taquería serves up specialties of nearby Toluca and Mexico State, namely, chorizo, cecina (salted dried beef), and obispo (stuffed offal along the lines of haggis) tacos. Red and green sausage links hang like Christmas ornaments above the griddle, and their spicy aroma entices passersby to stop for a tentempié (quick bite). The bright green chorizo verde, made with ground pork, serrano chiles, cilantro, tomatillos, spinach, and pine nuts, reminds this ex–New Yorker of the Italian sausage once proffered in Little Italy. Brightly colored salsas—chile-avocado, fresh pico de gallo, and roast tomato-chile—can be added to each diner’s liking.  

Taco de carnitas de buche y barriga at Taquería El Gran Abanico

Francisco J. Clavijero 226, Colonia Tránsito

This legendary carnitas purveyor occupies an entire block in the working-class Tránsito neighborhood south of the Centro. It is a pilgrimage site for aficionados of all stripes, who sit in the cavernous interior or spill onto the street to revel in all things pig. While some spring for the taco de maciza (pork loin), I recommend the “buche y barriga hecho a la plancha” (griddled pork belly and stomach). The extra pass on the grill gives the meat a crackly crust and brings out more flavor. Sides of sautéed nopalitos (cactus) and grilled cebollitas (baby onions) round out the proceedings, and a chela (slang for beer) is the perfect accompaniment.

Taco al pastor “negro” at Taquería El Trompo Imperial

Calle Río Lerma 43, Colonia Renacimiento

Tacos al pastor, iconic in the capital, are the Mexican interpretation of Middle Eastern shawarma, brought to the country by Lebanese immigrants in the middle of the last century. To make it, thin slices of achiote-marinated pork are stacked onto a trompo (upright skewer). Then, a peeled pineapple is placed on top, and the whole thing is grilled vertically and shaved to order by the pastorero with rhythmic elan. The meat is heaped onto a small tortilla, then topped with cilantro, onions, and salsa. Ex-music promoter and restaurateur Carlos Ruíz is the brains behind this refined neighborhood taquería. His version of al pastor stands out because it’s negro, “extra dark,” thanks to a marinade of smoky charred chilies. 

Taco de milanesa de res at Los Milanesos

Calle Glaciar 121, Colonia Olivar de los Padres

Los Milanesos stands alone—literally and figuratively. It’s located on a grassy strip in what feels like the middle of nowhere in the southwest part of the city, and its milanesa tacos are in a category of their own. Milanesas are breaded deep-fried cutlets of beef or chicken that can be layered with ham and cheese. To turn them into a taco, cooks here slice them into strips and bundle them in a tortilla with a schmear of frijoles refritos. The optional addition of fresh green or roasted tomato-chile salsa lends every bite a welcome zing. 

Taco de birria at Birria Las Margaritas

Mercado de La Merced, Pasillo 29 Banquetón, Centro

Birria, Jalisco’s signature dish, is a spicy, soupy stew of mutton or beef. It starts with a marinade combining several chiles and spices, such as cumin and oregano. The meat is then wrapped in leaves of the maguey plant (from which mezcal and tequila are extracted) and slow-roasted in pots sealed with corn masa. The dish is a specialty of this unassuming stand, which is run by the Gómez family from Guadalajara, and has just a few tables outside the Merced Market’s main building. Their recipe is a guarded secret, and once you taste the birria tacos garnished with cilantro, onions, and avocado—you’ll understand why. The bowl of accompanying consomé, ladled from a cauldron, is ambrosial with its balanced flavors of beef, chile, and spice.

Taco de pork belly cantonés at Cariñito Tacos

Guanajuato 53, Roma Norte

This tiny yet popular restaurant typifies the new breed of modern taquerías whose chefs don’t forsake traditions but add to them, fusing foreign techniques and ingredients with classic Mexican ones. Cariñito offers several types of pork belly tacos (plus a couple of vegetarian options such as grilled eggplant or cauliflower) that incorporate Korean and Chinese ingredients. The Cantonese, my favorite, consists of sous vide pork with a crackly chicharrón crust. It comes sliced and mounded on a housemade flour tortilla slicked with Korean barbecue sauce, then dressed with a chile and tamarind infusion and topped with lemony pickled carrots and turnips. This is Mexican-Asian fusion at its best. 

The post The Top 12 Tacos of Mexico City—And Where to Try Them appeared first on Saveur.

I’m a New England kid and whenever I travel, I’m always on the hunt for regional seafood specialties—from New Orleans’ crispiest fried oyster loaves to Patagonia’s cheesiest crab dip to to my own home state’s briniest bowl of chowder, meals from the sea always make me feel a little more at home in a new place. So when I was planning my beach vacation to Mexico recently, I knew I’d only be lounging poolside for so long before the itch to find some exceptional fish tacos kicked in. That’s how I wound up at Paradero, a new sea-to-table hotel in Todos Santos.

Todos Santos is an agriculturally rich oasis in the blistering desert of Baja California Sur, some 50 miles north of Los Cabos. Separating the hotel and the Pacific Ocean is a sweeping poblano chile field that creeps up the Sierra Laguna Mountains. Some guests decompress by the pool or under the stars in rooftop hammocks. Others take organic agriculture classes on the on-site kitchen garden or mountain bike through the surrounding farm country. And sure, I certainly did some of that—but like I said, I was mostly there for the fish.

Baja is well-known for its excellent and diverse seafood. On an earlier visit to the region, I had dived deep (literally) for a beloved local bivalve and enjoyed mounds of ceviche and aguachile. The peninsula’s fish tacos are particularly legendary, though, so I asked Paradero’s mountain biking guide, Diego Bautista, to show me around some of his favorite taco spots in town. Fast-talking and tall, Bautista is a Todos Santos local who lights up when asked about his hometown’s restaurants. “We really just have the best seafood here,” he told me, “so much better than Cabo.”

Unlike densely developed Los Cabos, Todos Santos (T.S. to locals) is quiet. At least for now, there’s plenty of high-quality local fish to go around to both no-fuss stools-in-the-sand restaurants and to more formal, chef-driven kitchens like the one at Paradero. When most think of Baja-style tacos, they imagine battered and deep-fried white fish—and we certainly sampled a lot of that in T.S. Most notable was the version served at Barracuda Cantina, which is Bautista’s favorite in the region. The cooks at this beachside restaurant coat fat strips of the day’s catch—grouper, when I was there—in a featherlight beer batter, then top the golden-fried fish with a crunchy slaw, fiery habanero salsa, guac, and a sprinkling of pico de gallo. It’s an exceptional example of the familiar style, best enjoyed between sips of one of the cantina’s tart-smoky-sweet mezcal cocktails.

After a short detour to Bautista’s favorite cevicheria, we got back to the taco task at hand. We headed further into town where the folks at Santo Chilote were making a more freestyle riff on the region’s battered-and-fried fish. There, sweet coconut-crusted shrimp are served unadorned atop chewy flour tortillas, and diners are free to top their own tacos, salad-bar style. My guide walked me through his preferred fixings: a few dots of fruity, Caribbean-style habanero sauce, pickled jalapeños, a generous drizzle of cooling crema, and a squeeze of lime. I followed his lead and didn’t regret it.

Back at Paradero, executive chef and Pujol alum Eduardo Ríos takes a more refined approach to the fish taco. His team nixtamalizes heirloom corn for handmade tortillas, which are fired off twice a day on a traditional wood-fired clay comal. Here too, the menu varies with the day’s catch. When Bautista and I returned to the hotel, stuffed from our hours-long eating excursion, Ríos was frying soft-shell crabs, which he then perched atop a tangle of tomato-pepper slaw, basil guac, and warm corn tortillas. A dollop of sesame salsa roja balanced the sweet crab with a fragrant and peppery heat; I devoured the thing in three, maybe four bites. While Ríos’s preparations are certainly more elegant and complex than the tacos we enjoyed in town, the chef doesn’t stray far from the spirit of the local formula, so rooted in impossibly fresh seafood.

The beauty of Todos Santos’ many tacos is, in part, their simplicity. While I couldn’t take Baja’s breathtaking backdrop with me, these days I find a glimmer of vacation by sourcing good-quality fish closer to home. If you’re staycationing this season, these recipes are a great way to make the Mexican seaside seem just a little bit closer.

Recipes

Soft-Shell Crab Tacos with Basil Guacamole and Sesame Salsa Roja

Get the recipe >

Coconut Fried Shrimp Tacos

Get the recipe >

Baja Fried Fish Tacos

Get the recipe >

The post The Quest to Find the Ultimate Fish Taco appeared first on Saveur.

The Tsotsil Maya call themselves the people of the corn. It grows readily in their home, in the foggy cloud forests of Chiapas in southern Mexico, the lush highlands in which their ancestors grew the grain for thousands of years before the first Europeans arrived. According to Mayan creation beliefs, humans were made from corn itself—white corn for men, yellow for women.

Blue Corn Pellizcadas with Salsa and Queso Fresco

Earlier this year, I visited a group of Tsotsil, far from their rural homeland, in the central city of Puebla, 65 miles southeast of Mexico City. They are an indigenous people who still speak their own language and maintain much of their rural way of life, but have come north temporarily with their families to work, perhaps to help pay medical bills or build a small cement-block house at home. When they make the 18-hour bus journey to this sprawling city of 3.5 million, they don’t carry much, but they do bring their food traditions. Life is very different here, where the Tsotsil women must shop the local markets for fresh corn and find a local molinero, or grinder, to make fresh masa for tamales and tortillas.

I had come as a guest of Yo’on Ixim, a small school and community center on a side street in the Loma barrio, to work with the women and help them share their stories and food traditions in a small cookbook. Yo’on Ixim began as a collaboration between Rosalina Ordóñez, a Tsotsil woman, and Samantha Greiff, a Mexican-­American born in Puebla. When they met in 2013, Ordóñez was selling chewing gum on a busy street corner. She spoke little Spanish and could neither read nor write it. But soon, these two very different women with barely a common language were working together—Greiff teaching Ordóñez Spanish, Ordóñez teaching Greiff enough Tsotsil vocabulary to learn about their culture and life.

Five years later, Yo’on Ixim has become a real school, with blackboards and cubby holes, three salaried teachers, a handful of volunteers, and 60 students, from age 4 to 38. Located in the same poor neighborhood where the families live when they are in Puebla, it is also a community center and cooperative, where Tsotsil women—typically unschooled and married by 14—can study and work together on intricately hand-embroidered gifts and weavings to sell at the tourist markets and online. Yo’on Ixim means “heart of corn,” a reminder that we are what we eat. My arrival coincided with an end-of-term celebration, and the schoolroom had been repurposed for an afternoon of making hundreds of blue corn tortillas on a coal-heated comal (griddle).

In Puebla, the men and boys easily blend in, with their modern clothes, but the Tsotsil women wear their native blusas—blouses of handwoven fabric, laboriously embellished with heavy black wool and fine, colorful metallic threads—over long black embroidered skirts, secured by woven cummerbunds, which are worn from the time the girls are very young. The extensive handiwork in a woman’s clothes is her pride and often her most valuable possession. Outside Puebla these garments could be treasures, but here the bright colors are a tell that the wearer is a migrant worker, rendering her invisible in many situations. Not all locals are kind, or open to trying to communicate with women who struggle with Spanish. Taxi drivers refuse them rides. Even shopping for groceries can become a nuanced cross-cultural dance. But as a unit of blue and purple, with several children in tow, the women of Yo’on Ixim moved through the giant Mercado Hidalgo at the southern end of the neighborhood, inspecting stall after stall of avocados, chiles, pineapples, nopales, or cactus paddles, and the prized pollos rancheros, yellow-skinned long-necked farm chickens that hang with heads and feet intact. After the group conferred and carried out some mandatory haggling with the shopkeeper, they bought several chickens for soup. Then their shopping bags quickly grew heavy: 37 pounds of fresh ayocote beans for tamales, 11 pounds of tomatoes, 11 more of onions, a bag of green peppers and chiles for salsa, and a bulging sack of dark green chayotes—small, dense squash—also for the chicken soup.

Upon return to Yo’on Ixim, the women carried in a squat tin coal stove, and the school space became an impromptu kitchen. There was a casual grace to the way they worked together: one holding the pot for another, while a third shooed several toddlers away from the fire. An older woman taught a younger one how to wrap the bean and masa tamales in banana leaves; Ordóñez, the cofounder, handled a machete like a paring knife. This way of working together is not traditional for the Tsotsil. In village families, the mother-in-law usually rules, but here in the city, it is experience and confidence that determines who adds the salt and tastes for seasoning, who sets the rhythm pressing pale blue masa to make tortillas.

Caldo de pollo is at once the simplest chicken soup and a celebration of bounty and community. It is, like most shared dishes the Tsotsil make, really just a vehicle to eat masses of tortillas. Hundreds of the disks, charred from the comal, were kept warm in baskets and plastic wash tubs lined with clean kitchen towels. The ayocote beans studded a dense masa for tamales steaming over a tin stove. Pellizcadas, a sort of thick tortilla, featured pinched rims to hold in spoonfuls of a simple tomato salsa and crumbled fresh cheese. Each dish celebrated corn, that heart of Tsotsil culture that tethers these families to their homes in the cloud forest so far away.

Mexican Chicken and Vegetable Soup

Tamales with Black Beans

The post The “Women of the Corn” Share More than Maize at Yo’on Ixim appeared first on Saveur.

Mezcal is a daunting world to enter: the range of flavors, the fact that there’s 46 different maguey species used to distill it, the traditions and history. But so much of what is known about mezcal has been twisted by marketing, and the majority of bottles are a weak version made by a few industrial producers like Zignum and Beneva, to name just two, whose factories loom outside Santiago Matatlán. These producers traffic in volume by using machines and automated processes adopted from tequila, as well as harvesting agave before they’re mature.

In Mexico, these industrial mezcals account for a majority of the market and are low in alcohol to appeal to the mass consumer—traditional mezcal is usually around 50% alcohol. Master mezcalera Sósima Olivera, who heads the co-operative FaneKantsini, says the complicated and expensive certification process to use the word “mezcal,” which involves lab testing and a mountain of paperwork, favors large businesses over traditional producers, so many don’t bother, and now you’ll see on small-batch labels “aguardiente de agave” or “destilado de agave.” “The difference between a destillado de agave and a mezcal is nothing but bureaucracy. You just have to pay to call it mezcal,” says Olivera.

Mezcal’s increasing popularity around the globe threatens the supply of maguey that can take up to 30 years to grow, and the capitalist ambitions of outsiders puts at risk the traditions and structures of the small towns and families that keep the spirit of mezcal alive. “There’s two ways to destroy a product,” says Eduardo ‘Lalo’ Angeles. “The people destroy it, or allow it to be destroyed; or others come and help to destroy it.” Angeles is always on the run, distilling, planting, teaching, advocating, and racing to preserve this tradition by refining techniques and supporting his community. What few understand, he explains, is that for farmers, mezcal has always come second to the milpa, the ancient technique of sowing maize, beans, and squash together. “The rural life is, at its base, associated with maize,” he says. “The production of mezcal was just seasonal. In the dry season, after the maize harvest, then they made mezcal.” His operation, Lalocura, in Minas, is in the minority of traditional producers—he estimates 5%—where mezcal is actually the primary product. “A new wave has to come, more conscious, wanting to make a different business dynamic,” says Angeles. “It’s worth the fight, because if not, then it’ll be destroyed like tequila.”

His mezcals are prized for their clean depths, which are produced through a rigorous process. For instance, it’s rare for producers, both big and small, to take the extra step of sorting and removing the blue and orange mold that grows on the piñas as they rest after having been cooked in a stone and earth oven. Some think these hongos add an interesting lactic, wet-cheese note, but Angeles sees it as a defect that distracts from the maguey itself.

Thankfully, mezcal’s popularity has offered more opportunities for younger generations to be involved, a crucial component of the industry’s future in Mexico. In Angeles’s palenque, the name traditionally used for where mezcal is made, the workers, as they are elsewhere, are young men, with an average age of 28. Most of Angeles’s generation, however, emigrated. It’s hard to find anyone in their 30s and 40s. The root cause was not a lack of work, but a terrible drought, says Angeles. No water meant no maize and a breakdown of the whole system—the U.S. is now full of master mezcaleros. Unfortunately, drought seems to be the new normal, as there’s been little rain the last two years. Lalo says only 10% of the town’s milpas were planted this year because of the drought, endangering families’ food supply.

While more youth are learning to make mezcal, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re learning about the land, says Graciela Angeles, Lalo’s sister and the head of Real Minero mezcal. “The main link to maintain between the world and mezcal is with the land. If you’re not connected to the land, you’re like a kite. What makes a complete mezcalero for me is this link to the land.”

At Real Minero, they laboriously cultivate 14 different maguey species from seeds in the nursery. Agaves can reproduce through offshoots called hijuelos, like transplanting cuttings from a succulent, or seeds. Seeds take more time but typically create better plants, as they contain more genetic diversity, whereas cuttings create clones. The biodiversity comes from the accidental hybrids created through the bats, bees, and hummingbirds cross-pollinating different species. A year after sowing the seeds in the nursery, they plant them in the fields. Ten or twenty years later they harvest them. It is a challenge to make business decisions based on such timelines and uncertainties. And this is where mezcal becomes incompatible with market growth and profit. How do you plan? What do you plant?

As an example, Graciela explains that a business bought 100 hectares of land in Minas, land that she was in love with, full of wild, beautiful karwinski agaves—the more tree-like plants are renowned for their diversity of magueys and their mineral and green flavors. “Someone stupid sold it to someone more stupid, and they tore out everything and planted espadin instead,” she says. Espadin is the workhorse of the industry, having been bred to grow quickly and produce a lot of sugar. More demand creates monocultures like this, which threaten the biodiversity—just look at the endless fields of blue agave that carpet the fields of Tequila.

A diversity of plants, as well as the local traditions of mezcaleros, lead to the near-infinite range of mezcal flavors. Oaxaca has the greatest variety of magueys because of geography and microclimates, and they use 20 to 25 different agaves for mezcal. Terroir is a tricky subject, says Yana Volfson, beverage director at Ticuchi, Cosme, and Atla. “There are no laws that say you can only make mezcal from magueys that are grown in your region, so a lot of people are buying magueys from other regions. I don’t see there being terroir in that. But for a maestro mezcalero who’s sustainable and mostly growing his own plants, only working with magueys from his region, then I think we can start to have a conversation about terroir. Mezcal was so quick to harp on all these words that we have respect and romanticism for.”

In Santa Catarina Albarradas, reached via a harrowing dirt road in the Sierra Norte mountains, mezcaleros use tree bark to help along the fermentation as nights get cold. They have always added tepehuaje and encino de agua, two varieties of local trees whose barks have nitrogen-rich enzymes that feed the yeasts. Fresh, the barks taste very bitter and numb one’s mouth. Maestro mezcalero Alberto Martinez’s mezcal has this underlying tannic note, perhaps because of the bark, like dried fruit. His other stylistic choices include fermenting in concrete and cow hide instead of wood, and cutting the fermentations short as there is an aversion to lactic flavors in the town. Every little decision alters the course of the mezcal.

In Miahuatlán, Felipe Cortés has been making mezcal for 55 years. During a visit he’s found standing in a tina, the open wooden vats used to ferment the mashed maguey, up to his knees in tobalá, a stout, wild agave that is hard to cultivate and one of the most popular to drink. He scoops out a bucket and hands it to a worker who loads it into the copper still. Ageo, Cortes’s son, fills a jícara cup from the still and passes it around. The tobalá tastes of bread and pound cake. Silvia Philion, who runs the small-batch label Mezcaloteca and lived with the Corteses for two years when she was learning about mezcal, says all of Felipe and Ageo’s mezcals have these yeast, beer, and bread notes because their 25 year-old tinas are rich with bacteria and yeast. Miahuatlán is also known for its delicious spring water, which adds another dimension, as well for growing fruit whose aromas and flavors seep into the agaves. At Victor Ramos’s palenque, banana trees grow beside the maguey fields, and the ferments smell like overripe bananas and banana bread.

In the bodega, Ramos and his son, Emmanuel, are tired from a long day of distilling and yet they offer tastings and talk shop. A mezcal of madre cuishe, an abundant agave from the karwinski family that is often grown as fence lines in Oaxaca, tastes of asparagus, a tobalá like potpourri. As the sun lowers on the horizon, they discuss business with Philion and the other guests. Victor and Emmanuel are frustrated. Each distillation they have to spend 70,000 pesos buying maguey. They’ve been planting their own for over a decade, but few have reached maturity. There are maguey shortages everywhere. Large tequila producers even come down to Oaxaca to buy maguey—some are even stolen from the fields. The costs are hard to bear, says Victor. “Ten years ago we bought a piña of bicuishe for 4 or 5 pesos. Now it’s 50, 70, 100 pesos.”

Another sore spot is the onerous taxes. Victor and Emmanuel, like many traditional producers, prefer selling direct to the consumer at the palenque, or else export with various labels, which avoids many of the taxes. “Most projects only declare part of their production because in reality there isn’t a business in selling alcohol when you pay almost 100% taxes. It’s rather working for the government, no?” says Philion. “It shouldn’t be like this, all the products leave the country. The only way to make a business with mezcal is to export. In reality, [the government] is killing all the culture and the products. You want to do things right but you can’t. Ojalá, one day it’ll change.” Before leaving, she encourages them to be patient. “You have an international reputation, you have magueys, you have so many varieties. It’s a long-term plan. In five years we’re going to take a photo of all the magueys that you will have here.” Like the agave, you have to be patient with mezcal.

The post What Does the Future of Mezcal Look Like in Mexico? appeared first on Saveur.

Every meal at Milli begins with a complimentary chalupa. One of the cooks griddles a small, handmade corn tortilla atop a hot comal until it’s bronzed on both sides, then layers it with smoky red salsa and homemade queso fresco. It’s a humble gift—and a warming first taste of the restaurant’s pueblo cooking.

One of Milli’s owners, Leo Téllez, says that other local chefs who come to his restaurant often end their meal with hopes of emulating the dishes they tasted. A common line of questioning is about the restaurant’s fresh masa. Leo answers amicably, knowing that the skill takes time to hone. “If you just want the final dish, that’s not how it works,” he says. “You have to feel the maiz, touch it, even plant it.”

Milli is remarkable for two reasons: First, most of the restaurant’s employees work there just half the week so they can tend to their farms in Ozolco on the remaining days. The heirloom maiz and most other ingredients used at the restaurant come fresh from either their own lands or their neighbors’. Second, all five of Milli’s founders are migrants. At some point in their lives, each of them left their home in Mexico for Philadelphia—where a large population of Ozolco natives currently reside—and have since made the journey back. Because there are few government or community resources to support them, they are proactively creating culinary and agricultural opportunities for themselves and others. “If no one gives us anything,” Leo says, “we have to do things ourselves.”

Ozolco is a small town, and the five friends and owners met each other over the years through family members or acquaintances. Each has a similar tale of crossing the border and returning. Benjamin Téllez, the restaurant’s soft-spoken waiter (no relation to Leo), crossed many times and spent nine years in Philadelphia before ultimately being deported for being undocumented. Ricardo Perez, who has a huge smile and knows just a few English words, lived there for 10 years, progressing from dishwasher to cook. Bernardo Rincon made it across the border on his first try, despite being robbed by drug traffickers, and lived in Philadelphia for three years before being sent home. Lino Hernandez, Milli’s head chef, left Ozolco when he was just 15 and worked for 14 years in restaurant kitchens in the U.S. Leo, who in his early 20s had never so much as left his hometown, made three attempts at walking through the deserts of northern Mexico before he made it into the U.S. He eventually landed in Philadelphia too, where he stayed with family for two years, working where he could as a dishwasher, cook, and boat refurbisher.

The journey to Philadelphia is a well-worn trail from Ozolco, a poor agricultural town in the state of Puebla, nestled on the slopes of two volcanoes about two and a half hours from Mexico City. In the 1980s, Puebla’s economy was particularly dire, with few opportunities for making a living. A few brave souls headed north seeking jobs and affordable housing, and landed in New York City. But rising rents and the restaurant downturn in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks forced them to look elsewhere—and they settled in Philadelphia. Ever since, hundreds more have followed their family and friends, working and sending money back home to provide for those left behind. Today, it’s estimated that a third of Ozolco’s former population, more than 1,000 people, currently reside in South Philly, the majority undocumented.

City life had definite appeal. “I had work, I made money, I could help my family, I was building a house [in Ozolco],” Leo says. “But at the same time, you work every day. And I missed a lot of things.” These included his hometown’s festivals and the annual planting of the maiz. After two years, he decided to return, and flew home to a big meal of his family’s beloved mole de olla.

The rest of Milli’s owners returned in waves, connecting and planning as opportunities arose, and growing various projects in fits and starts. Leo and his co-founders each speak of their time in America as something both in the past and still alive. They all have family and friends there; cellphones keep them connected. There’s a biweekly courier service that leaves Ozolco on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and arrives the next day in Philadelphia. They use it to send care packages filled with mole, sweet pan de muerto, walnuts, and pinole, a type of roasted, sweetened ground corn. “It was hard to leave Philly. I had spent almost half my life there,” says Lino, who missed his parents and returned home to help support them. “Sometimes when I’m here, I dream I’m there.”

Others are returning home now too. In the last decade, more Mexicans have left the U.S. than have entered it, and young people are less inclined to leave Ozolco today as the journey grows more dangerous and expensive. “I think a lot of people want another option before leaving their family, their kids,” Leo says. Before Milli, he and other former migrants started several other cooperatives, organizing both an annual music and pulque festival, and making ice cream and tostadas. But doing something new has been hard in a conservative town wary of change and new ideas; there are few supporters besides one another. “In the pueblo, everyone doubts what you’re capable of, doubts that you have ambition to do things, because you’re young,” Leo says. “They don’t know that we intend to be successful.”

Gabriella Hernandez, Lino’s wife, hovers over the comal on the edge of Milli’s dining room. She never left Ozolco, but both of her brothers live in Philadelphia. With quiet speed, she presses freshly ground red, blue, and yellow masa into spongy disks for tortillas, oblong tlacoyos that get stuffed with refried ayocote beans, salsa-smeared sopes, or quesadillas filled with leafy green quelites and stringy quesillo cheese. “It’s difficult work,” Lino says. “Women are taught how to make tortillas when they are kids, but not us. They make tortillas every day in the pueblo.”

Lino learned how to cook many of Milli’s traditional, seasonal dishes from his mother. In winter, he prepares a traditional Nahuatl dish called ayonanactl, in which chilacayote squash are buried to ferment for 15 days under the heat of the sun. He then combines the pulp with onion, garlic, mint, and guajillo chiles to make a pre-Hispanic-style tamale with a surprisingly fishy flavor. But his time abroad has also encouraged him to take more creative approaches to some preparations. Milli’s version of the popular mole poblano (“mole” comes from the Nahuatl word mōlli, or “sauce”) is significantly spicier and without the customary chocolate. In a spicy, chile-tomato mich mole, the cooks use dried bandera fish fillets from the Pacific coast of Chiapas to add brininess and umami. In the spring, they make tacos from shredded, cooked maguey (agave) hearts, and turn the flowers, which only bloom once in the plant’s 15- to 20-year life span, into a soup, tempering its bright green bitterness with dollops of crema. The cooks feature fresh corn elote, walnuts, and capulin cherries in late summer, and a soup of orange marigold flowers in the fall.

For the people of Ozolco, food and land are both a comfort and a means to make a living. On the edge of town, terraced farm plots lead down into the surrounding valleys, in which newly built homes with elaborate metal gates are scattered in various states of completion. Many are empty, waiting for their owners to return from Philadelphia, where they’re still working to pay for the construction. Here, farmers practice the traditional milpa agricultural system, in which maiz, beans, squash, maguey, and other plants are cultivated together to enhance yields and encourage sustainable, nutrient-rich farmland year after year. Women carry buckets of nixtamalized corn to community molinos, or corn grinders, to make their masa. There’s a tortilleria in town too, but tortillas are more commonly made at home.

Mazolco, another company co-founded by Leo, makes all the tostadas and corn chips for Milli, with an eye to rebuilding the heirloom corn market long diminished by American GMO hybrids. Patricia Hernandez, another co-founder, says they’re hoping the wages they pay and the quality of their product will bring more value to what’s produced in the fields, in turn creating better livelihoods for the farmers. “The community knows how much we pay at Mazolco,” Patricia says. “Now when people from outside come to buy maiz for cheap, the growers can refuse to sell.”

At the end of the day at Milli, Leo points out a saying on one of the walls, which reads in Nahuatl: “A flower said to me that my heart is content when I care for my milpa.” From the comal, Gabriella plates some chalupas, and Benjamin delivers the offering to a table of tourists. They believe the dish and the gesture behind it help build meaningful changes; from the kitchen to the field, they’re making traditional ways of living relevant again for those both here and in Philadelphia. “I like selling our products that come from Ozolco. I’m happy. I feel we’re doing something good,” Leo says. “But the thing I’ve thought the most about is how to include more people. We’re not the only ones.”

The post Culinary Migrations: Puebla to Philadelphia (and Back Again) appeared first on Saveur.

When my father moved our family from Oaxaca to Los Angeles in 1994, he told us we would only be there for a year. I was 9 years old then, excited to learn a new language and enamored with the America I saw on TV shows like Saved by the Bell and Full House. I said goodbye to my school friends and the neighborhood kids, telling them I’d be back soon, not realizing that one year would become 25 in the blink of an eye.

Our life in Oaxaca had been simple. My dad traveled from town to town, selling his mezcal. My mom cooked, cleaned, sewed, and tended to me and my three siblings. We spent weekends and holidays at my maternal grandmother’s house in San Pablo Villa de Mitla, a small town an hour outside the city. The long braids my grandma wore every day, each interwoven with a brown ribbon, always smelled of smoked pasilla chiles; her hands were coarse from decades passed in front of the comal, making corn tortillas.

In the 1990s, the Mexican economy was in crisis. Oaxaca, already among the nation’s poorest states, was hit particularly hard, and my father, just one of many Oaxaquenos who sought work in the United States. “We all said we’d leave for a year or two at most,” he admits. “But we got caught up in the American way of life.”

Shortly after settling in Los Angeles, my parents opened Guelaguetza, a restaurant in the heart of Koreatown. Although things were slow at first, the restaurant began to flourish once local paisanos learned that there was finally real Oaxacan food in LA. The money my father intended to save for his mezcal business back home was instead invested in a second restaurant, and later a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth.

Then, in 2008, the Great Recession struck the United States, and our lives were again upended. Over the next few years, my parents shuttered one restaurant after another, until only the original Guelaguetza survived. My siblings and I had grown up there, bussing tables and doing schoolwork in the kitchen. None of us ever played sports or musical instruments, but we were skilled hostesses, servers, and cooks from a very young age. Which is probably why we dreamed of running away to cushy corporate jobs. Yet the moment our mom and dad—battered by the process of closing five restaurants—told us they were ready to retire, my siblings and I realized we were ready to step up. In 2012, we bought Guelaguetza from our parents, and they went back to Oaxaca.

That’s the thing about Oaxaca: You can leave it, but it never leaves you. Known as the “land of the seven moles,” Oaxaca is also the land of the Zapotec, Mixtec, Mazatec, Mixe, and other proud indigenous peoples. Because the Spanish ruled some rugged pockets of the state in name only, its culture remains closely tied to ancient flavors, techniques, and ingredients. Native corn, chiles, agave, and cacao form the bedrock of Oaxaca’s cuisine, as well as its agricultural economy and strong sense of community.

The name my father chose for our restaurant speaks to the soul of Oaxaca. Zapotec in origin, guelaguetza means “to give or share.” It describes an ongoing ritual of kindness, of helping your neighbor no matter how little you may have. The Oaxaqueños who emigrated to America during the 1990s and 2000s brought this spirit of generosity with them, introducing the larger world to something even warmer, deeper, and more complex than mole or mezcal. And it may explain why these unwitting Oaxacan ambassadors are now returning to a state with a burgeoning tourism industry and increased economic opportunities.

Nineteen years ago, Eduardo Ángeles was cleaning carpets in Huntington Beach, California, when his landlord, also a Mexican immigrant, presented himself as a cautionary tale—urging Ángeles to prioritize passion over the next paycheck, or risk winding up alone in a foreign country with nothing to show for his work. Within a month, Ángeles was back in the Oaxacan town of Santa Catarina Minas, helping his father run the family’s mezcal brand. In 2014, the fourth-generation mezcalero debuted his own mezcal, Lalocura, to widespread critical acclaim. Ángeles shrugs off the glowing reviews, and his master distiller title. “At the end of the day, we are all farmers,” he insists.

José Melchor Pérez, who farms tomatoes in the Oaxacan town of San Pablo Güila, credits a few less-than-happy years in America with his success. It was while picking produce near San Jose, California, that Melchor Peréz first encountered a greenhouse. Today, the agricultural partnership he founded, Daan Llia, claims more than 300 greenhouses that yield approximately 3,000 tons of produce a year. Together, he and the partnership’s other members employ at least 800 local people, 75 percent of them women. What Melchor Peréz really aims to cultivate, however, is hope for Oaxaca’s future. “Kids won’t have to leave anymore,” he explains, “because they can call this project their own.”

I could go on and on, telling you about Omar Alonso, who returned from California and founded the tour-guide company Oaxacking, or about Miguel Martínez Cruz and Mario Cruz Santos, who used savings from their stint in the States to establish Ilegales, a pub that serves burgers, beer, and a wide variety of mezcal. But I’d rather you visit Oaxaca and see these things for yourself.

I still live in Los Angeles, so the time I spend in Oaxaca invariably ends at the airport, with a stop at nearby Alfonsina for my final meal. Jorge León and his mother, Elvia León Hernández, serve customers out of their home kitchen, offering her memelitas and various egg dishes for breakfast before he takes charge at night. A Oaxacan returnee of a different sort, León left for Mexico City, where he cooked at Pujol, one of the country’s most famous restaurants. His tasting menu at Alfonsina reinterprets Oaxacan traditions and ingredients in an incredibly sophisticated way.

It is a beautiful thing to witness, two generations sharing one Oaxacan kitchen, combining past and present. And it makes me think about my relationship with my parents and with my 4-year-old son. I almost always bring him along when I visit my mom and dad, which I do often. They live now on my late grandmother’s land in San Pablo Villa de Mitla, in a newly built house, dubbed Casa Elizabeth in her honor.

There, my mother makes enfrijoladas and squash-vine soup, accompanied by tortillas cooked on the wood- fired comal out back. When my father brings the food to the table, my boy digs in with both hands. Will he, too, I wonder, remember his grandma’s hair smelling of smoked chiles?

I want my son to know my Oaxaca—the Oaxaca that embraces the future while honoring tradition, especially the tradition of guelaguetza, of putting other people’s needs before your own. I want him to know that until you understand where you came from, you cannot figure out where to go next. I want his love for this sacred place to run as deep as mine.

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A pot of spiced clarified butter bubbles away on the stove next to a stock pot of cassava cooking down. A cook carefully presses out blue corn tortillas and lays them on the flat top as the restaurant Masala y Maiz prepares for lunch service.

Beyond the surface of what looks like a stylish new restaurant in Mexico City’s Juarez neighborhood is actually a very personal and radical project for married chefs Norma Listman and Saqib Keval. Here, they’re striving to build a decolonized and sustainable restaurant while also exploring a personal cuisine based on their family culinary backgrounds that they call mestizaje cooking. It’s been a hard and circuitous journey. This is the third time they’ve opened Masala y Maiz in two years. But neither of them have any interest in perpetuating the conventional. “We always knew we wanted to do more than just serve yummy food,” says Listman. “The restaurant is a tool for so many things—it’s a tool for resistance, it’s a tool to give something back to the community, to create something for the community.”

Masala y Maiz is a blend of food, art, and politics, and was born while Listman and Keval were shopping in a Mexico City market for a catering gig and realized how many similarities their two cooking traditions shared. Listman’s family is from Texcoco, just outside Mexico City, while Keval’s comes from India by way of Kenya and Ethiopia. He was the first generation born in the United States. Neither went to culinary school and chose instead to learn by doing in the kitchens of Bay Area restaurants. Keval says he was told repeatedly that to be a serious cook, you had to train in France and learn French technique. So he went to France, cooked with amazing chefs, and got a degree in French post-colonial literature.

“After all that time,” Keval says, “I realized that there is nothing remarkable or particularly special about French cuisine or technique other than white supremacy and colonization that held it to this high regard and made it be the end-all and be-all of food.” When he returned home, he delved into his family’s home cooking, trying to understand the technique behind recipes that he had never questioned before. “I had never given value to my own culture’s food, my own heritage’s food, because I never saw it valued anywhere else.” Alongside cooking, Keval is focused on community organizing through People’s Kitchen Collective, a food and activism project he co-founded in Oakland, California in 2011.

Listman comes from a family of talented cooks and researchers with a particular interest in corn. She first pursued art and fashion, moving to the Bay Area because she liked the music scene. The change to cooking came after she worked on an art project that reenacted an oft-overlooked event during the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt, which marked the beginning of California’s independence from Mexico. The Americans were coming for the Mexican general Mariano Vallejo, but instead of hiding, he invited them in for a feast. “That is when I realized the power of food,” she says. “I had been cooking all of my life, but that’s when it hit me that food has so many other possibilities outside of just eating.”

There have been challenges to doing a restaurant their way. A day after Masala y Maiz opened in 2017, a devastating earthquake struck central Mexico. For the first month, Listman and Keval cooked 800 hot meals every day for victims and rescue workers throughout the city. Eventually, they gained a following, but then a corrupt city official shut them down. They refused to pay the necessary bribes and instead cooked in exile for six months, doing pop-ups at different restaurants that supported their taking a stand. In the end, Listman and Keval triumphed, and the city allowed Masala y Maiz to reopen. In October they moved to a new space with a proper kitchen.

You might be tempted to call their cooking fusion, but Listman and Keval forcefully reject that term, instead using the word mestizaje to describe the mingling of their respective culinary traditions. “Fusion is always told from the perspective of whiteness, European plus something,” says Keval. “It’s a very shallow way of thinking about food that doesn’t speak to the history of the cultures, nor give respect or money back into the cultures, which is another type of colonialism.” One way to avoid these dynamics is to deeply research recipes and ingredients, as Keval and Listman do, and engage and respect the cultures and people who have guarded culinary heritages.

Mestizaje refers to what he calls the “organic blending of cultures” that has happened in Mexico over the centuries. “Mexico has historically been much more open to immigrants, and immigrant culture here becomes Mexican culture,” says Keval. “Whereas the U.S. has never been open to immigrants. It’s always been Eurocentric, American, and everything else is the exotic.” Their specific form of mestizaje is about exploring their two cultures within a horizontal power dynamic rather than the typical vertical one between the global north and global south.

You see this immediately in the language of the menu. For example, the description of esquites, the iconic Mexican street dish of corn that Listman and Keval make with coconut milk, carrot achaar, and Kenyan masala, contains four languages: Spanish, Hindi, Swahili, and Kenyan. “Language is power,” says Keval. “I think it’s important to use the proper names of ingredients because it tells the history and gives a sense of place and time for each dish.”

The menu is an ever-evolving conversation. “There are dishes that are just his, there are dishes that are just mine, then there are dishes we collaborate on,” says Listman. Their take on a patra roll, a classic Indian staple from Gujarat, subs in hoja santa leaf for yuca, while the tetela, a stuffed triangular pocket that is hard to find in Mexico, grows out of their corn obsession—they have a mill and grind fresh masa from heirloom varieties everyday. One incarnation of the tetela finds it filled with steamed soft-shell crab while the other half of the crab is breaded in garbanzo flour and spices and fried. “I’m in love with it,” says Listman. “It has pachi pulusu, an Indian sauce [from Andhra Pradesh] that has peanuts, piloncillo, tamarind, chiles; it’s luscious and yummy. To me it’s like a sweeter encacahuatado,” a peanut and chile sauce in Mexico.

In addition to decolonizing food, Listman and Keval are also trying to decolonize the restaurant model, which is still based on the French and European brigade system. This means addressing every facet of the business, from labor rights to patriarchy. They cross-train their workers so cooks rotate through different stations, and the front- and back-of-house blends depending on the restaurant’s needs. They provide all the government-mandated benefits (which many restaurants in Mexico don’t), guarantee paid overtime, and offer a matched savings plan. There are also fixed schedules and no last-minute shift changes. “In creating this restaurant,” says Keval, “Norma and I wanted to create the type of restaurant we want to work at, [with] the type of benefits that we always wanted working in restaurants.”

The restaurant is a provocation to change for an industry rife with problems the world over. “I don’t think we can hide anymore, and [I don’t think] all those fancy restaurants should hide anymore or mask themselves behind these obsolete Eurocentric ideas of what the industry should be,” says Listman. She points out that before the restaurant was ‘invented’ in France, before the Spanish arrived in Mexico, cooks fed people in the tianguis, or open-air markets, that popped up in public spaces. This has happened for millennia, and what we recognize as a restaurant is simply the current dominant perspective. There are other ways to be and other ways to serve food, and Masala y Maiz is here to prove it.

The post It’s Not Fusion, It’s Mestizaje appeared first on Saveur.

Riding shotgun through a cactus-studded desert in Guillermo Gomez’s ATV was not quite what I expected out of my Mexican beach vacation. And yet here we were: in shades and matching bandanas to shield us from the sun and dust, we might have been Mad Max extras, or blitzing cross-playa at Burning Man. Instead, the chef of Cabo San Lucas’s luxurious Cocina del Mar and I were on our way through Cabo Pulmo National Park—a rugged beachside preserve on Baja California Sur’s East Cape—to dig for almejas chocolatas, chocolate clams, in the Sea of Cortés.

Chocolate clams refer to two species of edible bivalves, M. squalida and M. aurantiaca, which live in the sandy waters of the Sea of Cortés and along the Pacific Coast of the Baja Peninsula. Historically, they have been a humble food source for coastal Mexican residents and fishing families, who most often roast them right in the sand on the beach or crack them open and enjoy them in raw, ceviche-like preparations. In recent decades, as regional Mexican cuisine has swelled in popularity, so have these pretty, mildly-flavored shellfish.

Diving for chocolate clams the old-fashioned way requires impressive lung capacity—after repeatedly plunging below the surface, I found a few spiny, purple sea urchins, but no clams; Gomez, however, gleefully pulled up half a dozen of them, popping up over the surface with a grin and a gasp to toss yet another shiny bivalve into the boat. Once we had our fill of diving, we climbed back into the dinghy one at a time and, with a pang of regret, tipped our catch back into the gentle blue waves—these pristine waters are federally protected, and fishing is banned.

Fortunately, the organizers were pros. A pair of local fishermen pulled a sack of the clams from a pickup truck just as we tumbled out of the boat and into the clear, shallow water, craving salt, beer, and lunch after our dive. Earlier that morning they had shuttled these glossy monsters, nearly 4 inches wide, from beds outside of the regulated park zone for us to share on the beach. On an upturned cooler, Gomez wielded a heavy kitchen knife to split a clam open. He skillfully tilted one shell down as he pulled them apart, catching every drop of the clam’s liquor as he twisted the other half away.

He carefully sliced the clam from the remaining shell, trimmed away the sandy bellies, then sliced the meaty red muscle that remained into bite-size bits. Using the edge of the knife, Gomez transferred the meat back into the juice-filled shell, doused the whole mess with a splash of vinegary red hot sauce, a pinch of Tajín, and a squeeze of fresh lime—the trio of casual toppings preferred by locals—and handed it to me to slurp as I sipped my Corona and ran through the math of uprooting my whole Manhattan existence to the Baja Peninsula. Taking a cue from Gomez, I tipped the remaining juices right into my drink for an improvised spicy michelada.

Gomez, who is originally from Argentina, has cultivated an appreciation for the spicier elements of Mexican cuisine that Argentines often shy away from, as well as an appreciation for the staggering marine biodiversity surrounding the Baja Peninsula. On our way back to civilization, he pulled the ATV over to let me get a grip on my motion sickness and admire the sparkling Sea of Cortés. He pointed out a shrimping boat far offshore, which was pulling in its net. While shrimp farming exists along the Pacific Coast operating with varying degrees of sustainability, Gomez prefers to special-order wild shrimp, live and with their heads still attached, from boats like these. “When you eat the juices from the head, they should be sweet. When they aren’t fresh, the juices are bitter and sour.”

For less adventurous guests, Gomez prepares a clambake lunch right on the private beach at Esperanza Resort, though even while tending the grill, he can be coaxed onto the nearby rocks for an impromptu hunt for sea snails, crabs, and uni. At Cocina del Mar, the resort’s dramatic cliffside restaurant, the fish fanatic Gomez offers farm-raised totoaba on the menu—a pillowy, tender white fish with massive, buttery, halibut-like flakes that he steams wrapped in root-beer-scented hoja santa leaves. The wild catch of this critically endangered fish is strictly prohibited, but recent local aquaculture projects aimed at restoring the population have opened up the sale of the once-abundant native fish. The sale of farmed totoaba is restricted to domestic buyers only, so, like the region’s chocolate clams, one must travel to Mexico to taste it.

As in so many other parts of the world, overfishing along Mexico’s coastlines is a problem, so for several larger varieties of local fish like the totoaba, or kamachi, which he buys from Omega Blue in nearby La Paz, Gomez sources from sustainable farms. He sources the chocolate clams for the restaurant from an approved fishery north of La Paz in Loreto Bay. “We take care of the season when the clams need a recovery, when they are in reproduction time. So there are four months a year where the clams are not available,” says Gomez. A lot of people here live from the product of the sea. There is a good consciousness of seasonality, so I think we just need to keep promoting that they are not really to be enjoyed through the whole year.”

The clams’ range extends from Laguna Ojo de Liebre in northern Baja California Sur as far south as Peru, and they are also abundant throughout the Gulf of California. Like many developing nations, Mexico has experienced challenges to enforcing fishery regulation, but the increased interest by some of Mexico’s top-tier chefs in sustainable practices brings much needed publicity and support to the collaborative efforts of environmental organizations, universities, and local fishing communities. Through Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs), these groups are able to collaboratively address overfishing and other environmental threats as they relate to individual seafood populations.

While there are environmental organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund, Pronatura Noroeste, and Community and Biodiversity (COBI) working on improving the sustainability of Mexican fisheries, regulations are often inconsistently enforced on the local level. Pablo Álvarez Morales, a FIP manager from Pronatura Noroeste, Mexico’s oldest and largest nonprofit conservation organization, believes that it is essential that producers are also involved in seeking sustainable and realistic alternatives to manage their own resources. “Since the 1980s, overfishing in clams fishery at the Mexican Pacific and the Gulf of California has caused drastic drops in catch numbers,” he explains. “The overexploitation of these resources has occurred mainly due to scant regulation, open access, and overcapitalization in the fishery.”

COBI, a Mexican civil organization that aims to protect deteriorating marine ecosystems, has launched a sustainable clam fishery program in Puerto Libertad, Sonora, just across the Gulf of California. According to Francisco “Paco” Fernández, who manages the FIP, chef Gabriela Cámara purchases the bulk of the NGO’s clams and features them on the menu at her beloved Mexico City restaurant Contramar. By 2022, COBI’s goals for the Puerto Libertad FIP include the implementation of a detailed traceability program for the fishery and increased involvement and responsibility of the fishing community. Fernandez also stresses the importance of ensuring that there is a heightened awareness about sustainable fishing initiatives like COBI’s. “In Mexico, most consumers and tourists don’t care about sustainability,” he says. “We don’t have much information in stores, markets, and restaurants. Since two years ago we have been working with CONABIO [Mexico’s National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity] to develop a seafood recommendation program.”

Curious to get off the tourist track, I asked Gomez to bring me off-resort to try the local chocolate clams at a casual cevichería favored by his team of chefs.

We ended up at Mariscos El Güero Camarón, a popular chiringuito (beach bar) located at the edge of the Colonia El Progreso neighborhood of Cabo San Lucas, known by locals for its fresh seafood.

After passing a table of kitchen staff chatting over their lunch (chicken!), Gomez exchanged pleasantries with the proprietor. We settled into a table by the window and nibbled on fried corn tortillas. Almost immediately, a server and the owner plopped nearly a grocery store’s worth of bottled condiments—mostly hot sauces, with a handful of other savory options like La Choy soy sauce, Worcestershire, Maggi seasoning, Tajín, chile flakes, juicy, thin-skinned limes, and bowls of freshly-made house salsas: chiles toreados (a loose and spicy dressing made with minced white onion, habaneros, and soy sauce), pico de gallo, fiery, roasted salsa roja, and, surprisingly, tartar sauce.

Gomez ordered a platter of aguachile—ceviche-like morsels of shrimp and scallops, thinly sliced like carpaccio, bathed in a thin salsa verde, topped with slivers of red onion and lime zest. Within minutes, another server delivered a tray of ceviche served in chocolate clam shells. The crunchy-tender red clams were chopped more finely and tossed with citrus and chunks of of firm white fish, octopus, scallop, and shrimp. Then came the order of raw chocolate clams, served en su concha (on the half shell), unadorned and as wide as saucers.

Fernandez stresses the impact of overfishing these local treasures, mentioning that further south, beds off the coast of Acapulco have seen near total collapse. Today, nearly 70% of the commercial chocolate clam crop is harvested from the waters surrounding Baja California Sur; and while there is some experimentation going on with farming in nearby La Paz, they are still most typically caught in the wild. They grow in fine, muddy sand at depths from 1 to 12 meters, from which they are hand-harvested by divers working from small boats using “hookah”-style breathing equipment; the gas-powered air compressor and a long thin hose feed air to the diver, who digs for clams buried in the sand below. Safety regulations prohibit harvest at depths greater than 30 meters, a limitation which protects both divers as well as the deeper-dwelling clam population.

While climate change and pollution are having an observable, but as yet not measured, impact on the species, according to Fernandez, the main threat to chocolate clams and other Mexican shellfish is illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

People visiting the area who are interested in tasting the local seafood can support sustainability efforts by seeking out restaurants that publicize partnerships with FIP’s and other sustainable fishery efforts. Morales further recommends asking restaurants or markets for information about the product’s place of origin, and generally being an informed and responsible consumer about any seafood you plan to buy. For chocolate clams, that means at the bare minimum knowing the legal size limit, refusing to buy smaller clams which may not have lived long enough to reproduce, and only buying clams large enough that they have reached full maturity (that means at least 64 millimeters wide in the Gulf of California and at least 80 millimeters wide on the Western Coast of Baja California Sur).

Chef Yvan Mucharraz of Cabo San Lucas’s Chileno Bay Resort came up through Thomas Keller’s French Laundry before returning to Mexico, and he brought home with him an infatuation with American-style barbecue. While smoking brisket barefoot on the beach, Mucharraz often fires up a second, hotter smoker for firing off local seafood, including extra-large chocolate clams, which he stuffs with compound butter flavored with garlic, cilantro, green chile, and lime. He wraps the individual clams in foil before throwing them in the smoker or even, as a nod to the old-school method, directly into a fire pit in the sand. With their delicately briny bite, vibrant red flesh, and a seductive texture worlds apart from the Atlantic’s stodgy quahogs and musky, frail mussels, these clams, raw or cooked, are worth traveling for.

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In America, beach food often means deep-frying something from the surrounding waters: New England has its clam cakes and fried clams, the Midwest its fried smelts, and the West Coast its fish tacos. In the state of Nayarit along Mexico’s Pacific coast, beach food also takes its cues from the ocean, but there’s no batter or hot oil involved. Instead, you’ll find all kinds of fresh seafood cooked over hot coals on small grills, or zarandas, propped up on cinderblocks or rocks.

One of the most popular dishes is the curiously named pescado embarazado, which is Spanish for pregnant fish. The term is a misnomer: the fish aren’t actually pregnant or served with their roe. Legend has it that the dish was originally called pescado en vara asado, after its cooking method (“vara asado” translates to “grilled stick”), but morphed into pescado embarazado after beachgoers misheard the name.

On the palm-tree-lined cove beaches of Nayarit, you can’t miss the vendors walking up and down the shore with their flaming-orange skewers. According to Esther Sanchez, the head chef at the Four Seasons Punta Mita’s Aramara restaurant, pescado embarazado traditionally calls for a whole fish, which is how she prefers to prepare the dish, but most hawkers now cut it into bite-size pieces for easy eating.

The fish, typically dogfish, mahi mahi, or red snapper, is marinated with a bright and earthy sauce—a combination of dried guajillos or anchos, achiote paste, cumin, and orange juice— then cooked over an open flame, often right on the beach. Vendors serve the sticks, which go for around 40 pesos (about $2 USD) each, with freshly cut limes, and for extra heat, a bottle of Salsa Huichol hot sauce.

Named for Nayarit’s indigenous Huichol people, Salsa Huichol is a local favorite that’s sold all over Mexico and in the U.S. The exact recipe is a secret, but the main ingredient is cascabel chiles, a relatively mild variety with a strong aroma and fruity sweetness.

While the beach may be the ideal location for eating pescado embarazado, sandy toes and a view of the water certainly aren’t a prerequisite. The dish would also make a welcome addition to any barbecue or cookout. It’s perfect for entertaining in more ways than one: the marinade can be prepared ahead of time; guests can hold the skewer in one hand and a drink in the other; and the origin story makes for one hell of a conversation piece.

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Azul Condesa (Nuevo Leon 68, Condesa; 52/55/5286-6380; azulcondesa.com)
The chef and author of the Diccionario Enciclopedico de Gastronomia Mexicana (Clio, 2000) Ricardo Muñoz Zurita serves flavorful, faithful renditions of Mexico’s regional specialties—Oaxacan black mole, Yucatecan pit-roasted pork, little Tabascan tamales made with the leafy green chaya—at this upscale-casual restaurant in the tony Condesa neighborhood.

Azul Historico (Isabel La Catolica 30, Centro Historico; 52/55/5510-1316; azulhistorico.com)
Ricardo Muñoz Zurita’s third location (the original, Azul y Oro, is on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) is tucked into the airy courtyard of the Palacio de los Condes de Miravalle, a 17th-century edifice turned boutique hotel and chic mall, with artisan shops selling charcuterie, tableware, mezcal, books, and more. The menu is similar to the one at Azul Condesa, except here breakfast is served. A plate of with steak served beneath the century-old laurel trees is a great way to start off the day.

Dulce Patria (Anatole France 100, Col. Polanco, 52/55/3300-3999; lasalcobas.com)
At her restaurant inside the boutique hotel Las Alcobas, chef Martha Ortiz cooks updated Mexican cuisine in fanciful, architectural platings. A salad of baby arugula and cactus flower buds is draped in a purple-tinged violet brittle; a roast chile, sliced from the stem, is splayed like an octopus over sea bass.

El Bajio (Cuitlahuac 2709, Col. Azcapotzalco; 52/55/5341-9889; carnitaselbajio.com.mx)
The rootsy restaurant that the esteemed Carmen “Titita” Ramirez Degollado founded 40 years ago in the working-class barrio of Azcapotzalco is still going strong. Don’t miss the soulful mole de olla, juicy pork, zucchini, and corn on the cob doused in a sweet-hot guajillo chile broth.

Izote (Presidente Masaryk 513, Col. Polanco; 52/55/5280-1671; izote.com.mx)
Renowned chef Patricia Quintana serves gorgeous renditions of traditional Mexican classics, including walnut-sauced, pomegranate seed-strewn chiles en nogadas; tender lamb steamed in banana leaves; and squash blossom soup.

Maximo Bistrot Local (Tonala 133, Col. Roma; 52/55/5264-4291; maximobistrot.com.mx)
Chef Euardo Garcia cooked at Pujol, as well as Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, before opening his cozy Roma cafe, where locavore sourcing meets Spanish, French, and New American influences. The seasonal menu changes daily, with dishes like organic pork rib eye with porcini puree for autumn and grilled snook with artichokes and arugula for spring.

Nicos (Cuitlahuac 3102, Col. Claveria; 52/55/5396-7090; laboratoriocreativo.com.mx/port_web/n/home.html)
Chef Gerardo Vazquez Lugo oversees the kitchen at his family’s gracious 55-year-old institution serving excellent, traditional Mexican dishes, many from historical recipes, such as a rich noodle casserole, sopa seca de natas, from Guadalupe’s Capuchin nuns.

Paxia (Av. de la Paz 47, Col. San Angel; 52/55/5616-6964 and Juan Salvador Agraz 44; Col. Santa Fe, Cuajimalpa; 52/55/2591-0429; danielovadia.com.mx)
Daniel Ovadia likes big, bold flavors and presentations; at his two restaurants downtown and out in the high-rise suburb of Santa Fe, he offers fare such as maguey worms (the nutty-tasting grubs found in the agave plant) with a chile salsa, nopales, and smoked agave hearts or the relatively tame huitlacoche, sea urchin, shrimp, and fried garlic in chestnut cream.

Quintonil (Newton 55, Col. Polanco; 52/55/5280-2680; quintonil.com)
Using carefully sourced local ingredients, Pujol alumnus Jorge Vallejo cooks beautiful, modern Mexican dishes such as the bitter broccolini-like herb huauzontle with Chiapas cheese and a tomato and habanero salsa or Baja clams with a squid ink sauce and borage flowers.

Sud 777 (Boulevard de la Luz 777, Col. Jardines del Pedregal; sud777.com.mx)
At this trendy steakhouse and lounge, chef Edgar Nuñez Magaña serves squash blossom ravioli with a huitlacoche and truffle sauce, Wagyu from Mexico’s Rancho Las Luisas, and other contemporary, globally inspired dishes.

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Outside the Cuchillos Ojeda workshop entrance lies a six-foot-high pile of discarded stainless steel. Inside the building, a tiny knife factory in the town of Sayula, Mexico, a small group of men work on whirring machines. Nearly every surface is stacked with knives in various stages of creation, including cocobolo wood, red deer antlers, and buffalo horns waiting to become future handles.

If a mad scientist were in charge of running a knife factory, it would look a little something like Cuchillos Ojeda. Presiding over the whimsical workshop is 87-year-old founder Don José Ojeda Larios, who launched the company almost 50 years ago. Many of his knives feature precious stones like lapis lazuli, jade, mother of pearl, or turquoise, painstakingly sourced from nations across the globe, and some incorporate even rarer materials such as fossilized mammoth tusks. Though the company keeps a small online shop, knife collectors and chefs know that you have to take a trip to the otherwise sleepy town of Sayula to see and purchase the latest of their intricate, artistic designs. (Guadalajara, the nearest city, is a two-hour drive away, and mostly features stores selling more conventional Japanese- or European-style knives). According to Don José, Cuchillos Ojeda is one of the few—if not the only—companies in Mexico making knives this ornate and high-performing. Of course, they’re doing it all by hand.

Ojeda comes from 12 generations of blacksmiths that date back to the 1500s, when Sayula was first established by the Spaniards. “The town was founded by a cousin of the conquistador Hernán Cortés,” says Don Josesito, as he’s affectionately known to the locals. “He brought artisans to serve him, including carpenters and blacksmiths. [My ancestor] Juan Ojeda was one of them.”

Hundreds of years later, Don José learned the trade of knife-making from his uncle, and before his 10th birthday, he had already produced daggers and other small knives of his own. He left school as a teenager and spent the subsequent years at his family’s workshop, where he whittled away at design goals, like how to make a .22-caliber rifle from scratch. (He achieved it.) In his early twenties, looking for a way to “work less and earn more,” Ojeda Larios says, he began manufacturing automatic and semiautomatic weapons as his full-time job. This lasted until his contract with Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defense expired in 1970. And that’s when Cuchillos Ojeda was born.

“When I was doing the weapons, I kept making knives once in a while so I wouldn’t forget how,” he says. “During this time, I also learned about a lot of different materials, and I liked converting them into knives that looked like works of art.”

Today, the business is a family affair. The bulk of knife production is handled by a few employees and Don José’s two sons, José and Rafael, both of whom he personally trained. “The most beautiful thing is being a father and teacher to my sons,” he says. When not in school, his three grandsons also put in time at the workshop. And at the Cuchillos Ojeda storefront around the block, various relatives by both blood and marriage are tasked with selling a wide array of products. These might include a 15.5-centimeter Japanese-style chef’s knife with a cocobolo wood handle (about U.S.$47), a set of eight table knives with animals etched on the blades ($24), or an engraved pocket knife with a handle that combines camel bone, buffalo horn, and wood ($295). Other options for sale are instruments for carving, filleting, and even hunting. Should you want your name inscribed or a specific design, they also do custom commissions, which can take up to 30 days to create.

Don José’s children helped move the business forward, switching the main material from carbon steel to stainless and damask steel, and expediting the process. While explaining the process from start to finish, the young José reveals that each knife, after being measured, cut, and tempered in the workshop, now gets sharpened at a separate nearby facility before coming back to be polished and engraved.

These days, Don José doesn’t work the machines anymore, but he’s a constant presence in the workshop, where he carefully oversees the close-knit team as they help carry on his ancestral legacy. He’s never been one to dwell on the details of the business, poring over facts and figures with worry, but he’s still driven by the same artistic vision. When asked how many knives they produce and sell per month, he responded, “I don’t even know how many—but that doesn’t interest me as much. I’m just interested in having fun.”

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