Mexico Travel: A Culinary Guide to Mexico City and the Mayan Riviera on StarChefs.com

Where to Eat and Where to Stay in Mexico City and the Mayan Riviera
By Heather Sperling and Antoinette Bruno

A remarkable diversity of produce grows in the lush, fertile land surrounding the metropolis of Mexico City. Like the cuisine of Spain, with which it shares a language and a history, the regional cooking of our southern neighbor varies greatly from north to south, east to west. But while many of the more ubiquitous products and dishes have made their way north of the Rio Grande, true Mexican cuisine with its myriad chilies, spices, sauces and seeds remains a relatively unknown culinary entity. This is a direct result of its short history in the fine dining restaurant world, and its frequent misrepresentation in casual restaurants as nothing more than beans, rice and cheese.

Unlike Spain, Mexico has not yet experienced a culinary renaissance on the international stage. Before Ferran Adrià burst onto the map with his capsules and foams, regional Spanish gastronomy was rarely understood outside its national borders. As leaders in the global development of molecular gastronomy, Spanish chefs also shed light on their country’s classical cuisine, introducing traditional ingredients, methods, flavors and styles, and sparking a general interest in Spanish food.

With a group of historically conscious, innovative chefs at the helm, Mexican cuisine is entering a modern period not unlike that of Spain in the 1990’s. Mexico City is leading the way; once known mainly for its traffic and crime, the “Distrito Federal” is today recognized as the epicenter of Mexico’s trendy cuisine and design scene. Sleek, modern restaurants and equally stylish boutique hotels have sprouted up throughout the city, providing upscale dining and lodging to the ever-growing, cosmopolitan crowd.

The aim is innovation and elegance: hotels like Habita offer cutting-edge amenities and a calculated modern aesthetic. Dishes at the city’s top restaurants, Pujol, Izote and Águila y Sol, are cleverly crafted fusions of traditional tastes and contemporary techniques that give new life to the ancient cuisine. And the scene is decidedly female. According to Mexican tradition, the matriarch runs the cocina; today Mexico City’s culinary landscape is ruled by female chefs able to balance life, family and success. This is a notable counterpoint to what in many cultures, especially the United States, is a male-dominated field.

Male and female alike, a significant challenge of Mexico City chefs is gaining access to the wealth of produce that surrounds them. The city’s market system is centralized, meaning that farmers sell products to a wholesaler who in turn distributes the products to stands in the market. Restaurants can buy from the stands and the wholesaler, but often have difficulties sourcing their products directly from small farmers. Transportation of time-sensitive goods within the traffic-ridden city is another obstacle. The greatest challenge, though, is one which all but a handful of chefs across the globe face every single day: creating a balance between what the customer wants and a restaurant’s own need to evolve.

Mexico has a cuisine to rival the oldest and the best. The multi-faceted layers of traditional dishes, like those of Chef Carmen Titita at El Bajio, are stunning. But years of misrepresentation in inexpensive restaurants and fast food chains have lead to a general ignorance of the cuisine’s complexities. The blossoming of Mexico City’s fine dining scene is a chance for Mexican cuisine to be noticed, for the myth of uniformity and simplicity to be dispelled, and for the cuisine’s true depth to be understood; innovation is Mexican gastronomy’s ticket to greater understanding and appeal.