Eating Out in Mexico

JULY!AUGUST "#$$ / METRO / !" !# / METRO / JULY!AUGUST "#$$

EATING OUT IN MEXICOHow I learned to love meat — more or less.STORY SAM EICHBLATT PHOTOGRAPHS EMILY ANDREWS

O HERE IT IS. Hot, steaming, animal protein: the meal that’s going to change my life, laid out in its full meaty glory. Pork, chicken, beef, lamb. And bits of something

that look like prop intestines from a zombie film, floating in a soup. The gang’s all here.

“There are some vegetarian things here too,” says Nicolas, poking around solicit-ously. Among the glistening piles of flesh piled high on sopes (a kind of Mexican pizza with pinched-up edges), bowls of o!al and maize soup, sliced limes and the myriad other condiments of a Mexican table, there’s a single mushroom sope.

It’s not that it looks bad, but I’ve had 20 years of this already — the last thing left on the table, the dietary refuge of sensitive teenagers and food phobists: the veggie option. I’m finally ready for meat.

It’s a busy Sunday in one of Mexico City’s oldest neighbourhoods, Santa Maria la Ribera, and a table of small elderly people dressed in their best to my right are fiercely gumming down plates of food while staring around them like hawks.

Sunday, in Mexico, is synonymous with eating — specifically, eating barbacoa, a whole sheep roasted underground in maguey leaves and then theatrically displayed in a wooden box with the unwrapped leaves hanging down around it while the cook hacks o! chunks of meat with a cleaver.

“Everything here is organic,” says Nicolas. “But that’s not because it’s a college-educated hip thing. Well-known restaurants have their own farms. This one has organic sheep, and that’s just the way they’ve done it for 50 years.”

Generations of families are crammed around pushed-together tables, which have the menu printed onto their plastic tabletops, requiring only a quick wipe-down afterwards by the sta! — who are two bright-eyed, e"cient teenage boys.

Drinks come in misty glass bottles, and a range of neon shades. “Old-fashioned restaurants have old-fashioned soda,” notes Nicolas. The Pozolería La Casa de Toño is one of the oldest. Located in a mid-19th century house, its walls are covered in murals and it features a typical hacienda-style internal courtyard garden as well as the original mosaic floors.

However, I’m still worrying about the meat. I mean, it’s been two decades. Do you get heart palpitations? Cold sweats? Spontaneous evacuation? I’m already the only person I know who hasn’t had a stomach complaint here, and I’ve been eating everything — weird fungus, ceviche, home-made cheese from unrefrigerated market stalls — everything except meat. Am I pushing it?

NICOLAS GILMAN IS A food blogger and the author of Good Food in Mexico City. A former New Yorker who first crossed the border south with his artist mother at 14, he’s now been living here for 22 years, and in 2005 traded in his American passport for “both practical and moral reasons”, he says. “I own property here and I wanted to be able to vote. It didn’t feel good to be an outsider.” He’s one of a small handful writing about the country’s culinary culture for an English-speaking audience, and I’ve persuaded him to spend his Sunday taking me out for lunch, rather than at his house in the country. It would be rude to back out now.

And that’s how, in September 2010, Mexico and I both wound up celebrating watershed moments. The 112 million inhabitants of the country were waving their hands in the air, and sometimes also giant novelty sombreros daubed in the red, green and white of the flag, over a landmark for their national identity — Mexico’s declaration of independence from Spain 200 years previously. In my personal, scaled-

S

JULY!AUGUST "#$$ / METRO / !$

down version, I declared independence from the veggie option.

It started 20 years before, when I was a grumpy teenager staging a passive-aggressive protest. Having but one crap menu option, or the ordeal of discovering the bacon bits my friend’s mum slipped into my dinner, merely confirmed my suspicions the world was a cruel place. But let’s face it: when you’re a teenager, the dining options are pretty limited. In 90s Howick, it was Sizzler or Valentines. At home, spag bol and chicken stir-fry ruled.

There was a moral reasoning behind it, of course. I had my icon: Morrissey. I had my text: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Animal Rights. I had my I Don’t Eat My Friends T-shirt. The problem was that, over time, my moral boundaries faded from a stark black and white to a mature spectrum of greys. Hitler was a vegetarian. Martin Luther King wasn’t. Confusing, right?

I got fed up with the meekness involved in always saying “no”; the meat-eating fraternity just seemed so much more rock and roll. By the time I got to Mexico, I was already in the same ethical camp as A.A. Gill, Anthony Bourdain and the Vogue food writer Je!rey Steingarten who, in his book The Man Who Ate Everything, travelled to the country to eat ant-egg tacos and fly caviar. I felt, in much the same way he did, that this was a good opportunity to get over my

irrational food biases. In short, curiosity finally got the better of me.

And it’s obvious: if you look at it from a cultural perspective, there’s nothing that screams “Let’s party!” less than vegetarianism. Nearly every culture around the world kills something to eat at happy points in the social calendar, from the Christmas turkey, to the fatted lamb, to the Mayan ritual of celebrating war victories with a communal dish made from the bodies of their adversaries.

WHICH BRINGS ME back to la Casa de Toño’s eponymous soup. Pozole has a curious position in the Mexican

food lexicon. Ostensibly a humble meat soup, a traditional comfort food containing the large white kernels of hominy maize and offal, its origins are actually quite the opposite of comforting. Corn being sacred to ancient cultures, it was consumed

HITLER WAS A VEGETARIAN. MARTIN LUTHER KING WASN!T. CONFUSING, RIGHT"

getting fat — like, really fat. Twenty years ago, they were not fat, but now they’re just behind the UK and USA. It’s ironic in a country that has so much beautiful fresh fruit and vegetables, and fresh drinks, that people here consume more soft drinks than anywhere else in the world. You eat a carnitas, drink a Coke… no wonder.”

Carnitas — literally “little meats” — is pork stewed in its own fat and served in a soft taco. Gilman pauses. “It is delicious, actually.” But then, good food is everywhere here. Wherever you look, there’s someone making a tall pile of uniformly circular tacos by hand, a man selling home-made ice-cream out of an insulated cardboard box, a woman roasting corn over a propane-fired grill. He hardly ever cooks Mexican food at home. “The taco stand outside my yoga class is amazing. Mole from the market is better than you can make yourself. It’s fun to make it, but there’s no reason to do it.”

GILMAN HAS BROUGHT us to Santa Maria La Ribera for its traditional atmo sphere, but also because it’s due a revival.

It was originally rather genteel, with turn-of-the-century mansions, wide streets and the beautiful art nouveau Museo de Geología. Since it was swallowed by the

ritualistically and communally — and originally made with human flesh. That’s probably a shade too far for this rehabilitated vegetarian, though ideologically I’m not 100 per cent opposed.

Barbacoa is rubbed with herbs and chillis, then cooked until it’s falling o! the bone. It’s served on a large platter surrounded by salsas, tacos, coriander and limes. The taste is, well… meaty. I don’t have much to compare it to, to be honest. Afterwards, I do feel kind of high, though that could just be adrenalin.

“It’s basically concentrated lamb,” says Gilman. “In the countryside, it can be gamey and not for the fainthearted, but here it’s part of the larger meal.”

The thing about meat in Mexico, he adds, is that until recently, it’s been scarce. “Not many people could a!ord it, so traditional cooking is not about a big hunk of meat. The chicken in a mole [sauce] is just a conduit to get it into your mouth — it’s not the French concept of having a beautiful piece of meat as the centrepiece.”

Because of this, today meat stands for a#uence and success. Mass production creates cheaper meat, so middle-class families can a!ord to eat it regularly — leading to the obvious pitfalls. “It’s become a status symbol. People on the street are

rapidly growing city in the 1950s, and more social housing was built after the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, it’s been rather down on its luck despite the 1040 listed heritage buildings within its borders.

The first part of our interview takes place in a cab without seatbelts, hurtling along 30 minutes north of the Condesa neighbourhood, where I’m staying — a formerly working-class, inner-city area that was gentrified in the 1990s, becoming the city’s bohemian district, and also the place to go for a contemporary take on Mexican food.

Yaax, a high-end restaurant combining traditional ingredients with Mediterranean techniques, is here, and the rooftop restaurant at the Condesa DF design hotel — an uno"cial clubhouse for bright young things — has a Japanese chef who produces sushi rolls with palmito (palm hearts) alongside tempura prawn tacos served with chipotle mayonnaise and pickled ginger.

A Japanese-Mexican fusion isn’t as nuts as it sounds on paper; in culinary terms, the two have a lot in common, including the use of chilli, citrus fruits, avocado, seafood and, of course, rice as a staple.

Food is an intrinsic part of what it is to be Mexican, in the same way as it is to the people of, say, Spain, France or China, and regional food is a part of regional

US-born food writer Nicolas Gilman has lived in Mexico for 22 years and is now a citizen.

It isn’t the official sponsor of any game.

It’s made to enjoy the game.

WE MAKE OUR BOURBON CAREFULLY. PLEASE ENJOY IT THAT WAY. Maker’s Mark® Bourbon Wh isky, 40% Alc./Vol. ©2011 Maker’s Mark Distillery, Inc. Loretto, KY, USA makersmark.com

You won’t find Maker’s Mark® associated with any big-time sporting event. Frankly, we don’t have the money for it. We’d rather invest in the handcrafting of our bourbon so you’ll be more likely to enjoy it as part of your own game- day rituals. Giving us all something to cheer about.

JULY!AUGUST "#$$ / METRO / !! !% / METRO / JULY!AUGUST "#$$

But during daylight hours, the most intoxicating substance on offer was tamarindo, a nerve-jangling sweet, sour, spicy and salty snack made of tamarind paste rolled in bright-red chilli powder and served in a plastic cup.

There’s a time and a place for vernacular food. You can bank on the fact that the retsina in a cobbled Grecian back-alley won’t taste the same at a suburban barbecue back home. Into this category — let’s call it the Marmite Category — I’d also put both tamarindo and huitlacoche.

In English, the latter is corn smut, a cancerous fungus that turns neat, yellow ears of corn into bulging, grotesquely blackened parodies of themselves. In Europe, they’re trying to eradicate it, but in Mexico it’s considered a delicacy. Like a poor man’s tru#e, it has an earthy, vegetable flavour vaguely recalling corn, and served in a quesadilla with the local homemade queso (a crumbly fresh cheese with the smell of day-old laundry), it’s surprisingly likeable.

Then there were carts carrying clear plastic cases of what looked like tortilla chips, each the size of a sheet of A3. Initially, I was confident the right time to eat one of these oversized snacks would arrive. The look of alarm I got from David persuaded me

identity. “Other ways of being Mexican have disappeared,” says Gilman. “People dress the same and listen to the same music you can hear anywhere. The international, middle-class people speak English. But the food stays. I hate the word ‘authentic’, but there’s more authentic food available now at every level. The fact that a fancy restaurant would serve tortillas now is a measure of that. People are proud to be Mexican. For better or for worse, this is a nationalistic country.”

A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, this is spelled out on a grand scale. On my third day in Mexico, I went in search of street

food with some expat friends, and with half a million locals, we also watched the Independence Day parade, a massive a!air converging on the central boulevard of the Paseo de la Reforma: five kilometres of flag-waving, street-food-eating crowds watching a seemingly endless march-a-thon of military uniforms across the whole camo spectrum, guns, tanks and dancing horses.

Amid fears of attacks by drug cartels, there were also 14,000 police o"cers on duty that day — not that they had much to do. In eight hours of walking through packed crowds, we didn’t see a single drunk person, no pickpockets, not so much as a voice raised in anything but good cheer. The most controversial sight was a sweet old gentleman holding a sign shaped like a dove reading, “Amor y paz para todos” (Peace and love for all), and looking sternly at the procession of military muscle.

“Of course, everyone will go back to their pueblos tonight and get totally hammered on mescal,” said my friend David Vaner, a German architect who moved to the DF hotel two years ago.

otherwise. “They’re actually pieces of pig skin that have been deep fried. They sit in those boxes in the sun. Sometimes, they still have hairs on them…” He trails o!. “I wouldn’t eat them if I were you.” Good to know.

On the other hand, you can trust a lady with a bucket of salsa. “You’re much safer eating that food than from the kiosks and some of the restaurants,” he says. “Those people often live in places without a fridge, so it’s all made fresh that morning, and when it’s all sold, she goes home again.”

Wealthy people, he says, would be celebrating today at house parties. The people around us were predominantly working class, so the food we ate was simple, portable and cheap: the equivalent of 30 cents snagged us a sope of frijole sauce, palmitos, coriander, queso and chilli sauce from two women surrounded by buckets of salsa, again in the national colours. “Mexicans are really proud of their food. They won’t ask you about whether you like Mexico, they’ll ask if you’ve had proper Mexican food yet,” said David.

For Gilman, living here has given him a life that’s vastly di!erent from anything he could have had in New York.

“I grew up in Little Italy surrounded by Sicilians and Neopolitans,” he says. “I was aware of ‘the authentic’ from the start and the first time I came to Mexico at 14, I remember asking for real tortillas. How could I know that at 14? So the search for the real and indigenous is exciting here, because there are all these ancient hole-in-the-wall places that haven’t changed in 40 years.

“I go on treasure hunts and find these institutions and, since no one else is doing it, it’s an incredible opportunity.” $

LIKE A POOR MAN!S TRUFFLE, HUITLACOCHE HAS AN EARTHY, VEGETABLE FLAVOUR.