Mexican cuisine is one of the three fundamental cuisines of the world. All other cuisines and traditions come from Mexican cuisine, French cuisine and Chinese cuisine. Talking about Mexican cuisine is a little abstract, a little uneducated, because … it would be to speak of “Spanish cuisine”, which in reality only exists as the sum of the numerous and very different cuisines that are prepared in the equally different regions of Spain. Mexico is a big country in terms of size, but even more so in terms of gastronomic traditions, and one region has nothing to do with the other and it is impossible to say which one is better because they are all the best in their particularity. You need to say it clearly if you don’t want to look like an idiot. But abstracting Mexican cuisine as a whole, or as a taco, for a moment, I think you could say it’s a cuisine based on happiness. There’s nothing that can make someone happier than a taco and a margarita, unless it’s two tacos and two margaritas. Mexican music, mariachis, the colors of their houses and their festivals and their art are an invitation to happiness, and to be so in a juicy, dense and hopeful way. There is no other country in the world that gives us so much.
The idea came from a summer conversation that Francisco Ruano, chef at Alcalde Restaurant in Guadalajara, Mexico, would stop in Barcelona to cook with Paco Méndez at Come. Ruano was planning to travel to Morocco at the end of the year and Paco, Mexico’s most important chef in creative Mexican cuisine, has always been interested in having the best chefs from his country come to his adopted city, especially those who speak his same language in some way.
Alcalde is not only not in Mexico but relies on the cuisine of Jalisco, sea and mountain, Pacific products, marinades, moles. The drowned cake is corn dough with carnitas bathed in chili marinades. Francisco Ruano, trained in Mugaritz, with the Roca sisters and at Noma, reinvents the dishes of his region and elevates this cuisine to the rank of gastronomic culture.
On Friday, December 18, the two chefs jointly offered lunch and dinner. 18 people at lunchtime, 18 in the evening. Tickets were sold immediately, at a price of 210 euros excluding drinks. In the end the party was around 340/350 per person. The two chefs had the good taste – and intelligence – not to start preparing dishes for the occasion, nor to make them together, so that Paco Méndez presented 12-13 dishes and Francisco Ruano 7-8. The indeterminacy comes from the desserts that I pay less attention to and don’t even notice them. I’ve always been suspicious of grown men who eat desserts. Women are fine, but a man?
The dishes were: cantina olive; peanut almond paste; white mole tartlet; wagyu toast with adobo; acevichado beet meringue; toasts of sliced shellfish and Chiapas cheese; the best tortilla chips in the world; Scoby sashimi; Caesar salad; caprese salad; tender coconut in tiger milk; thirty greens; seasonal aspic; Mexican style sinew; hare, pea and cauliflower juice; hare sirloin with mole; beef tanco
Paco Ruano has genius and a sense of beauty and taste, but he overuses garlic, sometimes transforming a very beautiful dish to look at into a terrible offense to the palate: I am referring to the tender coconut in tiger’s milk. Fortunately in others it is much more delicate like in scoby sashimi. He has the most important character and a path to becoming one one day.
Paco Méndez is one of the most important chefs in the world, and the one who, in the most essential and careful way, knew how to continue Ferran Adrià. El Bulli has always been a game of reinterpretation of the classic through talent. What happens is that Ferran’s talent is so powerful and so infinite that many times the tradition was so distant that it couldn’t even be seen. The marrow with caviar was an example. It is true that it is a synthesized reinterpretation of the “mar i muntanya” so typical – and disgusting – of Catalan cuisine, but Ferran’s dish is a metaphor so beautiful, so surgical, so perfect, that no one thinks to think of chicken with shrimp or any of those dirty things that we Catalans do from time to time.
The same thing happens with Paco with Ferran, whose talent takes him so far that sometimes the tradition is perceived on the plate only as a vague memory. It is the cuisine that interests us, the cuisine of intelligence. The kitchen of ideas, the profoundly human cuisine in which everything is at our service, we have everything at our disposal. Oscar Wilde wrote that the limits of literature are the limits of intelligence. That’s correct. The limits of Paco Méndez’s cuisine are the limits of his talent, and because it is limitless, Mexico grows in his works and an entire country becomes stylized, refined and gives a much more civilized image of itself.
Popular, traditional cuisines, attached to the product and the region, are beautiful, they can be tasty, they are generally gourmet, but they lack interest.
Popular cuisines are good, but all countries have their popular cuisine, their traditional cuisine, passed down from generation to generation, very close to the products and the land. Very attached therefore to everything which is not human and which is natural and which can be hunted or fished or found in a forest. It’s man-made cuisine but a very short distance from the lion biting you to eat. To eat you. Popular, traditional cuisines, attached to the product and the region, are beautiful, they can be tasty, they are generally gourmet, but they lack interest. Like your leg – and then the rest – for the lion of which you are his dinner. He eats you, he kills you, but he is not interested in you.
The interest lies in the geniuses, in what the geniuses do with each product, each tradition. Chef Ruano is interested when he interprets and elevates the cuisine of Jalisco and elevates it to the level of culture. Thanks to Francisco, it’s no longer just food but also culture, because there is an idea, because there is a concept, because there is hope. Beauty only exists if we love beauty and to love beauty is to create it and only geniuses can do it. Paco Ruano belongs to this same school and in his restaurant his country is elevated by technique, knowledge, beauty created – of course – by the capacity for synthesis of each dish as poets synthesize the world in their poems; and although it is a shame that we do not have it in Spain like the other Paco, going to Mexico and Guadalajara is a gift for any sensitive and educated person. In this case, it is important to book in advance. No one gives us as much as Mexico, and when its geniuses also elevate the earthly to the rank of categorical, it is impossible to compete in affinity and beauty.
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