Pujol at apex of Mexican cuisine
Enjoy a world-class menu ranging from street food to exotic delicacies
Like our famous geese, Canadians migrate south in winter to defrost. We recently hightailed it out of Vancouver just as the Arctic exhaled its cold nasty breath upon us and we dodged skidding cars as we headed for the airport. No orderly V-shaped pattern for us. Destination: Mexico City.
There, we immediately visited Pujol, the top dog restaurant in the city, the fourth best in Latin America, and 20th on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Chef and owner Enrique Olvera pioneered the new Mexican gastronomy movement, shining a bright light on a sophisticated cuisine with a storied history.
I’m not always completely blown away by restaurants sporting Michelin stars or on the world’s 50 best lists. Sometimes, the techniques and artistry are amazing, but I’m left cold or unmoved by a stiff formality on the plate and in the room.
But I was happy at Pujol. Olvera moved the restaurant to new digs last March and at the same time took a more relaxed approach to food and dining.
An area is reserved for an elongated taco bar. The new room is a lowkey beauty, a little bit mid-century, a little bit Zen, with Mexican sourced materials and furnishings.
The kitchen reflects Mexican cookery, doing away with burners and sauté stations. Instead, staff use a wood-fired grill, comals (earthenware or cast iron cooking surfaces) for making tortillas, and a brick oven outside for barbacoa. The food is haute, but the atmosphere is very relaxed.
Pujol’s six-course tasting menu — there is no à la carte — costs $128 per person (excluding drinks and tip), but also includes an amuse bouche, palate-cleanser sorbet, and post-dessert treat of a skinny, spiral churro.
The main act begins with a “street snack.” To Olvera, street food is but a Cinderella in need of a prince. And so, we started with a sort of elote, a common street food of grilled corn on the cob slathered with cotija cheese and spicy mayo.
Here, it arrived in a perfect hollowed gourd, sleek as ceramic art. Corn husks smouldered inside, releasing a poof of smoke upon lifting the lid. Nestling baby corns were coated in chicatana mayo (flying ant mayo, further flavoured with coffee, lime and costena chile). Flying ants appear only during the first two June rainfalls in parts of Mexico and I’m happy to have had this bite of Mexico’s fascinating cuisine.
Moving through the courses, I had ceviche-style sea bass with cacahuatzintle (heirloom corn) juice and celery (such gossamer texture); cauliflower with almond salsa macha (a Veracruz salsa with chipotle chilies, oil, garlic, peanuts, sesame seeds) and chile de arbol, which the server said also contained crispy chicken skin; and finally, duck with black recado (achiote paste), a gorgeous dish.
My husband’s choices were octopus with habanero ink, ayocote and veracruzana sauce (a mini-horror nightmare to me with the plump blackened tentacle sticking out under fresh herbs but beautifully tender and delicious); charred eggplant tamal and chard; and lamb with mint mole and baby potatoes. The latter was the only dish that rated a “meh.” It was cooked to medium rather than medium rare and was not as tender as it should have been.
Everyone is served the baby corn dish and another signature that climaxes the tasting menu — the Mole Madre. The mole does not come with a protein. It is, basically, sauce on a plate except for blue corn tortillas, embedded with a leaf, to scoop it up. A black mole (mole negro) encircles a light-coloured one like a bull’s-eye.
The dark mole is a mother sauce, like a sourdough bread starter that keeps on going, and is added to each day. When we had it, it was 1,465 days old, and amazingly deep and complex and beautifully balanced as the pedigree of the mole and the chef suggests. The lighter mole (mole nuevo) spooned into the centre is freshly made. I asked the server about the ingredients in the dish and he responded with a deer-in-headlight look. He explained it has more than 80 ingredients, and they change.
My dessert — an apple tamale with a paper-thin crisp disk of apples crowning the dish — didn’t exactly look like a tamale (nothing was wrapped), but it was delicious.
My husband chose chocolate torte with caramelized banana and vanilla ice cream with intrigues of pennyroyal gelatin kisses and pinole, an Aztec-inspired crumble of ground maize, cocoa and spices.
Pujol’s wine list ranges from Latin America to Europe, but curiously, there’s no wine pairing option with the tasting menu. This is, however, an eye-popping array of mescals and other agave spirits.
If Pujol isn’t in your budget, Olvera also runs Eno, a casual restaurant chain in Mexico City. In New York, Olvera operates Cosme, which ranks 40th in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.