Chef at Fayuca delivers Latin American experience
During the week Fayuca opened last month, owner Ernesto Gomez took off for a weekend fling.
It’s a serious restaurant with vibrant food and a front-of-pack Mexican chef, Jair Tellez, as a partner. Tellez is the owner and chef at Merotoro and Amaya in Mexico City, and Laja in Baja California, as well as a winemaker.
“He’s one of the most progressive and recognized chefs in Mexico right now,” Gomez says.
Gomez’s weekend fling was a professional one. He was invited to a dinner at Noma’s pop-up in Tulum, Mexico (US$600 a pop).
“These were the top culinary figures on the planet, and it was their interpretation of Mexican food through their own personal journeys,” he says.
Tellez assisted in Noma’s yearlong research in Mexico preceding the pop-up, and supplied wine for one of the courses.
“I took a red-eye to Mexico after service on Friday, barely slept and arrived around eight in the morning. I went to dinner at 5:30 and ate wonderful food and met amazing people,” he says. “On Sunday, we cooked a fish dinner on the beach and then I flew back that night. It was absolutely unbelievable.”
Gomez is also a principal, with founder Victor Bouzide, at Nuba, the casual Lebanese restaurants that were popular enough to grow to four locations.
“I fell in love with this food and I’m very happy with it, but I was previously in fine dining. I’m in my early 40s and if I don’t do my own project now, I might not have the stamina later,” he says.
Fayuca intends to ignore borders and the name, which means petty contraband in Spanish, is a wink.
“The food reflects a kind of smuggling of ideas and flavours over borders. It reflects our childhoods in Mexico and our personal journeys,” Gomez says. “We’ve both worked in fine dining. Jair apprenticed at Daniel in New York, where he worked with French techniques, and I worked in Spain and am inspired by that.
“We don’t like to call it a Mexican restaurant. We set forth to do a great restaurant and we’ll express with local artisanal ingredients and make something new and fun out of it.”
He points out that Ensenada, where Tellez opened his first restaurant, is closer to Vancouver than to Mexico City.
Got that? It’s not Mexican food. But I felt it was Mexican enough to tweet out “best Mexican food in town” when I ate there. My husband, more attuned, declared, “This is a million miles away from Tex-Mex.”
For appies, we started with charred albacore tuna ceviche with cucumbers and pickled radishes ($16). With ceviche, good-quality
seafood is everything, and you got that here. This is an elegant dish. Enfrijoladas ($16), commonly a breakfast dish, is a simple thing of tortillas, drenched in pureed black beans, with add-ons like eggs. There’s smoked mackerel, pickled onions and a soft-boiled egg bound by a velvety bean sauce that I mistook for mole. This isn’t the traditional quick-cook breakfast.
Their flour tortillas, by the way, are made with beef tallow, although they have a vegetarian version as well. Starting in June, they’ll be doing corn tortillas with non-GMO corn. Pork jowl with black bean-braised cipollini onion, charred salsa and poached egg ($21) is a Tellez creation.
“We cook the face and cheeks of pork then wrap in pork skin, slice and fry it to a crisp. We serve it with cipollini onions cooked in the same broth as the black beans. The liquid is reduced and mixed with charred salsa, and the pork puck is served with a poached egg on top,” Gomez says. I loved this dish.
Braised beef cheeks with butternut gnocchi, rapini and Mexican gremolata ($22) was another yummy dish, bathed in reduced veal stock. The beef had a nice jiggle thanks to the slow braise. A cilantro-orange-and-parsley gremolata added zest.
For dessert, we shared quequito, a cake made with 85 per cent chickpea flour and 15 per cent wheat. Sliced, grilled and served with a lemon gelato, it was gently sweet, light and simple, which I like in a dessert.
The wine list features organic, natural and biodynamic wines, but alas, they haven’t been able to import naturally produced wines from Tellez’s small Mexican winery, Bichi (it means naked in Spanish). Cocktails have a Latin American lean, with mescal and rum in many of them.
In June, Gomez is opening a tortilleria, selling house-made flour and corn tortillas, as well as grilled chicken and carnitas (like pulled pork). It’ll be at 1206 Seymour St., which was a Nuba location until the restaurant moved a few blocks over to Davie Street.
“It’ll be a kind of highway stand,” Gomez says.
“We couldn’t find good tortillas in Vancouver. They’re like the Wonder Bread. Our artisanal tortillas won’t be lasting three weeks in the fridge.”
He might flinch at being called the best Mexican restaurant in town, so I’ll call it the best Latin American one.