The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Say hola to modern Latin American cooking
Renowned chef Martha Ortiz is bringing the colours, flavours and sensuality of Latin America to London. By Sue Quinn. Photographs by Lindsay Lauckner Gundlock
MARTHA ORTIZ GLIDE S through Mexico City’s San Juan market like a ballerina, reed thin and elegant. She pauses at a produce stall, a kaleidoscopic tower of fruit and vegetables, and extends a lissom hand to accept a slice of a redfleshed pitahaya. Onwards to a chilli stall, fragrant with smoky spices, where she wafts a pasilla mixe variety under her nose, as gracefully as if it were a rose. ‘ I adore it,’ she murmurs, eyes closed, head tilted back to breathe in the smell more deeply. She poses for a photo with the stall’s proprietress, who actually sheds a grateful tear.
Chef, restaurateur, cultural ambassador, provocate ur, feminist and national treasure, Ortiz is one of Mexico City ’s most high-profile (not least for her role as a judge on Top Chef Mexico) and successful culinary figures. And she’s about to bring her unique take on Mexican food to London.
Ortiz’s acclaimed Mexico City restaurant Dulce Patria (Sweet Homeland) gleams pink and gold on a busy junction in the swanky Polanco district. Inside, the decor is a confection of pinks and reds, embroidered chairs and vases spilling over with flowers. It’s consistently listed among Latin America’s top 50 restaurants, and even on a Wednesday there’s no doubting it. At lunchtime
the place is jammed, and the gentle clink of cutlery on china and burble of conversation continue until late into the evening.
Diners flock here not just for her elegant and technically accomplished food. Ortiz strives to capture Mexico’s history, art, music and colours on the plate, transforming a meal into a culinary narrative. Her ethos is unashamedly feminine. The restaurant’s logo is a glamorous woman, astride a horse, wearing a sombrero and brandishing a freedom flame. Many of Ortiz’s dishes are boldly girly and bedecked with flowers, with names like Mary Goes to the Flower Shop. Half of her 100-strong staff are women – a ratio rare in professional kitchens around the world, but especially so in Mexico. ‘My ambition was to create something very lyrical and feminine, a concept that embraced everything that is so wonderful about my country,’ Ortiz explains. ‘Food is identity in Mexico and I’m very proud of being Mexican.’
Ortiz is outspoken in her belief in the sensuality of Mexican food, and this sometimes ruffles feathers in her devoutly Catholic homeland. ‘We’re not allowed to show our bodies in Mexico like they do in other cultures, so all the sensuality is expressed through food,’ she explains. She goes on to theorise why the classic Mexican mole (pronounced mo-lay) sauce, invented by nuns in the 16th century, is so fragrant, rich and complex. ‘The moles are sensual because this was a way for the nuns to channel their libido!’ she enthuses. ‘And also the rhythm of the molcajete (traditional mortar and pestle), which is just made for a woman, is also very sexual.’
Ortiz draws culinary inspiration from all around her: the work of artists such as Frida Kahlo, whom she reveres for her strength, passion and use of colour; the beauty of Mexico City’s ethereal canal system, where flowers and produce grow on ancient chinampas, or floating islands; her country’s vibrant embroidered fabrics and handicrafts, and its rich history.
In a way, Ortiz was destined for a dramatic culinary career. When she was a child, her mother, Martha Chapa, a leading Mexican artist and cookbook author, and father Fe de rico Ortiz Quezada, a pioneering transplant
surgeon, hosted lavish dinner parties attended by the country’s intellectual and cultural elite. The young Martha was allowed to help decorate the table in spectacular fashion, with sculptures, flowers and candles, and chop the vegetables. ‘The kitchen is a place of power and space for women, and I learnt that from my mother,’ Ortiz says.
At university she studied political science, majoring in the history of gastronomy, followed by spells in professional kitchens in Hong Kong and Paris. While abroad, she realised she needed to know more about authentic Mexican cookery, so she travelled around the country and learnt the secrets from mothers and grandmothers skilled in cooking meals for large families using local ingredients. She turned the experience into a series of award-winning cookbooks, some co-authored with her mother, on regional Mexican cookery.
In 2001, Ortiz opened her fine-dining restaurant, Aguila y Sol (Eagle and Sun) in Mexico City, to critical acclaim. Alongside an emerging s orority of female chefs in Mexico, she brought a new culinary energy to the restaurant scene by combining a modern, even avant-garde approach with authentic ingredients. But while Mexican women have traditionally been in charge in the kitchen, it ’s unusual for them to run large businesses. Ortiz’s stewardship of a successful restaurant favoured by corporate bigwigs and politicians marked her out as ‘too powerful’, she believes. In 2007, bureaucrats closed her restaurant on the pretext that it was one short of the requisite 91 parking spaces. Ortiz was devastated but undeterred. Two years later she opened Dulce Patria, to even greater acclaim.
She’s excited, and a little nervous, about the forthcoming launch of her UK restaurant Ella Canta (She Sings), which opens at the Intercontinental London Park Lane this week. What will UK diners and critics make of it? Certainly interest in Mexican cuisine is growing in the UK; restaurants like Peyotito and El Pastor, both in London, have been enthusiastically received,
‘The sauce is sensual because this was a way for the nuns to channel their libido!’