I recently joined Jeffrey of xtremefoodies.com on a ‘high-low’ taco crawl in Mexico City. The genre of expensive tacos—the high part—designed by schooled chefs and proffered in cushy surroundings, is a fairly recent phenomenon here in Mexico’s capital. It is familiar to L.A. and Tijuana’s food truck scene. But only since the pandemic wound down have a spate of venues begun to proliferate in la CDMX. Enrique Olvera, pioneer as usual, inaugurated his ‘taco omakase’ at Pujol in 2017, but it remained in a class by itself for years.

Perhaps Mexico City’s taco culture has traditionally been unusually conservative about what constitutes a taco, while L.A. and Tijuana became laboratories for cross-border experimentation. Nobody here was open to kimchi, truffles or ponzu entering the kitchen of a taquería. “Restructuring” al Pastor seemed an abomination. But a new generation emerged, both within the kitchen and at table, who were open to innovation. Tweak here, fuss there. Or, simply redo the classic utilizing prime ingredients.

So we decided to reevaluate the newish, much ballyhooed taquerias. Closely under our magnifying glasses were seemingly random places the Michelin Guide has (and has not) chosen to include. There were a few surprises. Much virtual ink has been spilled over the recently arrived Michelin’s granting of El Califa de León a star, the only taqueria to win one (it has since been rescinded). We residents have known this previously humble hole-in-the-wall for decades—I, in fact, included it in my first guide, published in 2008 more for its history and community standing than for the great quality of its tacos. Fast forward to 2026. The ambience remains down to earth, but prices are high and payment is in advance (a change from the typically casual attitude of yore,) and tourists show up in Ubers. The tacos themselves are bland, meat chewy, salsas one-dimensional. Off my list.

We continue to the stalwart, El Jarocho where guisados—dishes prepared and served out of clay casseroles—have been gracing La Roma since 1947. Earthy mustard-colored tortillas, richly fragrant, hold a heap of the mole verde I have touted in the pages of Saveur (the recipe I presented was my own approximation as El Jarocho wouldn’t part with theirs on pain of death). Unerring, unchanged.

Los Parados, another old-timer (1965) which does charcoal grilled meats to smoky perfection, is open all hours. It specializes in feeding late-night revelers, cops and robbers, off duty working girls and nice Jewish boys like me, and is consistently fine. Move the star here!

Moving up the ladder of critical thinking into the trained chef category, we head to Siembra, a likeable spot on a shady side street in chichi Polanco. Israel Montero, a French-trained chef who formerly ran the fine-dining spot Raíz, has gone downscale here and doesn’t attempt to re-invent, only to refine, and pay loving homage to, known classics. My favorite is the soft-shell crab, done Baja style, that is, as tempura with a shmear of mayo and some finely sliced vegetable crunch. A ´campechano´, a combo of longaniza chorizo and salted/pounded beef cecina, native to the State of Mexico and sold by the thousands at humble stands there, is similarly caressed and showered with respect.

We then agree to tackle La Once Mil, whose “most expensive taco in Mexico” infamy has garnered it a contentious reputation.

La Once Mil opened in 2024 in the city’s most upscale neighborhood, Lomas de Chapultepec (think Beverly Hills), the name taken from the area’s postal code. The original concept of chef and restaurateur César de la Parra, it was conceived as an upmarket version of a classic taquería. De la Parra says he loved eating tacos around working-class neighborhoods such as Doctores and Narvarte, but wanted to create the kind of venue more appropriate and attractive to the area: comfortable seating, good design and unusually refined ingredients.

The food follows that train of thought: handmade/nixtamalized tortillas and elaborate salsas are combined with premium beef cuts, including Prime beef and A5 Wagyu. The chef wanted to put ingredients of the quality found in top restaurants inside a taco.

It took off quickly. By late 2025 it had expanded to a Roma location, and in the spring of 2026 La Once Mil received one Michelin star, becoming the second Michelin-starred taquería in Mexico after El Califa de León.

But the high pricing also garnered negative publicity. “Estos son los tacos más caros de la CDMX” shrieked El Universal. “(La Once Mil is) the latest opening of what Chilangos call ‘bougie tacos’”, advised Eater. And the chip-on-their shoulder social media crowd had a field day.

“I wanted to hate it,” exclaimed Jeffrey, wiping a trail of Wagyu grease from his chin—but I just can’t. We had just downed that taco, priced at around $20 USD; a starkly simple thin slice of smoke infused, buttery Wagyu beef resting on an equally fine multicolored tortilla. The exquisite integrity reminded me of what I usually extol about the greatest dishes in Spain: top ingredients beautifully married—and only a few of them. This bijou taco took no more than a drop of lime, salsa seeming excessive, as it does on a great oyster. I had to put aside my decided prejudice against upscale anything, and agreed that this place was a gem, deserved every accolade it has received, and is well worth the price of admission.

So what did we learn? Certainly not that an expensive taco is necessarily better than a cheap one. Nor did we reinforce our prejudice that a cheap one from a street stall is somehow morally superior to its manor-born cousins. El Jarocho and Los Parados handily disprove the former; La Once Mil the latter. Nor does a Michelin star guarantee anything worth eating—but then, I never did believe that. Neither is a high-priced taco inherently an insult to the noble tortilla, as I might once have argued.

In the end, a taco is no different from anything else we eat. Good ingredients cost money. Skill costs money. “Bougie” décor costs money too. Whether it’s worth paying for all of that is another question. At La Once Mil, surprisingly, I thought it was. Maybe it’s an insult to the noble taco to believe you shouldn’t dress it up once in a while and take it to Downton Abbey.

The ever cynical W.C. Fields was right: never give a sucker an even break. But perhaps the sucker isn’t always the person paying a small fortune for a taco. Sometimes it’s the guy who refuses to taste it because he thinks he already knows what a taco is supposed to cost—and taste like.

* For more information on tacos in Mexico City, see my book, The Best Tacos in Mexico City.

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Food writing—or what increasingly passes for it in the press and on social media—continues to bombard us with the word authentic. As cuisines increasingly cross borders—Japanese in Mexico, Mexican in Japan, Chinese in India, Indian in England—the concepts of what is “real” and “true” have become central to the way we evaluate restaurants. In the always multicultural New York of my past, nobody ever disputed the veracity of the local Italian joint, chop suey house or mom & pop venue proffering ‘Spanish-Mexican food’. But times have changed and the arbiters of taste now must ask if these places are true or false, real or pretend—i.e. authentic.

Nobody seems to define the term; they don’t seem to understand the question, much less the answer. If two restaurants serve the same regional dish but prepare it differently, which one is authentic? If a grandmother in Oaxaca and a chef in Mexico City make mole differently, is one real and the other fake? If a dish changes over time, at what moment does authenticity freeze? Who gets to decide what is right? The critic, who, like me, has traveled extensively and, presumably, eaten a dosa in Chennai, a ceviche in Lima, a xiao long bao in Shanghai or a paella in Valencia? Or is it the all-knowing chef, the grandmother, or the influencer. These days, the loudest voice is often the winner.

When I arrived in Mexico for the first time, as a teenager, I knew there was such a thing as a “real” tortilla. All we had in New York were Old El Paso Tortillas—in a can—I kid you not! Already on my quest for the real thing, I entered the first tortillería I encountered and asked, in hesitant and minimal Spanish for “Una tortilla, por favor”; the entire crew broke out in laughter, handed me the tortilla free of charge—I was not aware that tortillas are sold by the kilo—and I sheepishly retreated to the street, where I inhaled, fondled and licked my “authentic” tortilla before slowly devouring it. Fifty years later, whenever I return to Mexico, now my home for over thirty years, after traveling, I do the same with my first tortilla, it’s a ritual I need to repeat. Let’s face it, tortillas aren’t the same outside the country. Nor are baguettes outside France, som tums made other than from a pushcart on a Bangkok alley, or non-New York bagels.

Authenticity often becomes a form of culinary gatekeeping. There is an assumption that somewhere exists an original, correct version against which all others should be measured. Restaurants exploit this idea because “authentic” has become one of the most powerful words in food marketing. I certainly don’t defend the Thai restaurant that features “green curry with your choice of chicken, beef or tofu” (a pre-made curry with a protein tossed in to serve is bad cooking and would not be tolerated in Thailand). Nor would I promote such aberrations of ‘Mexican’ cooking as gloppy nachos or hard-shell tacos. I don’t like the sushi done in Latin America with a schmear of cream cheese, an idea that horrifies many Japanese visitors, because I don’t think cheese is good with rice or fish. It’s not because the above foods aren’t real or done as they would be in Thailand, Mexico or Japan but because they are bad cooking. There is fabulous Mexican-American food, exquisite Italian-American dishes, interesting Indo-Chinese concoctions, and superb, complex Japanese-Peruvian that even earned its own name, Nikkei. Cuisines brought across borders evolve and adapt for many reasons. New versions of old dishes are created according to the availability of ingredients, the influence of local traditions, and most of all, the tastes of the public for whom they are being prepared. I have long objected to restaurants chasing trends and to diners looking for external validation (from Michelin, influencers, social media approval etc.). They’re searching not for delicious food but for reassurance that they’re eating the “correct” food. This is unfortunate, as my tenet is that there are only two kinds of food, good and bad. An authentic painting can be authenticated because an original painting exists. An authentic historical document can be authenticated because an original document exists. But where is the original mole? The original taco? The original ramen?

I am still that teenager searching for the ‘authentic’ only my criteria have widened. Perhaps I haven’t abandoned the search for authenticity after all. I’ve simply stopped letting other people define it for me. I eat with an open mind. I taste, then judge.

I’ve noticed a recent trend on Instagram and Facebook (the only social media in which I participate) among people who post about restaurants. It’s a popularly supported reaction to the invasion of perceived “Influencers”. Signs posted at the entrance of restaurants proclaiming the unwelcome status of these increasingly vilified cogs-in-the-publicity-machine appear in these posts followed by accolades of support thereof. Whether the images were AI-generated is beside the point. They imply an “anti-Influencer movement” which is no more than a leitmotif in the endless opera performed by those social media denizens who love to kvetch and diss.

There is no organized movement, to my knowledge. The problem lies, as I have previously stated, within the current global restaurant culture, formed and adhered to by chefs and patrons eager to conform to, and sheepishly follow, trends and the people who proffer them. The idea of a restaurant formulated to a supposed contemporary, fashionable style is what’s at issue. The problem is not influencers. The problem is the restaurant culture that produced them.

I have written before about what I see as the current restaurant aesthetic: menus that insist upon multi-element dishes built from awkward combinations of formerly distinct ingredients; local foods artificially elevated simply because they were once considered humble; forced fusions intended to wow but which instead diminish—sometimes even insult—the cuisines being fused. Presentation for the camera. Theatrical service. Plates designed to be photographed before they’re eaten.

Enter the influencer. An influencer is not necessarily someone knowledgeable about food. He or she is someone good at self-promotion, someone with an audience valuable enough that restaurants will gladly trade dinner for publicity. Their job is not criticism. Their job is content. There’s nothing new here. Famous people have been plugging products to us forever and we believed them because we wanted a piece of the life they represented. Did Dinah Shore actually “see the U.S.A. in her Chevrolet”? Did Annette Funicello spend her afternoons with her fingers buried in a jar of Skippy Peanut Butter? Does @foodie_whatever really adore Bistrot X?

Cynical comedian W.C. Fields famously advised, “Never give a sucker an even break.” The public has always believed what it wishes to believe.

The difference today is not the existence of advertising. It is that advertising increasingly masquerades as criticism.

I have been fascinated by other people’s food for as long as I can remember. At six years old, studying the menu at the old Greenwich Village Spanish restaurant Sevilla, I astonished my parents by ordering almejas en salsa verde. At 10, on my first trip outside the continental United States, to Puerto Rico, the heady aroma of sopa de ajo—an egg bathing serenely in its garlicky broth—lodged itself permanently in my memory. I have asked foreigners what they eat for as long as I remember. That fascination eventually became a career. I have now spent nearly twenty years writing professionally about food, though I came to it later in life. Long before Instagram, before reels, before hashtags. I confess to being opinionated. I dislike trendiness, falsity, pretension. And I don’t see much need to “reinvent” dishes that have survived perfectly well for centuries. Why produce “a new take on...” when the old take is magnificent? Have we really exhausted the regional cuisines of India, France, Japan or Mexico to such an extent that we must fuse them together simply to manufacture novelty?

The truly sad thing is not the rise of influencers but the disappearance of the critic. The restaurant critic—already an endangered species and never much of a presence in the heavily censored press of Latin America—is being replaced not by another generation of critics but by paid entertainers. Gone are the Pete Wellses, the Ruth Reichls, the Jonathan Golds. Even Anthony Bourdain, whose television persona could be gloriously obnoxious while his writing remained remarkably perceptive. These independent voices are becoming rarer. Instead we are encouraged to consume an endless stream of smiling recommendations in which everything is “amazing,” every cocktail is “insane,” every taco “slaps,” every chef is a “genius,” and every meal deserves twelve heart emojis. Perhaps it does; more often, I suspect, it doesn’t.

Increasingly, restaurants are becoming stages upon which chefs, diners, influencers and publicists all perform for one another. To eat at the fashionable address is to join the club. The ‘mean cheerleaders’ from high school have finally invited you to sit at their table—provided, of course, you remember to follow and tag them.

From time to time I receive invitations offering a complimentary meal—sometimes with a budget, two drinks included—in exchange for posts, stories and reels. I always decline. I explain that I’m a writer, not an influencer. Not because I believe I’m morally superior, but because I value my independence. If I recommend a restaurant, I want readers to know that recommendation wasn’t negotiated in advance. Occasionally that polite refusal results in a different invitation—with no strings attached—which I am perfectly happy to accept.

A restaurant critic isn’t there to cheerlead, to destroy, or to accumulate invitations. We are there to observe, to compare, to remember, and to describe honestly what we find. To add context, subjective opinions. Sometimes we’ll offend. Good. Better an opinion worth arguing about than another sponsored smile beneath a photograph of a perfectly lit risotto.

My newest book, available here as an instant digital download, is a guide that delves into the heart and soul of Mexico City through its most iconic tacos.

The taco is for Mexicans a whole world of flavor, a lifestyle, emblematic of the country's culture. In the nation's capital, visitors may be overwhelmed by the myriad choices of tacos and places to eat them. In this user-friendly book, Gilman guides the reader through the different genres of tacos and shares his favorites in each category.

Gilman’s tone strikes a masterful balance between informed erudition and streetwise enthusiasm. The prose is never dry, even when touching on complex subjects like colonial culinary fusion or genetic corn modification. There’s humor (“salsa that could grow hair on a bowling ball”), but also respect—for taqueros, for the history they represent, and for the people who make Mexico City’s street food scene one of the world’s great edible spectacles.

The design by Alfonso Garza is clean and easy to navigate, with thoughtful iconography and maps that make the book genuinely functional as a field guide. Andrea Tejeda’s photography, meanwhile, is a triumph of visual storytelling—never overly stylized, always appetizing, capturing both tacos and taquerías with intimacy and honesty.

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Every so often I eat in a restaurant that leaves me with an odd feeling. The food is excellent. The chef has clearly done the research. The ingredients are right, the techniques are sound, the flavors are convincing. Yet something essential is absent. It has taken me years to understand what that missing ingredient is.

We often think of cuisines as collections of recipes. Learn how to make the dishes, source the proper ingredients, and you’ve recreated the gastronomy of a place. But restaurants are rarely just about food. The best of them are expressions of a way of life, and that is much harder to export than recipes.

This thought first occurred to me more than thirty years ago in New York, when a so-called Spanish bar called Ñ appeared in SoHo. The menu purported to offer tiny, expensive “tapas” to diners who had no cultural framework for understanding why they were so small. In Spain, tapas and pintxos were never primarily about portion size. They were about movement, sociability, spontaneity and wandering from one bar to another. Once separated from that culture, they became simply small plates at New York prices. Needless to say, Ñ is long gone.

Years ago, at the high-end Mexican restaurant El Teddy’s in Tribeca, a chef decided to deconstruct chile en nogada. The naked chile sat forlornly on a smear of sauce in which floated a few pomegranate seeds and flecks of parsely. The ingredients may all have been present, but the chef had misunderstood the dish. A chile en nogada is not merely a stuffed poblano accompanied by walnut/cream sauce and pomegranate seeds. Its appearance is inseparable from its identity: the green chile cloaked in white sauce and scattered with red seeds, a ceremonial dish whose visual symbolism is part of the pleasure. Rearranged into contemporary sculpture, it had become something else. Sometimes the misunderstanding is grand and conceptual. Sometimes it reveals itself in tiny details. A Mexican friend was genuinely offended.

Fast-forward to Mexico City, where Spanish culture ought to be more familiar. La Cocina del Bizco presents itself as a Madrid-style taberna, and much of the food is good. The portions are ample but the prices higher than they would be in the “old country.” There are no medias raciones, no tapas. The prices on the wine list begin where the neighborhood Iberian taberna’s ends; no inexpensive house red by the glass or half-liter to make wine-drinking attractive and affordable. People come for dinner rather than drifting in for a drink and a couple of bites before moving on. The menu has been copied, but not the habits that gave it meaning.

Kura presents another variation on the same problem. It calls itself an izakaya, but it is really an expensive, polished Japanese restaurant using the word and little of the concept. An izakaya is not simply a place that serves Japanese small plates. It is a social institution: casual, convivial, noisy, often inexpensive, a place to drink after work and order food as the evening unfolds. Remove that social function and the word becomes little more than branding.

Mendl, Mexico City’s New York-style Jewish delicatessen, gets a surprising amount right. The pastrami is excellent. The matzoh ball soup is comforting. The bagels have a satisfying chew. The restaurant has approached a difficult, tradition-laden cuisine with skill and respect. And yet the details give it away. The potato salad is made with halved new potatoes and no mayonnaise, rather than the soft, creamy version that accompanied deli sandwiches throughout my childhood. The rye bread is light and soft—goyish, in other words. Instead of a bowl of sour and half-sour pickles sitting on the table automatically and being replenished without charge, the sandwich comes with a single, chintzy shred. None of these things ruins the food. Taken separately, they hardly matter. Together, they tell you that the restaurant knows the cuisine from the outside. I grew up in New York with this food. My parents were Jewish by culture, if not by religion. I remember impossibly stuffed pastrami sandwiches, dense rye bread and bowls of pickles that seemed to magically refill themselves. I remember old men arguing over newspapers and waiters who treated customers as an interruption. A waitress at the Carnegie Deli once told my friend that he could not order hot borscht, even though it was on the menu. Presumably, it would have broken her heart to see him eat it at the wrong time of year. None of that appeared on the menu.

This is not really a question of authenticity, a word that has become so overused as to mean almost nothing. Nor is it an argument that only people born into a culture are entitled to cook its food. Recipes can be studied. Techniques can be mastered. Traditions can be approached with curiosity, humility and imagination. But some knowledge is instinctive rather than intellectual. It resides in portion sizes, prices, rhythms of service and assumptions about what is included for free. It determines whether people stand at the bar or sit for a formal meal, whether they order everything at once or keep adding dishes, whether a restaurant is a destination or simply part of an evening.

Food cultures do sometimes travel successfully. Walk into a good Cantonese dim sum restaurant in Queens, Vancouver or even Mexico City and you may find three generations gathered around the table, drinking tea, lingering for hours and ordering one bamboo steamer after another. The recipes have travelled, but so have many of the people, customs and reasons for eating that way. You are witnessing yǐn chá, not simply consuming dumplings.

Perhaps no restaurant can fully reproduce a food culture once the social world around it has vanished. The closer a restaurant comes, the more revealing its tiny failures become. A cuisine can be taught. A culture has to be lived.

When I came to live in Mexico City in the late 1990s, I was obsessed with finding the best Mexican food. There were no restaurant guides for outsiders—I would later write the first one. Street food was still regarded with suspicion by most foreign visitors. The only indispensable guidebook I found was the mythical, spiral-bound Guía del Pleno Disfrute de la Ciudad de México, produced by a circle of writers and intellectuals and as rare as a three-peso bill. It became my bible.

In his introduction, the essayist, urban chronicler and bon vivant Carlos Monsiváis posed a question that has stayed with me ever since:

“What does a city offer? What are its mysteries, its hidden corners, its underground paradises? And what mechanisms does it provide for pleasure?”

For years, I thought the answer lay entirely in local food. I chased late-night taquerías, weekend barbacoa, mole made by anonymous women in hole-in-the-wall kitchens, forgotten fondas and bustling market stalls. I was still captivated by that troublesome word “authentic”—a concept I have long since abandoned. I believed that understanding Mexico meant eating nothing but Mexican food. But Mexico City has changed; so have I.

One of the most rewarding ways to understand the city today is by eating everyone else’s food. That may sound like a contradiction. Why fly halfway around the world only to eat Chinese noodles or Korean barbecue? Because those meals are just as much a part of contemporary Mexico City as tacos al pastor.

One of the great misconceptions about “eating local” is that it assumes a city’s identity can be reduced to its traditional cuisine. But cities aren’t museums. They evolve with the people who live in them.

Mexico City was cosmopolitan long before anyone coined the phrase “digital nomad.” Chinese immigrants founded the cafés de chinos more than a century ago. Spanish, French, Lebanese and Jewish communities have all left lasting marks on the city’s culinary landscape. More recently, Indians, Koreans, Japanese, Venezuelans and, increasingly, Chinese immigrants have added entirely new chapters.

Contrary to what one occasionally reads in newspaper trend pieces, none of this has diluted Mexican cuisine. During the thirty years I’ve lived here, I’ve witnessed precisely the opposite. Regional Mexican cooking has flourished. There are more excellent taquerías, seafood restaurants, fondas and fine-dining venues than ever before. The city’s table hasn’t become less Mexican; it has become bigger.

So when people ask me what I miss most about New York, I usually answer: family, friends… and good Chinese food.

For years, finding it in Mexico City felt like searching for the Holy Grail. Every so often someone would whisper about a place above a shopping arcade or hidden behind an office building where nobody spoke much Spanish, the menu wasn’t translated, and every table seemed occupied by people who clearly hadn’t come because the restaurant had five stars on Yelp or appeared in a guidebook. Half the time, the rumors proved disappointing. Then, every once in a while, I’d strike gold. Those discoveries thrilled me every bit as much as finding an extraordinary taco stand. Eventually I realized why. The best foreign restaurants in Mexico City are the ones that don’t really care whether you come or not. That isn’t meant as criticism. Quite the opposite. Their purpose isn’t to introduce Chinese food to Mexicans or Indian food to tourists. They exist because someone misses the food they grew up with. They serve homesick students, engineers, factory managers, visiting relatives and families who simply want dinner to taste like home. The rest of us are welcome, of course. We’re just not the intended audience, and that’s precisely what makes them so exciting.

There is something deeply satisfying about eating another person’s comfort food. Food that hasn’t been adjusted, translated, sweetened or explained. Food that assumes you already know what it is and if you don’t, you’ll learn.

In the last few years, that world has expanded dramatically in Mexico. A growing Chinese community—driven in part by investment in the electric vehicle and technology sectors—has brought with it a new generation of restaurants serving regional cuisines that would have been unimaginable here a decade ago. Some don’t even have Spanish menus, requiring Google Translate and a willingness to take chances. The dining rooms are filled largely with Chinese customers. Exactly as they should be.

I find myself increasingly drawn to these places—not because I’m tired of Mexican food, but because they reveal another Mexico City. The same is true of Korean restaurants crowded with Korean families, Japanese noodle shops serving Japanese office workers, or even American-style cafés feeding brunch to homesick digital nomads. These aren’t “ethnic restaurants,” they’re neighborhood venues serving neighborhoods most of us never knew existed.

Carlos Monsiváis asked what hidden pleasures a city proposes. After almost three decades, I’m still answering that question. Some of those hidden pleasures are still found in tiny taquerías and market stalls. Others arrive in bowls of hand-pulled noodles, sizzling Korean grills, or plates of food whose names I still can’t pronounce.

That’s one of the great pleasures of living in a city that never stops becoming itself.

If you’re curious to explore this other side of Mexico City’s dining scene, I’ve written about many of these discoveries—including outstanding Chinese restaurants and other immigrant cuisines—on Good Food Mexico.

Consider it the beginning, not the end, of the treasure hunt.

I loved the place. For fifteen years it was my benchmark, my default recommendation, the restaurant I sent friends to without hesitation. If you were going to Madrid, I’d demand that you go there. And now it’s off the list.

It was never fashionable. That was part of its magic. A neighborhood bar with the more formal comedor in back, windowless in that inimitable Spanish style in which diners are comfortably cocooned from the bustle of the city. It was the kind of place where everything seemed to come together effortlessly: traditional cooking without nostalgia, simple but serious food, often made with three or four ingredients, served without ceremony, prices that felt almost miraculous for the quality, and a dining room full of people who had come simply because this was where they always ate. I’ll even risk using the dreaded A-word. It felt... authentic. No. Better than that. It felt real. The difference is subtle but important. Authentic has become a marketing slogan. Real is something you recognize instinctively.

Almejas a la manzanilla. I can still taste those tiny clams swimming in a sauce reduced from manzanilla sherry—briny, faintly sweet and almost impossibly rich in umami. I remember the arroz meloso con pulpo y calamar, each grain and morsel of buttery seafood suspended in a luxurious reduced broth. The off-the-menu mollejas con boletus, lamb’s sweetbreads sauteed with seasonal mushrooms, just olive oil and garlic, nothing more.

The organized chaos behind the bar. Waiters weaving through impossible crowds, balancing trays of wine glasses and little plates high above their heads. Neighbors spilling onto the sidewalk in every season for a smoke, talking loudly, laughing boisterously. It wasn’t picturesque-it simply was. Then something happened.

Madrid, particularly after the pandemic, was “discovered.” Remote workers arrived. Weekend city-break tourism exploded. Instagram, TikTok and YouTube did what they do best: they transformed hidden gems into mandatory destinations. And my restaurant became everyone else’s. It’s difficult to identify exactly what changed.

The waiter places an English menu in front of me despite my fluent Spanish. Reservations that once required a phone call the day before now disappear weeks in advance. Most shocking of all, there’s the warning that the table is yours for exactly one hour and forty-five minutes. No time for sobremesa. In Spain! Really? The room sounds different now, not worse, just different. Conversations happen in English, French and German. People hesitate over the menu. Questions about substitutions abound. Drinks arrive with Coca-Cola instead of vermouth or beer. The rhythm feels unfamiliar. Of course, I’m a foreigner too. So am I part of the problem?

And then there’s the food. Nothing is objectively bad. But it has lost its je-ne-sais-quoi. The cooking now feels industrialized—not literally, but emotionally. Dishes emerge with impressive consistency yet somehow without conviction. They taste assembled rather than cooked. The kitchen no longer seems driven by pride so much as throughput. Feed them. Turn the table. Seat the next reservation. Context undoubtedly affects the taste buds. But even stripped of nostalgia, the cooking has lost its edge. The great American model of restaurant economics has quietly arrived in Spain. Perhaps that’s inevitable.

In case you thought I wasn’t going to say it, the restaurant is called La Castela, and anyone who knows Madrid—or knows me—knows exactly which place I’m talking about. But it could just as easily be a bistro I used to love in Paris, Le Bourguignon du Marais, which now grinds out conveyer-belt beef stew, the myriad copy-cat pintxo bars in San Sebastián’s Parte Vieja which label their wares in English, or countless once-local restaurants in Rome or Athens where laughably translated multi-lingual menus signal tourist-trappieness. Success is often incompatible with the qualities that created it.

The crowds demand consistency, speed and volume. Social media—and its paid content creators—reward visibility over intimacy, likes over truth. The economics of popularity require more tables, more staff, more reservations and more turnover. Eventually, the restaurant begins serving its reputation rather than its neighborhood.

But not every place succumbs. Soi Polo in Bangkok still does its gloriously garlic-encrusted chicken much as it always has, and Jay Fai, the fire-wok lady, is still cooking too, Netflix fame notwithstanding, for a never-ending line of towheaded farang. Katz’s Delicatessen in New York remains chaotic, inefficient and gloriously indifferent to fashion. The last time I went I was probably the only customer who even vaguely resembled an old Jewish regular, but the pastrami justified the line. The tacos al pastor at El Huequito in Mexico City are still carved with quiet confidence. And the lechón at Botín, Madrid’s oldest and most tourist-trodden establishment, is as succulent as ever. So it isn’t impossible, just rare.

The irony is that social media influencers and food writers—including people like me—often celebrate ourselves as champions of small businesses. We think we’re helping. Sometimes we are. But occasionally we’re documenting the beginning of the end. Is it the same contradiction as the driver complaining about traffic while sitting in his own car contributing to it? Every one of us searching for the “real” adds one more layer separating the place from what made it desirable in the first place.

A restaurant can survive anonymity for decades. Sometimes it doesn’t survive fame.

Our arrival did little to challenge those assumptions. We emerged from the airport into cold drizzle and walked along a dreary road bordered by barbed wire. The train station turned out to be little more than a shelter beside a set of tracks. A woman in a beige raincoat and babushka stood silently with her suitcase. I couldn’t help wondering whether these were the same rail lines that once carried people toward the nearby camps.

Unlike Warsaw, Kraków escaped wartime destruction. Its medieval and Renaissance center survived largely intact and has been beautifully restored. Storybook-like Wawel Castle sits atop its hill, surveying a city of handsome townhouses, churches and squares. Restaurants, cafés and bars fill the streets, while jazz clubs tucked away in ancient cellars draw visitors from around the world. A historic Jewish area, which includes the didactic Schindler Museum, attracts visitors like me, though there are few Jewish residents.

Whenever I arrive in a new city, the first thing I look for is the market. Seeing what people buy and eat tells you something about who they are.

I didn’t expect much from a Polish market, in fact, I didn’t even expect there to be one. It took some prodding to figure out if and where it was. But when I entered the ‘Stary Kleparz’ market, a couple of blocks from our apartment, I felt like Alice stepping through the looking-glass. What followed was a powerful Proustian rush of nostalgia, joyful and melancholy.

I grew up in a New York where old-fashioned Jewish delicatessens still flourished. Every neighborhood had at least one. I can still remember the smell: golden roast chickens turning on spits in the window, glistening smoked fish, garlicky pickles, fresh poppy-seed bagels and caraway-flecked rye bread. The towering glass cases displayed gleaming tubs of coleslaw, potato salad, herring, olives, ‘health’ salad and rice pudding. To a six-year-old, it was magical.

My mother shopped sparingly, ordering a little liverwurst or tongue, perhaps a pickle or two, maybe half a pound of gefilte fish. But when my hefty Uncle Dave visited from deli-challenged Cleveland, he'd make a pilgrimage to Russ & Daughters on Houston Street and return laden with bags of smoked sturgeon, lox, whitefish salad and mysterious containers whose contents I didn’t know. There was Katz’s, Ratner’s, the Carnegie and the Stage.

And, of course, Zabar’s, which, before it became a gourmet emporium, was essentially a neighborhood Jewish deli. The wait at the smoked fish counter was interminable. Ornery customers argued with equally gruff countermen over the thickness of the nova. “C’mon, Murray, you know how I like it!” someone would inevitably shout above the din.

Most of those places are gone now. The surviving delis have changed, and so has New York. Zabar's sells more white lasagna than lox these days. Many of the new New Yorkers don't know a matzo ball from a meatball.

So when I entered the old Kleparz market, I stopped in my tracks. One deep breath and I was a child again. Those distinctive aromas transported me back to a Saturday morning in the Manhattan of the ‘60s. “My God,” I thought. “This is the source.”

I stood there astonished. I hadn’t expected to find this food in Poland. There are few Jews left in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and the other lands from which my family emigrated, and I had assumed their food had largely disappeared along with them. Yet here it was.

Despite the chilly weather, shoppers crowded the aisles of the semi-open market. A cheerful old man in a cap sold fragrant bunches of lilacs. Across from him, a babushka-clad woman offered her own flowers. An ancient vendor with nary a tooth in her head displayed soft fresh cheeses, while her neighbor sold beautifully molded smoked ones from a basket.

The vegetables reflected a Northern European spring: bright cucumbers, crisp lettuces, leeks, parsley, dill and cabbages. Fruits appeared mostly imported. Potatoes came in seemingly endless varieties—yellow, white, red, large as grapefruits or tiny as marbles.

The prepared foods fascinated me. Rows of colorful salads filled refrigerated cases. With a little help from Google Translate, I deciphered labels for herring in tomato sauce, cod Greek-style, Hawaiian herring and something simply called “vegetable salad” that turned out to be the direct ancestor of the coleslaw I knew from New York.

The smoked fish counter, whose aroma could be detected from ten meters away, seemed like a recreation of Zabar's, though I knew perfectly well it was the other way around. Smoked salmon, sturgeon, oily striped mackerel, jars of creamed herring—it was all there.

At the bakery, dense rye loaves with textbook-perfect crusts sat beside dark pumpernickel and bagel-like rolls. I bought what looked like a modest piece of rye bread. It weighed a kilo.

The charcuterie counter offered more than a hundred sausages and preserved meats, many pork-based (this was not a Jewish market, after all). I left carrying a foot-long krakowska, the local specialty: a deep-red pork sausage packed tightly with garlic and pepper.

I hadn’t even begun exploring local restaurants. Later I would sample rich beet soup made with meat stock, far more complex than the cold borscht of my childhood. I would feast on roast goose leg with sweet-and-sour red cabbage and tackle hearty bowls of bigos, the national stew of meat, sausage and cabbage, washed down with the thick, warming vodka my grandfather had loved.

I became particularly fond of Zapiecek, a pierogi restaurant where I ordered plate after plate of ‘ruskie’, delicate dumplings filled with potato and cheese and topped with a generous dollop of sour cream.

Long after the meals and monuments have faded from memory, I still remember those smells: rye bread, smoked fish, pickles and dill. They carried me back to the New York of my childhood, but they also taught me something I had never fully understood. The people who brought those foods to America were largely gone from the lands they had left behind. Yet somehow the food remained.

Standing in a market in Kraków, I realized that what I had always thought of as Jewish New York food was also, in many ways, Polish food. The source was still there.

For all the globalization of restaurant culture, truly compelling Indian food remains surprisingly rare outside India itself. One finds plenty of “Indian restaurants” around the world, of course, but many reduce one of the planet’s most intricate and regionally diverse set of culinary traditions to a standardized repertoire of heavy sauces, interchangeable curries and decorative exoticism. What is usually missing is not “authenticity” — a word I’ve always distrusted — but specificity: the sense that dishes actually come from somewhere, from distinct regions, histories, techniques and habits of eating.

India’s cuisines are so vast and culturally layered that even many sophisticated international dining capitals barely scratch the surface. Which is what makes Mexico City’s Maza Bistrot feel so unusual. Rather than offering a generalized export version of Indian food calibrated for foreign expectations, owner and chef Rohan Chanana cooks with the confidence of someone drawing from memory, regional traditions and personal taste. The result is food that feels lived-in rather than performed.

Meanwhile, I’m pleased that good “foreign” kitchens are finally making headway in my home town, the ever more gastronomically global capital of Mexico. It makes sense that we should embrace Indian culinary traditions here, as Indian and Mexican cooking are kissing cousins. The philosophy behind these two aggregations of regional cuisines is similar: the greatest dishes in both are amalgamations of many ingredients that are magically transformed, alchemically, into new flavors. The sum of the parts stands alone. There is no doubt that masalas and moles invite comparison. Poet Octavio Paz, who for a time served as Mexico’s ambassador to India, acknowledged the relationship in his memoir In Light of India, stating that the gastronomic repertoires of both
countries, with their eccentric flavors and intense colors were
“imaginative and passionate.”

The superb Maza Bistrot, which opened a couple of years ago in the capital’s fashionable Colonia Juarez, is something to celebrate. It’s a relaxed, unpretentious venue for chef Chanana, who is from the culture-rich state of Rajasthan, and heads the kitchen with his wife Caroline Astier Chanana of Drôme, in southeast France. Rohan is passionate about what he cooks and unwilling to compromise on quality of ingredients. The menu, which is mostly Indian but veers into Francophile territory, features the chef’s eclectic selection of dishes from various regions of the subcontinent, ranging from chaats—appetizers known as street foods normally sold off a pushcart—to rich, labor-intensive main dishes. And Caroline brings a touch of France to the table.

But I’m relieved to report that no contrived fusing goes on here, only respectful acknowledgments, one culture gently overlapping the other.

We start our meal with a refreshing glass of chaach, savory buttermilk flavored with toasted cumin and black pepper. Though common throughout India, it is seldom offered on a Western menu.

Bhel Puri is a chaat, an umbrella term for a wide range of street foods that usually feature some kind of fried or puffed dough or grain (in this case rice) topped with various ingredients such as tamarind, sweetened yogurt and herbs to create a balanced mélange of spicy, tangy, salty and sweet. Bhel Puri vendors, ubiquitous in Bombay typically carry their wares strapped to their bodies or sell from simple pushcarts. Maza’s version, meant to be shared, is perfectly balanced texturally and flavor-wise.

The Frankie Roll (AKA Kathi Roll), India’s version of the burrito, is to Calcutta denizens what the take-away pizza slice is to New Yorkers - that is, beloved and revered. Here it consists of a Malabar paratha - a rich, flaky flatbread, rolled around gently spiced chicken and egg, served with a tangy cilantro/mint dipping sauce and pickled onions.

French-leaning dishes include Pâté, simply stated as such. It is a fairly traditional French pâté de campagne, here acknowledging the matrimony of the chefs and the influence of the French community of Pondicherry by the inclusion of the aromatic chutney with which it is served.

The “thali”, a form of presentation as well as the plate itself, is India’s answer to our comida corrida, only all the (often many) small dishes are served at once, on a round metal tray, or, in the south and east, on a banana leaf laid directly on the table.

At Maza, the thali presentation (listed on the menu as “Curry du Jour”) is closer to a western main course with side dishes—main dish, vegetables, rice and bread. Maza’s thalis change from day to day, so are listed as simply “lamb, chicken or veg”. Be sure to ask, as these are the chef’s specialties, the gems of his kitchen.

On a recent visit, the lamb turned out to be nihari, a Mughal (Islamic) dish originating in Lucknow in the 18th century and popularized by the beloved Karim’s Restaurant in Old Delhi. It is a deep, buttery, brick-red stew of mutton, flavored with myriad spices including “long black pepper”, an aromatic cousin to our black pepper. As we were served this exquisite dish, the chef assured us that he had stayed late the previous night to get it started as long-term simmering is the key to the melding of aromas.

On another visit, we sampled a subtly spiced chicken “do pyaza” which means “two onions”, a Persian-inspired dish that incorporates caramelized and fried onions.

Biryani, long-grain basmati rice and meat slow steamed in vast sealed pots, is gently perfumed with sweet spices such as cardamom, cinnamon, clove and saffron. It is also a legacy of the Mughal Empire, brought to Bengal on the East coast, and now the specialty of Calcutta as well as Dhaka in the former East Bengal, now Bangladesh. Here it is lovingly presented in the individual casserole in which it was prepared, sealed “en croute” with a dough crust that is cracked open with a spoon like the caramel on a crème brûlée, releasing a poof of ambrosial steam. It hits all the marks.

Papillote de poisson, also references the French lexicon but here is closer to the Bengali version of fish wrapped and steamed in a banana leaf, like a tamal.

Desserts include kulfi, India’s version of the paleta, chocolate or pistachio. And a particularly delightful gulab jamun, fried dough balls which swim in rosewater-perfumed syrup.

Maza’s menu includes an extensive cocktail and drink list. Organic and natural wines, many of them Mexican, are astutely selected. Ciders from the north of France are a very good idea for this type of food. Beers are standard, though a handful of the craft variety are on offer. And there’s the aforementioned chaach.

The space is open airy, and spartanly decorated. It exudes the anti-pretentious agenda of the owners; this is reinforced by cool Indian/house music which mercifully, stays in the background facilitating that dying art, conversation.

At Maza, Indian cuisine is treated not as an exotic abstraction but as a living, regional and deeply expressive culinary tradition. The result is one of the rare Indian restaurants outside the subcontinent that feels less like an interpretation than an act of genuine culinary memory.

I had not originally gone to Albania for the food. Over dinner with the well-travelled Ana Cristina, I was lamenting the slow ruin brought by mass tourism: the way places once mysterious, difficult and culturally distinct eventually become polished into familiarity — and overrun with foreigners. I found myself nostalgically invoking cities and regions that, decades earlier when I had first visited them, still retained the intoxicating sensation of elsewhere: Marrakech, San Cristóbal de las Casas, even the then comparatively obscure Siena. “I was so fortunate to have seen the before,” I sighed. “Then go to Albania,” she replied. “It’s still in the before.” So we did.

We arrived drawn by the promise of dramatic landscapes, Ottoman towns, Adriatic coastlines and the vague sense of a European country still somewhat outside the homogenized circuits of mass tourism.

Albanian culture — and especially its cuisine — remained abstract in my imagination: somewhere between Greece, Turkey and the Balkans, but indistinct. And in many ways it remains so. Albania is an unusual place, the myriad influences of its complicated history visible everywhere. Yet that uncertainty quickly became part of the pleasure.

Tirana, the capital where we arrived, is thriving. There seems to be virtually nothing architecturally older than forty years, while wild modernist towers rise, many of them still in construction, across the skyline. After several days exploring the city, we traveled south by bus to Berat, the remarkably well-preserved Ottoman town that has, perhaps inevitably, already become one of Albania’s major tourist destinations.

There are still places in the world where one eats without a pre-written narrative already set out by Instagram, Netflix or Michelin. Albania largely retains that sensation. Albania — despite its mountains, Ottoman inheritances, Adriatic produce, pastoral traditions and ancient wine culture — is still largely unknown gastronomic territory outside the Balkans. Perhaps that is because Albanian cuisine does not reach the elaborate complexity and refinement of neighboring Turkey or Greece. But complexity is not always the point. Simplicity and honesty are the real virtues here.

Restaurants — at least in Tirana — are not yet performing “Albanian cuisine” for foreigners in the polished way so many destinations now package themselves. That is changing quickly, and the historic towns of Berat and Gjirokastër already contain their share of tourist-trap “traditional restaurants” serving interchangeable greatest-hits menus of bland dishes.

So I relished the prospect of a special lunch at a vineyard outside Berat, recommended by the exceptionally talented young chef Klajdi Tafa of Punishtja e Artizaneve in Tirana. We hired a taxi to take us on the half-hour drive into the hills east of town, where Alpeta Agritourism & Winery sits above a valley among vineyards and olive groves. It feels less like a calculated “wine country destination” than a large family gathering that accidentally evolved into a restaurant. The restaurant itself is deeply seductive: a rustic wood-and-glass dining room suspended above terraced vineyards, dried herbs swinging from the rafters, waiters weaving through crowded tables carrying platters of roasted meats and pouring local wine or raki.

Entire Albanian families seemed to be making a pilgrimage here on a sunny Sunday afternoon. A nearby table of men who appeared to be farmers became progressively more animated as bottles of wine and glasses of fiercely alcoholic raki disappeared. Their presence reassured me. Alpeta was not merely a destination for affluent urbanites or foreign travelers; it still belonged to local residents.

The kitchen avoided the over-designed self-consciousness that increasingly afflicts rural dining around the world. Food arrived generously, communally, almost defiantly rustic.

A long wooden platter appeared crowded with pickled vegetables and salads, olives, creamy fresh sheep and cow’s milk cheeses, walnut-studded stews, japrak — stuffed grape leaves that inevitably recalled both Greece and Turkey while remaining distinctly Albanian. Fërgesë, the beloved Albanian mixture of peppers, tomatoes and cheese baked into a soft, comforting mass, may be one of the Balkans’ most underappreciated dishes.

There were qofte of ground lamb simmered in tomato sauce, deeply savory and unmistakably Ottoman in ancestry; lakror, the regional spinach-and-cheese pie of the Berat area; grilled peppers; roasted potatoes; and eventually enormous platters of roasted lamb and chicken with beautifully lacquered skin and the sort of direct wood-fire flavor that fashionable urban restaurants now spend fortunes attempting to recreate.

Nothing felt “elevated” in the contemporary sense of the word. No tweezers. No decorative smears. No miniature portions scattered across oversized ceramic landscapes. Yet the meal possessed something increasingly rare: coherence. The dishes belonged naturally to the landscape surrounding them.

The wine was another revelation. Albania possesses one of Europe’s oldest wine traditions, though decades of communist isolation left its viticulture largely unknown abroad. Alpeta’s Xha Beqo Reserve — a blend of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon aged in oak — was surprisingly polished: ripe plum and cherry fruit, touches of vanilla and spice, and enough structure to stand comfortably beside the roasted meats. Not revolutionary perhaps, but deeply pleasurable and entirely convincing within the context of the meal.

What remains most in my memory, however, is not any single dish but the atmosphere itself: multigenerational tables lingering for hours, children running between vines, waiters proudly explaining wines, sunlight flooding across the valley.

In much of Europe, rural food culture now risks becoming performance — preserved for tourists like a folkloric exhibit. At Alpeta, it still appeared to function as ordinary life.

And perhaps that is Albania’s greatest culinary luxury at the moment: not “authenticity,” that exhausted modern travel cliché, but the simple sensation of a culture that has not yet fully learned to stage itself for outsiders.

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Mexican cooking, for all its richness and sophistication, has never developed a formal equivalent to France’s haute cuisine. Its traditions emerged from pre-Hispanic roots and evolved in kitchens both humble and aristocratic. The difference between what appears at a market stall and what is served on fine china has historically been one of setting and presentation rather than of entirely different culinary concepts.

But in the last two decades, a new generation of chefs has transformed the landscape. Many trained at places like the Culinary Institute of America or worked in Michelin-starred kitchens in Europe before returning to Mexico with new techniques and ideas. Led by figures such as Enrique Olvera, they began reinterpreting Mexican traditions through the lens of contemporary gastronomy, drawing inspiration from innovators like Ferrán Adrià and Juan Mari Arzak. Local ingredients, seasonality and sustainability remain central, but tradition is often dismantled, reassembled and viewed from unexpected angles.

From this movement emerged a new kind of taco: inventive, playful, sometimes strange, occasionally brilliant. These creations may incorporate unusual textures, luxury ingredients or avant-garde techniques, while still remaining recognizably tied to Mexico’s culinary DNA. The style has long flourished in places like Tijuana and Los Angeles, though until recently it remained relatively unexplored in Mexico City.

And then there are the stand alone places that simply continue doing what they have always done — neighborhood taquerías and family-run stands whose greatness comes not from reinvention but from repetition, memory, mastery and singularity acquired over generations.

What follows are some of the city’s taquerías that resist easy classification: not necessarily the “best,” but certainly the most unique.

1. Cariñito
Cariñito serves a compact menu of Asian-influenced tacos that manage to feel inventive without slipping into the usual gimmicky “fusion” clichés. The Thai taco features rich pork confit lacquered with a tamarind-and-basil sauce whose sweet-sour-herbal balance evokes Southeast Asia while still working perfectly in taco form. Equally compelling is the Cantonese taco: shatteringly crisp pork belly layered onto a flour tortilla with Japanese-style barbecue sauce, a tart tamarind-chile glaze and crunchy pickles that cut through the richness.

A couple of thoughtful vegetarian options round out the menu, underscoring the kitchen’s attention to balance rather than excess. What makes Cariñito stand out is that these combinations do not feel forced or random. The Asian influences are integrated with restraint and intelligence, creating tacos that are playful and contemporary while remaining deeply satisfying to eat.

Guanajuato 53, Colonia Roma Norte
Open daily 12 – 10 p.m.

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My first trip to Iberia was in 1984, when Spain was rapidly emerging from the dark years of Franquismo. I’d worked in the curatorial department of the Hispanic Society of America in New York and was looking forward to exploring the country. Traveling for four months, I fell in love with the artists of the siglo de oro—Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo—flamenco, toasted bread drizzled with olive oil for breakfast, and the magical capital, Madrid.

But I didn’t eat well. Most meals, low budget to be sure, consisted of dull sautéed mystery meat, fried potatoes, and acrid house wine. Another extensive trip, fifteen years later, turned my head around, gastronomy-wise. What had changed—Spain or me? Perhaps a little of both. I had become more experienced in finding what’s good to eat. And with the opening up of the country, a reverse trend was set in motion. Now great pride is taken in regional cuisine.

Everywhere one travels there’s fine cooking: food prepared with care, rooted in tradition—and in simplicity. Often a dish will consist of five or six components, combined with a kind of quiet finesse. A legendary (in my book) pescado en salsa verde I ordered in a port-side Santander bar some years back proves the point: glisteningly fresh fish, fruity olive oil, a little young garlic, parsley, and tiny clams that provided oceanic umami. Perfectly balanced, and to this day one of the most sublime dishes I’ve eaten. Five ingredients, each one best in class.

What continues to strike me is not just how good Spanish food can be—but how few elements it needs to be so. Fine dining today is filled with theatrical, seemingly endless tasting menus composed of embarrassingly tiny plates of heady, invented, multi-ingredient dishes that often fail to deliver the one thing that matters: pleasure. Recently I’ve been spilling ink kvetching about the torture of the multi-course degustation, accompanied by lengthy pairings that only salt the wound. I long for simplicity, real food. In Spain, I find it.

Jeffrey of Xtremefoodies fame, professional fine diner par excellence, had invited me to what he promised would be the ultimate paella experience. I had, of course, heard that before—and not just anywhere, but in Valencia itself. Jim, not prone to hyperbole, had declared his paella at Casa Carmela the “best meal of my life.” That gave me pause. But Jeffrey leans toward the emphatic, so I proceeded with caution. I am, after all, constitutionally skeptical of anything described as “the best.”

Elías is a destination restaurant, set quietly in the hills outside Alicante, south of Valencia. The place does not announce itself. A long, low building at the end of a winding road, with nothing to suggest what happens inside—where everything points to fire. Huge brick ovens glow at the back, like a controlled inferno, fed continuously with bundles of olive wood—branches, not logs. They catch quickly, burn hot, and give off a steady, aromatic heat. There is something almost poetic about it: the olive branch, emblem of peace, reduced to flame then embers, to the elemental force that makes the cooking possible.

The cooks move with quiet precision. Pans slide in and out. Heat is adjusted not with knobs but with handfuls of wood. It looks simple. It is anything but. This kind of cooking demands a pre-industrial instinct—a feel for fire, for timing, for the exact moment things are ready.

The first courses set the tone. Tiny artichokes, in season when we were there in November, sliced thin and placed directly onto the heat of those ovens. They arrived lightly charred, their outer edges crisp, the interiors tender but still structured. Three ingredients: artichokes, salt, olive oil. That’s all. And it’s enough. The flavor is at once austere and complete—the slight bitterness of the vegetable sharpened by the fire, rounded by good oil, lifted by salt. Nothing added that doesn’t belong, nothing missing.

Then other appetizers arrive, each following the same logic. Wild mushrooms, deeply caramelized, their moisture driven off until only essence remained. Chipirones, the miniature cousin of squid, barely cooked, their natural sweetness intact, glistening with oil. Again: three, maybe four ingredients, no more. It becomes hypnotic, this repetition of restraint.

And then the main event: the rice. At Elías, everything leads to it. The paellas are cooked in those same ovens, over olive wood, in pans blackened by use. What arrives at the table is deceptively simple: a flat, golden field of rice, punctuated by pieces of rabbit and the occasional snail. A refined regional version of paella Valenciana. Nothing decorative. Nothing extraneous.

When the paella arrives at the table, a kind of hushed reverence takes over. Conversation falters. Plates are forgotten. We lean in. Then, almost immediately, civility collapses. We begin to scrape and dig—with paella, it’s each man for himself.

Each grain is distinct, dry but not austere, carrying the concentrated flavor of the broth. And underneath, the socarrat—so often pursued, so rarely achieved—forms naturally, a thin, crisp layer that anchors the dish without announcing itself.

The experience is, in every sense, the opposite of the dominant trends that have defined high-end cooking in recent decades. No sleight of hand. No foams or gels. No narrative imposed on the plate. No attempt to entertain or provoke. And yet, nothing here is simple. Strip a dish down to three or four ingredients and there is nowhere to hide. The rice must be perfect. The fire must be exact. The timing must be instinctive. This is cooking that depends not on invention, but on refinement—on doing the same thing, over and over, until it approaches something like inevitability.

Sitting there, watching the ovens fed with olive branches, it becomes clear that this is a different kind of luxury. Not complexity, but clarity. Not innovation, but understanding. And, ultimately, not less—but more, achieved with almost nothing.

I’ve never thought of the Riviera Maya as a place to eat. Cancún, man-made in the 20^th century, was a destination that I had been avoiding ever since I began my relationship with Mexico, decades ago. When I finally got there to do some restaurant research, I was predictably disappointed by the mediocre fare on offer. The area has long catered to a tourist economy where food was secondary, often perfunctory—about quantity rather than quality—and rarely rooted in place.

But then Jonatán Gómez Luna and Le Chique came along. The chef has been on a mission to change the face of Mexican dining on the gulf coast. It’s not easy to do that outside the capital, where cutting edge chefs such as Enrique Olvera, Elena Reygadas and Eduardo García reign supreme and diners are more accustomed to innovation. But the challenge is being met. Le Chique, which holds a Michelin star, isn’t so much a restaurant as a theatrical, sense-encompassing spectacle, intellectual and visceral, challenging and comforting. Proustian memories are invoked for those who carry the references, newly minted if you don’t. The chef pays homage to the gastronomy of the world, the country and, increasingly, the region, never turning his back on where he is. He is a scientist, a magician and an artist; he wants you to think and learn but also to eat and enjoy.

Recently, the restaurant, now in its 19^th year, moved from its improbable location inside a run-of-the-mill all-inclusive hotel to the exquisite, high design yet embracingly rustic Hotel Xcaret Arte, whose philosophy is to celebrate everything Mexican. The new setting, as a whole, is more polished, and more aligned with the restaurant’s long-standing aspirations. The menu, at twenty-seven courses, is equally ambitious—perhaps stubbornly so, at a moment when many chefs are moving in the opposite direction. For years, the long tasting menu has been the dominant format of high-end dining: a chef’s argument, laid out in 20, 30, sometimes more courses. Recently, that type of experiential theatrics has begun to feel fatigued. In some revered temples of gastronomy, there has been a quiet retreat toward brevity—fewer dishes, more focus, less text, less choreography.

And yet, here we are again: twenty-seven courses. There are moments when the experience edges toward excess—when the sheer number of ideas threatens to overwhelm rather than persuade. But that tension has always been part of Le Chique’s identity. This is a form of dining that has long flirted with theater. From Ferran Adrià’s legacy to Heston Blumenthal’s notion of “multi-sensory gastronomy” at The Fat Duck, and onward to René Redzepi’s increasingly narrative-driven Noma, the meal becomes staged, sequenced, cinematic. Le Chique belongs, uneasily but undeniably, to this lineage.

At a recent visit, I began the “culinary experience guided by narrative” (as Le Chique’s publicity would have it) by being led, rather mysteriously, from space to space, seated in various locations, and even separated from my dining companions. I was reminded of the disembodied hands of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête, which guide the hapless visitor to her palatial destination. The choreography is still settling into this new space, but the intention is clear: this is not dinner, it is progression.

And then the length asserts itself. Courses arrive in steady succession, spaced just enough to keep one alert, but never quite enough to suggest an end. I begin to think of Buñuel—no, not the biblical Last Supper of Viridiana, but the existential entrapment of The Exterminating Angel. Would we ever finish? Would we be allowed to leave, or were we caught in a closed loop of culinary recursion?

The meal is, at times, operatic. Some dishes evoke a kind of steamy Wuthering Heights atmosphere—the dry ice fog lifts to reveal several oysters, resting on a bed of multicolored seaweed, dotted with “agua de ceviche,” Yucatecan kimchi–infused oil, and cured roe. There is the tiny gallina fashioned from crisp chicken skin, resting on her nest and eyeing the diners, almost goddess-like. She accompanies her egg hose yolk has been extracted and substituted by kilpauk, a typical chutney of roasted tomatoes and habanero. When the remade egg is gently prodded, the golden, translucent sauce seductively oozes out. Taken together as a small bite, almost sipped, the texture and flavor are delicate and layered. The sulphurousness of the egg hits first but is quickly tempered by the pleasing aromas of spices, a few small flashes of tomato, and an intangible umami. The chef insists that “there’s that dilemma of trying not to force creativity; it has to flow.” It does.

It can veer toward the surreal: golden spheres crack open to reveal escamoles—ant eggs: The Gilded Age meets The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Will a broth be served in a reproduction of Meret Oppenheim’s fur teacup? Little tarts of venison wear crowns of impossibly tiny flowers. A walnut reposing on moss is really cacao and black truffle.

We proceed from small to more substantial appetizers, then to a Wagnerian presentation of oceanic offerings. By the time we arrive at a familiar but finely tuned Oaxacan mole negro, melodramatically poured over an embarrassed naked chunk of tongue at the table (can we dispense with this performative ritual, already?) and eight or nine wines later, I and the other guests are fighting food fatigue.

While I’m not convinced that an endless procession of dishes is the future I’m looking for, one has to respect the chef—part cook, part conjurer—whose succession of small illusions continues, against the odds, to enchant. When queried about his lengthy menu he responds that, “…it may be less fashionable, but for me it’s still the best way to express what I do. I work in sequences—five or six dishes at a time. That’s how I tell a story. If I reduce it to six or ten, I lose that. This menu has 18 new dishes—one for each year of Le Chique—and nine classics. Together they make 27. It’s a new cycle.”

Four or five hours later, the curtain finally falls and we are released from this Sartrean “cycle”. There is no dramatic grand finale, no catharsis—just a gentle return to the outside world. For a moment, I half-expect the guests to fly off into the sky on broomsticks, à la De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano. Instead, they wander out slowly into the caressing tropical night, dazed, a bit disoriented—but unmistakably persuaded.

*Le Chique is located in the Hotel Xcaret Arte in Playa del Carmen.

“Comfort food” may be one of the most overused phrases in the lexicon of the contemporary food scene. Restaurants from Peoria to Zanzibar claim to offer it. Even in Mexico City, my adopted hometown, the English phrase has been absorbed into Spanish and deployed to promote the latest fashionable openings.

The concept may be timeless, but the term itself appears to have entered American print in the late 1950s. Now it appears everywhere: on menus, in PR copy, in Instagram captions, in earnest essays about nostalgia. It is meant to signal reassurance, warmth, emotional balm. Yet the phrase has grown so elastic that it now covers everything from mac & cheese to ramen, tacos, and triple-cooked French fries. And it no longer belongs only to Anglo-American food writing. It is used in India, borrowed into other languages, and casually globalized. When a phrase means everything, it begins to mean very little.

A few years ago, at a dinner during the Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants event in Lima, we—some twenty food writers and industry insiders—decided to take a break from the industry ballyhoo and go around declaring our hypothetical “last meal,” implicitly framed as comfort food. As my turn approached, indecision set in. As a Manhattan Ashkenazi Jew, the expected answer might have been a bagel with shmear, or something that the B&H Dairy Restaurant might serve: latkes, matzo ball soup, kasha varnishkes. But I also grew up alongside Italian-American, Chinese, Puerto Rican, and Black communities. Pastrami on rye was as familiar to me as Sunday sauce, South Carolina ribs, or ma po tofu. Choosing one dish felt almost heretical, a culinary Sophie’s Choice.

Under pressure, I offered “a good pasta Bolognese.” Further down the table, a poised young woman representing the Indian diaspora in South Africa declared, without hesitation, “My mother’s lamb biryani.” That answer had weight: my mother wasn’t a very good cook, nor was my grandmother. So I raised my hand and asked for a do-over.“I’d like to change my answer,” I said. “I want her mother’s lamb biryani.” Laughter and applause followed. To each his own—or someone else’s.

Proust’s madeleine may be the most frequently invoked literary example of what we now call “comfort food,” though strictly speaking it is not about comfort at all, but about involuntary memory. In À la recherche du temps perdu, the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea does not soothe the narrator in a simple, sentimental way. It unlocks time. The sensation produces what Proust calls a “sudden revelation,” a flooding of memory that collapses past and present.

The madeleine has since become shorthand for nostalgia, flattened into a cozy metaphor. But Proust was not writing about comfort. He was writing about memory’s violence and surprise. A good oyster does that for me, evoking waves crashing both literally and metaphorically, even though the sea was not something we Manhattanites connected to much; downing a good one is an art experience for me, emotional but not comforting. A bowl of matzo ball soup or someone’s mother’s lamb biryani may not collapse time. It may simply make the world feel briefly in order.

Originally, “comfort food” implied something intimate: a dish tied to memory, childhood, place. It suggested repetition—the foods returned to not for novelty but for stability. Ease rather than art. But in contemporary restaurant culture, the phrase often functions as shorthand for “rich,” “familiar,” or simply “easy to sell.” It becomes a marketing category rather than an emotional truth. The problem is not the food. The problem is the imprecision: comfort is not universal. It is geographical, cultural, and deeply individual.

In South India, comfort may arrive as breakfast: steaming idli—soft fermented rice and lentil cakes—bathed in a tart, aromatic sambar, fragrant with tamarind and curry leaf. The rising steam alone can recalibrate a mood.

In Turkey, comfort might come in the form of a bracing glass of sauerkraut juice sold at a street cart—sharp, saline, restorative—shocking the palate into alertness, soothing to some, I suppose.

In Mexico, comfort assumes multiple forms depending on upbringing, neighborhood, and appetite. To Morgana, a Mexico City–born architect, it is a quesadilla. To others, pozole on a cool evening. For many, it is pan dulce—pleasantly bland and reassuringly sweet—alongside an even sweeter café de olla, a combination I confess I still struggle to understand after three decades in the country.

In the capital’s Colonia Roma and Condesa, restaurants such as Lindy, Lalo!, and The Lamb frame their menus around a certain idea of comfort. A properly cooked steak frites. A Scotch egg executed with precision. A composed American breakfast in a room designed for lingering. These kitchens may reinterpret tradition, but they promise continuity, familiarity, reliability—at least to someone. It is worth asking to whom the “comfort” rhetoric is directed, since few Mexicans grew up eating mac & cheese or Scotch eggs.

It is tempting to equate comfort solely with nostalgia. Often that is accurate. But comfort can also derive from order—from technical precision in a chaotic world. A balanced sauce. Rice cooked to the exact degree intended, not a minute more.

For my Japanese stepmother, a sophisticated cook, that precision is comfort: she retires each night with a bowl of leftover rice doused with green tea. My father’s—her husband’s—dream dish was Marcella Hazan’s famously minimalist tomato sauce, a first love for many Italian friends; it remains a mystery to her.

There is also the contemporary embellishment: “elevated comfort food.” The phrase appears frequently now, as though comfort required refinement in order to merit attention. Yet elevation can risk erasing the very qualities that made a dish soothing in the first place. A street tamal requires no reinterpretation to reassure. Nor does a bowl of dal.

Perhaps the more useful question is not what qualifies as comfort food, but what conditions create comfort in the act of eating. Is it temperature? Fat? Fermentation? Familiarity? Technique? Context? A dish consumed in the right room at the right moment can steady the nervous system regardless of cuisine. A meal prepared with care can ground the body even if it bears no resemblance to childhood.

In the end, “comfort food” resists codification. It cannot be reduced to cream, starch, or melted cheese. It travels. It shifts. It contradicts itself. Comfort is not a category of dishes. It is a condition—nostalgic, technical, cultural, or purely physical—that occurs when food restores equilibrium. Everything else is branding.

I have been traveling to India, specifically to New (and Old) Delhi, for many years, and have never been timid about food. I eat everything. I have never been sick (sound of knocking wood). I will enter the smallest, oldest, funkiest-looking establishment without hesitation if something smells good or looks tempting. Street food—and India is up there with Mexico and Thailand for its variety and availability—improvised kitchens, places with no apparent concern for décor or hygiene: these are often where the most meaningful culinary experiences occur.

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This instinct inevitably draws me to the oldest part of the city, the area—principally Muslim—surrounding one of the grandest Mughal mosques in India, the 17th-century Jama Masjid. Chandni Chowk, the teeming main artery, and its adjoining lanes form one of the most extraordinary food environments in the world. Cooking happens everywhere, continuously, in public view. Smoke rises from charcoal fires, tea is poured into disposable clay cups, bread is slapped onto the walls of tandoors. Customers gather in loose, shifting clusters around whatever happens to be ready.

In the evenings, the broad plaza facing Jama Masjid becomes one of the most dramatic cooking environments I have ever witnessed. A long row of open-air kebab and roast-meat stands lines the perimeter, each one a small universe of fire, smoke, and movement. Charcoal braziers glow fiercely in the darkness as cooks tend skewers with practiced gestures. Wild, flaming smoke wafts upward and outward, carrying the unmistakable aroma of spiced roasting meat across the square. Chicken, marinated in ruby-red chili paste, sizzles and chars, its surface blistering as fat drips onto the coals below. Skewers of keema—ground mutton—stained mustard-yellow from turmeric—grill slowly, the spice forming a fragrant crust while the interior remains succulent. Flames leap and subside in rhythmic bursts. The cooks work quickly, turning and lifting skewers in a continuous choreography that has likely changed little in decades. I stand among the crowd and eat them, wrapped in flat, freshly tandoor-baked naan and spiked with green chili sauce and pickled onions, surrounded by strangers likewise engaged. Nearby are the legendary eateries Karim’s and Al-Jawahar. I return to them on every visit. Karim’s, founded in 1913 by descendants of cooks who once served the Mughal court, feels suspended in time. Its nihari, stewed overnight until the meat collapses into a dark, deeply spiced gravy, retains its original purpose as sustenance for laborers.

At Al-Jawahar, waiters clad in white kurtas and capped with topis (Muslim caps) circulate among enormous metal pots simmering continuously, producing qormas and curries whose essential character has remained unchanged for generations. I always order the mutton qorma, thickened by slow-cooked onions and yogurt.

And then there’s Alwar’s Chicken, whose morsels of roast bird luxuriate in a pool of butter and cream.

Some of my most memorable eating in Chandni Chowk has occurred while grazing, moving from one vendor to another, guided by instinct and the counsel of those who know the terrain intimately.

Somdeb and Kamalika Basu, who live to eat and host pop-up Bengali meals in their cozy apartment, took me through Chandni Chowk on an eating binge that remains one of my most vivid culinary experiences of the city.

We stop at Farid Fish Corner, a tiny hole in the wall that opens promptly at 6 p.m. There, Mr. Farid, proprietor and sole employee, deep fries succulent chunks of singhara (a freshwater catfish) coated in an aromatic turmeric marinade. I eat them, my plate perched on someone’s parked motorcycle, with thinly sliced mild onions and a spiky/tart mustard sauce. The exterior is crisp and intensely flavored, while the steaming interior remains moist and delicate. His neighbor does great keema kebabs so I down one of those.

We continue on to Shabrati Nahari Center, where vast metal cauldrons hold a slow-cooked mutton stew traditionally prepared overnight. Tough cuts of meat, often including shank, are braised for hours until they collapse into a thick, silky gravy enriched by bone, cartalage and fat. The surface glistens with spice-infused oil. Eaten with naan straight out of the tandoor, it is rich, deeply savory, and profoundly satisfying—food that speaks of patience and tradition.

At Sheeren Bhawan, a traditional mithai (sweets) shop, we indulge in a plate of white carrot halwa topped with pistachios and cashews. The shop was founded more than a century ago by one Fayazuddin. The founder’s great-grandson explains that the white carrot used in their halwa is a distinct variety known as sunheri gajar, or golden carrot, sourced from a farm in Ghaziabad. It is this carrot that gives the halwa its pale color, delicate sweetness, and unmistakable, buttery character.

Just steps from Jama Masjid, I recently discovered a small Kashmiri dhaba preparing wazwan, the traditional cuisine of Kashmir. Several large metal pots simmer at the entrance, releasing clouds of steam into the evening air. Inside were dishes rarely encountered outside their place of origin: large, springy lamb meatballs called rista are cooked slowly with yogurt and spices, delicately perfumed gravies whose structure differed entirely from the Mughal cooking surrounding them. I entered without hesitation and was rewarded immediately. Delhi had revealed itself not only as a place with its own cuisine, but as a place where the cuisines of an entire nation coexist.

Strolling down the avenue, where motorcycles, carts pulled by huge black water buffalo, well-cared-for street dogs, and the occasional cow or goat weave impossibly through the crowd, we stop for a refreshing sharbat, a watermelon-based drink scented with rosewater, proffered by vendors clad in white kurtas and headscarves meant to evoke Arabia. They perform a kind of culinary theater that feels both ancient and improvisational. They yell out to potential customers—myself included— “Habibi!”, which means sweetheart in Arabic.

If Old Delhi is a loving, delicious madhouse, I am a willing patient.

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Gujarat sits along India’s northwestern coast, north of Mumbai and edging Rajasthan. We recently traveled through the western part of the state—an area that draws few tourists—by train, bus, private taxi and rickshaw. What fascinated me was the food, which I’d sampled on previous visits; this time I wanted to explore it in depth.

The docks of Porbandar, birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi; while fishing is an industry in this coastal town, most seafood is shipped to Mumbai and beyond where there are larger markets for it.

We began in Ahmedabad, continuing through Rajkot, Jamnagar, Dwarka, Junagadh, and Porbandar, finding that the food shifted subtly but unmistakably from town to town. In Rajkot, street vendors specialize in lasaniya bataka—small potatoes split and smothered in a vivid red garlic masala, intensely savory and unapologetically pungent.

A street scene in Porbandar, birthplace of Gandhi

An 18th century Muslim cemetery in Junagadh

In Jamnagar, there were delicate farsan - snacks - and softer, sweeter dals; in Dwarka, closer to the sea, but unapologetically vegetarian, due to its status as a Hindu pilgrimage site, the cooking felt lighter, with more yogurt and buttermilk-based preparations. Junagadh offered robust vegetable stews and earthy millet breads, while in Porbandar, birthplace of Gandhi, the masalas seemed especially restrained and balanced. Everywhere, the thali—Gujarat’s great culinary gift—reflected local preferences: a dal slightly sweeter here, a sharper pickle there, a different balance of vegetables, textures, and breads. The structure remained constant, but its expression was always local, shaped by habit, climate, and taste.

Street scenes in Gujarat: Making bread, serving chai, frying rice, selling fruit, deep frying jalebi, preparing buffalo meat, roasting shawarma, selling oranges and proffering spices.

Gujarati cooking strikes me as one of India’s most quietly sophisticated regional cuisines, shaped as much by climate and trade as by faith. Centuries of mercantile exchange—Arab traders, inland farmers, coastal shippers—left their mark in the spicy pickles, myriad farsan (fried snacks)- and surprisingly diverse aromatic masalas.

In the dry heat, thrift and ingenuity rule the kitchen: grains, pulses, yogurt, and vegetables are transformed into endlessly varied dishes—steamed, fermented, tempered with mustard seed and curry leaves, brightened with jaggery and lime. Strong Vaishnava (the worship of the Hindu god Vishnu) and Jain traditions mean much of it is resolutely vegetarian, yet never austere. The masalas tend to be aromatic rather than fiery—coriander, cumin, turmeric, sesame, asafoetida—often bloomed in hot oil and softened with yogurt, peanuts, or chickpea flour. Curries skew lighter and gently sweet-sour, sometimes enriched with buttermilk or a pinch of sugar, more about balance and fragrance than heat. Flavors layer sweet, tangy, and spicy in the same bite.

The variety of street food seems limitless: from prepared samosas, “farsan” a term for the huge variety of fried, sauteed or baked snacks, the rare meat samosas in Junagadh’s Muslim market, Rajkot’s lasaniya bataka and even a vegetarian white-bread sandwich, legacy of the English.

The pride of the state is the thali, a word that refers to both the metal serving platter and the style of eating. Always vegetarian in Gujarat, they are served everywhere from homes to no-frills canteens to formal restaurants. A thali usually includes numerous small portions: breads, chutneys, dals, vegetables, stews, sweets, and fried snacks. Waiters circulate with refills, urging one on with Jewish-mother insistence to have more, more. These meals are astonishingly affordable: one of our favorite thalis, an elegant restaurant in Rajkot, cost 400 rupees or about $4 US dollars—simpler ones were as little as $1.

A bean masala fragrant with haldi aka turmeric.

A thali unfolds in small, deliberate portions. First come the breads: rotli or chapati, sometimes a thicker millet bhakri; one or two dals, often gently sweetened; several vegetable preparations, from potatoes in garlic masala to slow-cooked bitter gourds or seasonal greens; a yogurt dish or cooling kadhi; sharp pickles and fresh chutneys; and an assortment of farsan—savory snacks like dhokla - fermented chickpea flour batter leavened to create a light, airy, savory cake, khandvi, or fried lentil crisps. There is usually rice at the end though it’s hard to leave room for it, then a sweet element—a square of milk candy or something syrup-soaked—and always something to refresh the palate: chaas which is spiced buttermilk, raw onion, or a wedge of lime. Each component arrives in miniature, but together they form a complete and deeply satisfying whole.

Diners enjoy a thali lunch at Gordan Thal in Ahmedabad

A proper thali feels less like a meal than a conversation between textures and tastes—generous, practical, and deeply local—the kind of food that tells you exactly where you are: Gujarat, feeding you with care rather than showmanship.

Diners enjoy an all-you-can-eat thali lunch at Gordhan Thal in Ahmedabad

Despite sampling thalis across Gujarat—each with its own inflection, its own logic of sweetness, sourness, and abundance—I still think of Shree Thaker Bhojanalay in Mumbai as the gold standard of the Gujarati thali. Without pretension, they offer perhaps the most elaborate expression of all: an almost overwhelming procession of farsan, vegetables, dals, sweets, breads, and condiments, each prepared with precision and care. Eating there is entering an archive. If Gujarat gave the thali to the world, Shree Thaker Bhojanalay is its museum—the Louvre of the form, preserving and presenting its full vocabulary with reverence and generosity.

Everybody eats in Gujarat; street animals are cared for.

We ate remarkably well in Gujarat. The absence of meat—and of alcohol—never registered as deprivation, only as a different and more subtle kind of abundance. Gujarat feeds you with intelligence and care. It is a place to which I will gladly return.

The author, at a street stall, enjoying a typical breakfast of puri with aloo shaak, often served with sev and chutneys—one of the most common breakfasts across Gujarat.

Since pre-conquest times, the majority of cooks in Mexico have been women. They ground corn on the metate, patted tortillas by hand, simmered beans and stews, roasted chiles, and fed families and communities from open hearths. When the Spanish arrived, it was also women—Indigenous women above all—who absorbed and transformed the ingredients, techniques, and tastes brought from Europe. Wheat, pork, chicken, beef, dairy products, spices, and new cooking vessels entered the kitchen not as impositions but as materials to be reinterpreted.

Because few Spanish women came to the New World in the early decades after the conquest, Indigenous women were employed in the kitchens of haciendas and convents. Known as mayoras, they ruled storerooms and larders, managed production, and trained younger cooks. It was in these kitchens—hierarchical but creative—that a truly mestizo cuisine took shape. Long before “fusion” became a marketing term, Mexican food was already the result of adaptation, negotiation, and invention carried out largely by women

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For generations, culinary knowledge in Mexico was transmitted orally and practically: from mother to daughter, aunt to niece, grandmother to granddaughter. Recipes were not written down; they were learned by watching, tasting, repeating. Until well into the twentieth century, women—especially working-class women—had few professional options outside domestic labor. Even in living memory, a woman’s occupation might be listed on official documents as labores propias de su sexo - “work appropriate to her sex.”

As women’s lives expanded beyond the kitchen, an unintended consequence followed. Knowledge that had once been central to daily survival began to lose status. Techniques perfected over decades were no longer automatically passed on. Many cooks guarded their recipes closely, not out of selfishness but because they represented identity, pride, and power in a world that offered few other forms of recognition. Diana Kennedy famously observed that her greatest challenge, as she traveled the countryside researching her books, was persuading cooks to share what they knew. Trust had to be earned—often over years—before anyone would “spill the beans.”

For much of the twentieth century, Mexico lacked formal institutions dedicated to teaching traditional Mexican cooking with the same rigor applied to French or Italian cuisine. But from the 1980s onward, a generation of women chefs began to change the public perception of Mexican food, both at home and abroad. Figures such as Alicia Gironella de’Angeli, Patricia Quintana, Mónica Patiño, Martha Ortiz Chapa, and Carmen “Titita” Degollado opened restaurants that treated Mexican cuisine not as folklore or nostalgia, but as a living, evolving tradition worthy of serious attention and international acclaim.

They were not alone, nor did they emerge from a vacuum. Earlier generations of women had already laid the groundwork: cookbook authors and cultural advocates such as Lula Bertrán, María Orsini, María Dolores Yzabal, and researchers Janet Long and Lila Lomelí documented regional cuisines, organized festivals, raised professional standards, and insisted that Mexican food deserved intellectual and cultural respect. Before them still were pioneers like Josefina Velázquez de León and Adela Hernández, who collected recipes and published cookbooks at a time when doing so was itself a radical act.

Artists and cultural figures also played a role. Frida Kahlo, Olga Costa, and Lupe Marín—each in her own way—understood food as an expression of identity and nationhood. Their embrace of Mexican cuisine was not incidental but ideological: food was culture, history, and politics on a plate.

Outside Mexico, it has likewise been largely women who carried Mexican cuisine into the wider world. Diana Kennedy’s meticulous documentation, Josefina Howard’s advocacy at N.Y.’s Rosa Mexicano, Zarela Martínez’s bridge-building between Mexico and the United States, Gabriela Cámara’s ethical and culinary vision, Josefina Santacruz’s work with moles and tradition, and Thomasina Miers’s popularization of regional Mexican flavors in the UK all helped reframe how Mexican food is understood internationally.

Today, the legacy of women in Mexican cooking has expanded beyond home hearths and fondas into the global fine-dining stage. Female chefs are not only participating alongside their male peers but are leading and innovating. For example, Elena Reygadas, the force behind Rosetta, was named The World’s Best Female Chef in 2023 and her restaurant earned a Michelin star in the first Michelin Guide for Mexico, elevating a neighborhood kitchen into one of the country’s most internationally celebrated tables.

In Oaxaca, where a new generation is also making history. Abigail Mendoza Ruiz is a legendary cocinera tradicional from Teotitlán del Valle and has become something of a superstar. Celia Florián runs the superb Quince Letras, a stalwart of classic cooking. Thalía Barrios García, a young Oaxacan cook steeped in traditional techniques, earned her first Michelin star for her restaurant Levadura de Olla in 2024, bringing ancestral regional cuisine into the spotlight of global gastronomy.

Female leadership at Michelin-recognized kitchens isn’t limited to those in Mexico. Mexican women such as Karime López have also made their mark abroad — López became the first Mexican woman chef to earn a Michelin star while leading Gucci Osteria in Florence, challenging national stereotypes about where Mexican cooks belong in the world’s culinary map.

These contemporary figures stand on the shoulders of earlier pioneers — they show how far Mexican women have come from the private, intergenerational kitchens of the past. Their presence in the Michelin era highlights not only culinary excellence but also cultural leadership, bringing regional knowledge, sustainability practices, and community roots into the world’s most scrutinized culinary platforms.

None of this diminishes the contributions of male chefs and scholars such as Enrique Olvera, Rick Bayless, Ricardo Muñoz Zurita, Salvador Novo, or José Iturriaga, whose work has been influential and often essential. But in no other major world cuisine have women played such a continuous, visible, and foundational role across every level—from hearth to hacienda, from market stall to Michelin-recognized dining room.

Mexican cuisine exists because women made it, preserved it, questioned it, and carried it forward. That fact is not sentimental; it is historical.

Las Mujeres y la Construcción de la Cocina Mexicana

Desde tiempos prehispánicos, la mayoría de las cocineras en México han sido mujeres. Ellas molían el maíz en el metate, palmeaban tortillas a mano, cocían frijoles y guisos, asaban chiles y alimentaban a familias y comunidades desde fogones abiertos. Cuando llegaron los españoles, también fueron las mujeres —sobre todo las mujeres indígenas— quienes absorbieron y transformaron los ingredientes, técnicas y gustos traídos de Europa. El trigo, el cerdo, el pollo, la res, los lácteos, las especias y los nuevos utensilios de cocina no entraron al ámbito doméstico como imposiciones, sino como materiales susceptibles de reinterpretación.

Debido a que pocas mujeres españolas llegaron al Nuevo Mundo en las primeras décadas posteriores a la conquista, las mujeres indígenas fueron empleadas en las cocinas de haciendas y conventos. Conocidas como mayoras, gobernaban despensas y alacenas, organizaban la producción y formaban a cocineras más jóvenes. Fue en esas cocinas —jerárquicas pero creativas— donde tomó forma una verdadera cocina mestiza. Mucho antes de que la palabra “fusión” se convirtiera en un término de mercadotecnia, la comida mexicana ya era el resultado de procesos de adaptación, negociación e invención llevados a cabo, en gran medida, por mujeres.

Durante generaciones, el conocimiento culinario en México se transmitió de manera oral y práctica: de madre a hija, de tía a sobrina, de abuela a nieta. Las recetas no se escribían; se aprendían observando, probando y repitiendo. Hasta bien entrado el siglo XX, las mujeres —sobre todo las de clase trabajadora— tenían muy pocas opciones profesionales fuera del trabajo doméstico. Incluso en tiempos relativamente recientes, la ocupación de una mujer podía aparecer en documentos oficiales como labores propias de su sexo.

A medida que la vida de las mujeres se expandió más allá de la cocina, se produjo una consecuencia no prevista. Un saber que antes era central para la supervivencia cotidiana comenzó a perder estatus. Técnicas perfeccionadas durante décadas dejaron de transmitirse automáticamente. Muchas cocineras guardaban sus recetas con celo, no por egoísmo, sino porque representaban identidad, orgullo y poder en un mundo que ofrecía pocas formas alternativas de reconocimiento. Diana Kennedy observó célebremente que su mayor desafío, al recorrer el país investigando para sus libros, era convencer a las cocineras de compartir lo que sabían. La confianza tenía que ganarse —a menudo a lo largo de años— antes de que alguien estuviera dispuesto a “soltar la sopa”.

Durante gran parte del siglo XX, México careció de instituciones formales dedicadas a enseñar la cocina tradicional mexicana con el mismo rigor que se aplicaba a la cocina francesa o italiana. Sin embargo, a partir de la década de 1980, una generación de mujeres chefs comenzó a transformar la percepción pública de la cocina mexicana, tanto dentro como fuera del país. Figuras como Alicia Gironella de’Angeli, Patricia Quintana, Mónica Patiño, Martha Ortiz Chapa y Carmen “Titita” Degollado abrieron restaurantes que trataron la cocina mexicana no como folclor o nostalgia, sino como una tradición viva, en constante evolución y merecedora de atención seria y reconocimiento internacional.

No estuvieron solas, ni surgieron de la nada. Generaciones anteriores de mujeres ya habían preparado el terreno: autoras de recetarios y promotoras culturales como Lula Bertrán, María Orsini, María Dolores Yzabal, y las investigadoras Janet Long y Lila Lomelí documentaron cocinas regionales, organizaron festivales, elevaron estándares profesionales e insistieron en que la comida mexicana merecía respeto intelectual y cultural. Antes aún estuvieron pioneras como Josefina Velázquez de León y Adela Hernández, quienes recopilaron recetas y publicaron libros de cocina en una época en la que hacerlo era, en sí mismo, un acto radical.

Artistas y figuras culturales también desempeñaron un papel importante. Frida Kahlo, Olga Costa y Lupe Marín —cada una a su manera— entendieron la comida como una expresión de identidad y nación. Su reivindicación de la cocina mexicana no fue incidental, sino ideológica: la comida era cultura, historia y política servidas en un plato.

Fuera de México, también han sido en gran medida mujeres quienes llevaron la cocina mexicana al mundo. La documentación minuciosa de Diana Kennedy, la labor de difusión de Josefina Howard en Rosa Mexicano de Nueva York, el trabajo de puente cultural de Zarela Martínez entre México y Estados Unidos, la visión ética y culinaria de Gabriela Cámara, la investigación de moles y tradición de Josefina Santacruz, y la popularización de sabores regionales mexicanos en el Reino Unido por parte de Thomasina Miers contribuyeron a replantear la manera en que se entiende la comida mexicana a nivel internacional.

Hoy, el legado de las mujeres en la cocina mexicana se ha expandido más allá de los fogones domésticos y las fondas, hasta los escenarios globales de la alta cocina. Las chefs no solo participan junto a sus colegas hombres, sino que lideran e innovan. Por ejemplo, Elena Reygadas, al frente de Rosetta, fue nombrada The World’s Best Female Chef en 2023, y su restaurante obtuvo una estrella Michelin en la primera Guía Michelin de México, elevando una cocina de barrio a una de las mesas más celebradas internacionalmente del país.

En Oaxaca, una nueva generación también está haciendo historia. Abigail Mendoza Ruiz es una legendaria cocinera tradicional de Teotitlán del Valle y se ha convertido en una auténtica figura emblemática. Celia Florián dirige el magnífico restaurante Quince Letras, un referente de la cocina clásica. Thalía Barrios García, joven cocinera oaxaqueña profundamente arraigada en técnicas tradicionales, obtuvo su primera estrella Michelin en 2024 por su restaurante Levadura de Olla, llevando la cocina regional ancestral al centro de la gastronomía mundial.

El liderazgo femenino en cocinas reconocidas por Michelin no se limita a México. Mujeres mexicanas como Karime López también han dejado huella en el extranjero: López se convirtió en la primera chef mexicana en obtener una estrella Michelin al frente de Gucci Osteria en Florencia, desafiando estereotipos nacionales sobre el lugar que ocupan las cocineras mexicanas en el mapa culinario mundial.

Estas figuras contemporáneas se sostienen sobre los hombros de pioneras anteriores y muestran cuánto han avanzado las mujeres mexicanas desde las cocinas privadas e intergeneracionales del pasado. Su presencia en la era Michelin pone de relieve no solo la excelencia culinaria, sino también un liderazgo cultural que incorpora saberes regionales, prácticas de sostenibilidad y vínculos comunitarios en los espacios gastronómicos más observados del mundo.

Nada de esto minimiza las aportaciones de chefs y estudiosos hombres como Enrique Olvera, Rick Bayless, Ricardo Muñoz Zurita, Salvador Novo o José Iturriaga, cuyo trabajo ha sido influyente y, en muchos casos, fundamental. Pero en ninguna otra gran cocina del mundo las mujeres han desempeñado un papel tan continuo, visible y fundacional en todos los niveles: del fogón a la hacienda, del puesto de mercado al comedor reconocido por Michelin.

La cocina mexicana existe porque las mujeres la crearon, la preservaron, la cuestionaron y la llevaron hacia adelante. Ese hecho no es sentimental; es histórico.

La Casa de los Tacos in Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighborhood appears to be an ordinary fonda; it is anything but. Featured is a  menu of “pre-Hispanic tacos,” i.e., the farthest-reaching conflagration of edible insects in the republic. Ultra-modern bug-munching combines with other ancient ingredients and cutting-edge culinary technique. And they prove insects can taste good. Pork or beef tacos are also on the menu for the timid. See our video…

https://youtu.be/1qrYvP-b2Ds?si=r_lm6zY_Dz-aAGib

A small storm erupted recently on social media when a British chef, owner of a fashionable bakery in Mexico City’s trendy Roma neighborhood, casually remarked in public something to the effect that “there is no culture of bread in Mexico.” Stripped of context, the comment was quickly seized upon by the chip-on-the-shoulder crowd—those eager to blame foreigners for gentrification, the supposed “Americanization” of Mexican food, or general cultural erosion, themes I have touched on recently. It was an ill-judged and insensitive thing to say, particularly coming from a foreigner. But it also emerged from a reality that deserves a more thoughtful discussion than outraged reaction allows.

First, the statement is plainly false if taken literally. Tortillas are bread. So are tamales, tlacoyos, and countless other forms of masa, shaped, cooked, and eaten daily across the country. Flatbreads exist in nearly every culture on earth, from India and the Middle East to Africa and the Americas. To claim that Mexico lacks a bread culture is to overlook one of the oldest, most sophisticated grain traditions in human history.

What the chef was clearly—and clumsily—referring to was something narrower: the relative absence, until recently, of consistently high-quality, artisan European-style bread of the sort the French are famously protective of. On that more specific point, there is room for nuance. There has been a culture of European breadmaking in Mexico since the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, later enriched by French and Italian influences. The bolillo—along with its cousins, the telera and birote—became one of the most widely consumed breads in the country, baked in wood-fired ovens across Mexico well into the late 20th century. Pan dulce is beloved by just about everyone.

The confusion arises from a genuine decline in quality during the second half of the 20th century. Industrialization, cost-cutting, and a diminished market for craft led to breads that prioritized speed and price over flavor and structure. Fifteen years ago, even in Mexico City’s most affluent neighborhoods, baguettes, if they existed at all, were often pale and bland. Bolillos, sweet breads and baguettes were made with ultra-refined flour, chemical leavening, and little patience. What has changed is not the existence—or lack of it—of a bread culture, but the public’s expectations. As Mexican diners became more globally engaged and more demanding, space reopened for well-made European breads. Sourdough returned. Fermentation mattered again. A market re-emerged.

In the end, disparaging comments criticizing Mexico and its culture should be examined carefully before being weaponized. When they become excuses for disdain, xenophobia, or the externalization of blame, they reveal more about the insecurities of those repeating them than about the chef or the bread itself. Mexico has always had a culture of bread. What it temporarily lost—and is now reclaiming—is a broad insistence on quality in one particular tradition among many.

¿Existe una cultura del pan en México?

La imprudencia verbal rara vez sale gratis.
Hace poco se desató una pequeña tormenta en redes sociales cuando un chef inglés, dueño de una panadería de moda en la Roma, comentó públicamente —así, al pasar— algo en el sentido de que “en México no hay cultura del pan”. Fuera de contexto, la frase fue rápidamente aprovechada por el grupo de los eternamente resentidos: los que están listos para culpar a los extranjeros de la gentrificación, la erosión cultural o la supuesta “americanización” de la comida mexicana, temas que he tocado recientemente. Fue un comentario torpe e insensible, sobre todo viniendo de un extranjero. Pero también parte de una realidad que merece una conversación más cuidadosa de lo que permite la indignación.

Para empezar, la afirmación es obviamente falsa si se toma al pie de la letra. Las tortillas son pan. También lo son los tamales, los tlacoyos y muchas otras formas de masa que se moldean, se cuecen y se comen todos los días en todo el país. Los panes planos existen en casi todas las culturas del mundo, de la India y Medio Oriente a África y las Américas. Decir que México carece de una cultura del pan es pasar por alto una de las tradiciones del grano más antiguas y sofisticadas de la historia humana.

A lo que el chef se refería —con torpeza— era a algo más específico: la relativa ausencia, hasta hace poco, de pan europeo artesanal de alta calidad de manera constante, del tipo que los franceses defienden con particular celo. En ese punto más acotado sí cabe el matiz. En México existe una tradición de panificación de estilo europeo desde la llegada de los españoles en el siglo XVI, más tarde enriquecida por influencias francesas e italianas. El bolillo —junto con sus primos, la telera y el birote— se volvió uno de los panes más consumidos del país, y se horneaba en hornos de leña por todo México hasta bien entrado el siglo XX. Y el pan dulce es querido por prácticamente todo el mundo.

La confusión viene de una caída real en la calidad durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX. La industrialización, la reducción de costos y un mercado menos dispuesto a pagar por el oficio produjeron panes que privilegiaban la rapidez y el precio por encima del sabor y la estructura. Hace quince años, incluso en las colonias más acomodadas de la Ciudad de México, las baguettes solían ser pálidas y desabridas. Bolillos, panes dulces y baguettes se hacían con harina ultra refinada, leudantes químicos y poca paciencia. Lo que ha cambiado no es la existencia —o inexistencia— de una cultura del pan, sino las expectativas del público. Conforme los comensales mexicanos se volvieron más globales y más exigentes, se abrió de nuevo el espacio para panes europeos bien hechos. Regresó la masa madre. La fermentación volvió a importar. Reapareció un mercado.

Al final, conviene tomar este tipo de crítico y examinarlo con cuidado antes de convertirlo en arma arrojadiza. Cuando se usa como pretexto para el desprecio, la xenofobia o para culpar afuera lo que duele adentro, revela más sobre las inseguridades de quienes los repiten que sobre el chef o sobre el pan en sí. México siempre ha tenido cultura del pan. Lo que perdió por un tiempo —y hoy está recuperando— es una exigencia amplia de calidad dentro de una tradición específica, entre muchas otras.

Although I have entitled my newest book “The Best Tacos in Mexico City”, I have never been comfortable with the language of absolutes—the best, the greatest, the most essential. In food writing, these superlatives are everywhere, pushed by list-making machines like “The World’s 50 Best,” Michelin stars, and an endless stream of “content” as hook bait. We take these lists as gospel, with nary a grain of salt. We treat them as if they capture something objective about taste. But taste, as anyone who has ever eaten anything knows, is subjective, contextual, cultural.

I have always disliked hyperbole in food writing because it narrows our vision. It directs diners toward a handful of anointed places at the expense of everything else. It encourages restaurants to contort themselves in hopes of attracting the attention of international tastemakers, often at the cost of the very soul that made them interesting in the first place. Instead of cooking great food, chefs begin to cook for the camera, for the list, for the influencer.

The result, increasingly, is a global dining monoculture: dishes engineered to be photographed, plated with tweezers, shaped into identical visual gestures recognizable from Copenhagen to Bangkok to Mexico City. Food that looks less like food and more like a Fabergé egg or a minimalist sculpture. I’ve said this before: I prefer food that looks like food. I have nothing against aesthetics, creativity, or refinement—but when the image becomes the point, something essential is lost. A dish should delight, nourish, surprise, or comfort. It should not aspire to be an emblem of status.

This is why “Best” lists trouble me. They pretend to celebrate excellence, but what they really celebrate is conformity to a particular, globalized idea of excellence. They flatten cultural nuance and fetishize novelty, especially when it fits a Eurocentric fine-dining mold. Everything becomes a competition, even cuisines that evolved in defiance of hierarchy—street food, home cooking, the humble taco. These traditions don’t need medals; they need curiosity, respect, and time.

My resistance also comes from years of observing how the hype distorts Mexico City’s culinary reality. A case in point is Michelin’s seemingly arbitrary awarding of a star to a single taqueria that arguably deserves it but no more than hundreds of others. This is the framework that rewards hyperbole. Global rankings create the illusion that a city’s food culture can be distilled into a handful of talking points: a famous tasting menu here, a buzzy taquería there, a trend imported from abroad. The lived reality—messy, layered, diverse—is harder to package, and therefore too often ignored.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of people actually eating in this city—Mexicans themselves—continue to support the full spectrum of culinary life: fondas, markets, loncherías, taquerías, regional specialists, immigrant-run kitchens, family dining rooms that have survived for generations. These places may never appear on a “Best” list, not because they lack excellence, but because they don’t play the game. Their excellence is measured differently: by consistency, memory, generosity, the taste of a dish that needs no explanation.

Lists also impose a false sense of urgency. They tell diners that if they can’t get a reservation at the latest “Top 10” darling, they’ve missed out. But food is not fashion. It does not become obsolete because a committee has shifted its attention elsewhere. A taco stand does not lose its magic when the line shortens. A bowl of pozole does not require international validation to be worthy of devotion. The beauty of food lies in its immediacy—its connection to place, to time, to the hands that make it.

I’m not arguing against recognition. Chefs and cooks deserve support, visibility, and success. But what I advocate is a recalibration of how we talk about food—less ranking, more listening. Less absolutism, more context. Less spectacle, more honesty. There is no “best” restaurant in the world, just as there is no “best” book or “best” song. There are only the places that move us, that feed us, that stay with us.

If we let go of the illusion of “best,” we might rediscover something far more valuable: the pleasure of eating without an agenda. The freedom to stumble upon a meal that wasn’t pre-approved by a global list. The humility to admit that greatness in food cannot be certified—it can only be experienced.

Me Caga la Palabra “Best”

Aunque he titulado mi libro más reciente “Los mejores tacos de la Ciudad de México”, nunca me he sentido del todo cómodo con el lenguaje de los absolutos: lo mejor, lo máximo, lo imprescindible. En la escritura gastronómica, estos superlativos están por todas partes, impulsados por máquinas creadoras de listas como The World’s 50 Best, las estrellas Michelin y un flujo interminable de “contenido” como anzuelo. Tomamos estas listas como si fueran evangelio, sin siquiera un grano de sal. Las tratamos como si capturaran algo objetivo sobre el gusto. Pero el gusto, como cualquiera que haya comido algo sabe, es subjetivo, contextual, cultural.

Siempre me ha disgustado la hipérbole en la escritura gastronómica porque estrecha nuestra visión. Dirige a los comensales hacia un puñado de lugares ungidos a costa de todo lo demás. Alienta a los restaurantes a contorsionarse con tal de atraer la atención de los tastemakers internacionales, muchas veces a costa del alma misma que los hizo interesantes en primer lugar. En vez de cocinar buena comida, los chefs empiezan a cocinar para la cámara, para la lista, para el influencer.

El resultado, cada vez más, es una monocultura gastronómica global: platillos diseñados para ser fotografiados, emplatados con pinzas, moldeados en gestos visuales idénticos que se reconocen de Copenhague a Bangkok y a la Ciudad de México. Comida que se ve menos como comida y más como un huevo Fabergé o una escultura minimalista. Ya lo he dicho antes: prefiero la comida que parece comida. No tengo nada en contra de la estética, la creatividad o el refinamiento, pero cuando la imagen se vuelve el objetivo, se pierde algo esencial. Un platillo debe deleitar, nutrir, sorprender o reconfortar. No debe aspirar a ser un emblema de estatus.

Por eso me inquietan las listas de “lo mejor”. Pretenden celebrar la excelencia, pero en realidad celebran la conformidad con una idea particular y globalizada de excelencia. Aplanan los matices culturales y fetichizan la novedad, especialmente cuando encaja en un molde eurocéntrico de alta cocina. Todo se convierte en competencia, incluso las cocinas que evolucionaron desafiando la jerarquía: la comida callejera, la cocina casera, el humilde taco. Estas tradiciones no necesitan medallas; necesitan curiosidad, respeto y tiempo.

Mi resistencia también surge de años de observar cómo el ciclo de hype distorsiona la realidad culinaria de la Ciudad de México. Un ejemplo es la aparentemente arbitraria concesión de una estrella Michelin a una sola taquería que, si bien quizá la merece, no la merece más que cientos de otras. Este es el marco que recompensa la hipérbole. Las clasificaciones globales crean la ilusión de que la cultura gastronómica de una ciudad puede destilarse en un puñado de puntos clave: un menú degustación famoso por aquí, una taquería de moda por allá, una tendencia importada del extranjero. La realidad vivida—caótica, estratificada, diversa—es más difícil de empaquetar y, por lo tanto, con demasiada frecuencia se ignora.

Mientras tanto, la gran mayoría de las personas que realmente comen en esta ciudad—los propios mexicanos—siguen apoyando todo el espectro de la vida culinaria: fondas, mercados, loncherías, taquerías, especialistas regionales, cocinas de inmigrantes, comedores familiares que han sobrevivido generaciones. Estos lugares nunca aparecerán en una lista de “lo mejor”, no porque carezcan de excelencia, sino porque no juegan el juego. Su excelencia se mide de forma distinta: por la constancia, la memoria, la generosidad, el sabor de un platillo que no necesita explicación.

Las listas también imponen una falsa sensación de urgencia. Le dicen al comensal que si no consigue una reservación en el nuevo favorito del “Top 10”, ya se perdió de algo. Pero la comida no es moda. No se vuelve obsoleta porque un comité desvió su atención hacia otra parte. Un puesto de tacos no pierde su magia cuando la fila se acorta. Un plato de pozole no requiere validación internacional para ser digno de devoción. La belleza de la comida radica en su inmediatez—su conexión con un lugar, un tiempo, las manos que la preparan.

No estoy en contra del reconocimiento. Chefs y cocineros merecen apoyo, visibilidad y éxito. Pero lo que propongo es una recalibración de cómo hablamos de comida: menos rankings, más escucha. Menos absolutismo, más contexto. Menos espectáculo, más honestidad. No existe el “mejor” restaurante del mundo, así como no existe el “mejor” libro o la “mejor” canción. Solo existen los lugares que nos conmueven, que nos alimentan, que se quedan con nosotros.

Si dejamos ir la ilusión de “lo mejor”, quizá redescubramos algo mucho más valioso: el placer de comer sin agenda. La libertad de tropezarnos con una comida que no fue preaprobada por una lista global. La humildad de admitir que la grandeza en la comida no se certifica: solo se experimenta.