| | |  Entertainment | March 2009 
Learn Mexico City's Secrets
 Tim Cuprisin - JSOnline
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| | Rick Bayless | |
Rick Bayless has spent years on public TV demonstrating that Mexican food is far more than tacos and burritos in his series, "Mexico: One Plate at a Time."
The Chicago restaurateur talked about the show during a recent visit to the Milwaukee Public Market:
Q. Is a new show coming?
A. We just finished filming the seventh season of our show. This new series really focuses strongly on the culture of Mexico City and the vitality of Mexico City. Every show, our standard pattern is half-shot on location in a number of different locations in Mexico City and then interspersed with cooking segments that are done in my home kitchen in Chicago, . . . giving our viewers really a chance to know Mexican culture, get inspired with that, and then to see how they can get that back into their own home kitchen.
Q. Give me a little sample of Mexico City and what we'll find there.
A. Mexico City's one of the most cosmopolitan places on the face of the Earth. . . . What you find in that is people that have come from all over Mexico and contributed their two cents.
The pace of life is really fast in Mexico City, so it's definitely the New York City of Mexico. It has a lot to offer from high to low. It's the place where all the money is, basically, and so you get these really cool high-end restaurants.
Up until the last 10 years, those restaurants have all been foreign, just like they were in the United States a couple decades ago where people would say, "Oh, we're going to go out for a fancy meal; it has to be French."
Everyone always said you will only find the best Mexican food in people's homes. But that was because they had grandmother there cooking, they had resident cooks. Those days are kind of over. Grandma died, there's no cook left, and so the people are really interested in tasting those flavors that remind them of the past. But they want them now in a restaurant setting, and they want them to be sort of updated.
So there's a number of chefs in Mexico City that are doing contemporary versions of traditional Mexican dishes, and they're doing it really quite spectacularly. It's a nascent kind of movement, but it's really taking off.
Q. When you travel to Mexico, how do you find the good places?
A. I'm the creative director for the show. And what I do is to do a lot of research before I go, talk to a lot of people. Then I go on a scout, and I go with my director, our Mexico producer, and then a location person. Basically there's four or five of us who go down there, and we keep digging.
I often try to shoot in a beach community at least for a couple shows in every series, because 90% of Americans know only the beaches in Mexico. . . . We did a show in Guadalajara, and it's just a hop, skip and a jump to Puerto Vallarta. And I was frustrated because I couldn't find anything that made a show for me. It was too Americanized.
So, finally, I just started asking the porters and bellmen at the hotel, "If I gave you $50 to take your girlfriend out, where would you go?"
We found this one place that I will never forget. Of all things, it's called "Big Burro" in English. They specialize in this thing called shrimp burgers, which you can only find in Puerto Vallarta. It's a shrimping area, and shrimp is just dirt-cheap.
It's this little street stall, it's got a little seating behind it. He stands there at this griddle, and he takes . . . just a big old handful of shrimp. And he throws it on the griddle. And he throws on some onions and cilantro and green chiles and tomatoes, and he sort of stir-fries it there.
He kind of piles it all together, and he throws a big blanket of cheese over it so it starts melting. Then he toasts a bun on the side; he gets it all warm. He piles this thing high, this cheesy spicy shrimp mixture. Then you just, you know, tuck into it.
I have to say, it was one of the best things I've ever eaten in my life. It was so far off the beaten path that you would never find the place. But one of the guys at the hotel told me about it. |
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