All I Know Is I Don’t Know Nothing And That’s Fine — Chris Ying
Juan the cab driver ordered tacos, but my friend Danny the chef had been talking up the soup. For the first time on the trip, I was considering breaking my personal rule to always listen to the fat cab driver when it comes to matters of late-night eating.
Juan had not yet steered us astray. Earlier he’d dropped us at Los 4 Ases, the roadside cantina responsible for our current state of inebriation. We’d sat at the bar next to a vitrolero filled with pickled pig’s feet, and hurled ourselves headfirst down a steep hillside slicked with liquor. We bounced along to a cowboy lounge singer’s up-tempo stylings, and ordered “pollo KFC” from the menu, just to see what it was like. (It was like the Colonel’s, only a little worse.) Our disappointment was tempered by the knowledge that food is gratis at cantinas in Mexico City. The alcohol costs money, but while you’re drinking, you can order whatever you want from a list of salty booze-sponges. The fare had been first rate at the cantina we’d visited the previous day, the more famous Cantina La Mascota near the Zócalo, where we’d had simple fried quesadillas filled with crushed potato, picked the meat and fatty bits from the bones of a dark, slightly acidic ternera en adobo while wincing through shots of silver tequila.
Now Juan had brought us here, to La Polar, based on nothing more than a slurred request from Danny to take us to “the birria place you took me before. It’ssssooo good.” We sat down, Juan, Danny, and I, and fixed our eyes on the kitchen. I was sauced and starving, but still had a full, bulbous glass of mescal in front of me along with a side plate of sour orange sliced dipped in chili powder. I sipped at the smoky molten agave to pass the time, or perhaps to reach some threshold of drunkenness that would allow me to pass through time and skip to the point when my bowl of birria would finally, finally make it to the table.
The wait turned out to be a small price to pay, as La Polar far exceeded Danny’s earlier inebriated endorsement. The birria arrived cloudy with chili and herbs, but san crystal clear in flavor. I pressed down with the back of my spoon against a bumper crop of tender goat, hunting after the main attraction: the broth. If you could juice a roasted goat, then concentrate and clarify the results, you’d have something akin to the consomé at La Polar. A squeeze of fresh lime and a healthy scattering of rinsed white onion brightened things up, and a stack of thick, soft corn tortillas sat near at hand for meat-scooping. But the broth was our purpose and our savior.
There’s a window outside the restaurant where one can prop oneself against a metal counter and scarf the same birria tacos they serve inside, technically qualifying as street food— my ostensible purpose for being in Mexico City. Danny was doing research for a restaurant he was planning to open. He’d called me while I was in the middle of another trip to tell me that I’d be an idiot not to join. I agreed to meet him, but had no time to repack, let alone do anything resembling proper research. From what I’d been told, you can’t throw a stone in the DF without hitting the greatest pambazo or tacos de mixiotes or quesadilla you’d ever had. Like other poorly prepared travelers before me, I was going off something I’d heard, hoping to bump into something extraordinary.
It looks easy on TV, doesn’t it? Land in a foreign country, ask your cab driver to head for the nearest market, and arrive to teeming crowds of diners and smiling vendors playing you with samples of grilled meat and exotic pastries. But the reality of trying to find an amazing street-level eating experience is rarely so straightforward. If you’re not armed to the teeth with research on what moment to be where and what to order, you can find yourself, as I have, wandering the same three blocks as dusk creeps, looking for the entrance to a place that is closed on weekdays or has been shuttered for half a decade. And when you are prepared, the problem then becomes finding a rice-noodle cart that can meet the impossible expectations you’ve built up. Even in cities like Rio or Hong Kong, where you can almost feel the heart of the city beating under your feet, it can still seem like the cool party is always around the next corner. Like a swimmer being pulled by the current, you see that the shore is maddeningly near but just out of reach.
In these times, it’s tempting to let the sea take you, to drown yourself in the luxury and safety of the hotel and minibar. But there is a better middle ground, and to get there, you must first do away with the notion that you are going to live like a local. Short of moving somewhere, there’s no way to see everything you want to see, or to understand everything there is to understand. You can travel well without focusing on how well traveled you want your friends back home to think you are.
Danny had been to Mexico City recently, and for about half the time we were together we were covering ground he’d tread no more than a month earlier. This relieved the distinct sense that I was flying blind as well as some of the pressure of discovery. And while I can’t take credit for any great culinary unearthings in Mexico City, I can offer you this: when you’re trying to find the good stuff, it helps to ask someone who already found it. More important, that someone should be someone you trust. Restaurant recommendations are a chorus that does not lack for voices. The problem is, who knows what you have in common with any given reviewer or body of reviewers?
The only filter to sift through the glut of information available to the traveler is trust. Danny and I find the same things delicious, so I seldom put up any resistance when he leads the way. Plus, he has a way of walking with the purpose that leaves you little time to question whether he knows where he’s headed. For large periods of the trip, my view was of his back as he wended his way through markets and alleyways, headed for a place he’d been to last time. Sometimes we’d end up lost at the other end; other times I’d look up to see we were exactly where he’d described we would be. Seldom did I know where I was.
But as hound-like as Danny’s nose for tastiness is, there really is no substitute for being fluent in the local language. The entire time we were in Mexico, we could not stop saying cuenta when we meant to say carta, and asking for the bill when you want the menu is not generally a direct path to unlocking the house secrets. Still, I found the DF to be an altogether English/high-school-level-Spanish friendly city.
And so we muddled through the days with our pidgin Spanish, aided by a list of tips from James Casey, whose magazine, Swallow, devoted a whole issue to Mexico City. On our first morning in country, we headed to eh Mercado de la Merced, a densely-packed market that dips in-and outdoors and houses hundreds of stalls hawking comically large piles of chilies and cactus paddles, golden-hued chickens, tremendous sides of beef and pork, tacos of all sorts, blood sausages sizzling on griddles, towers of cheese, corn grilled almost black, fresh masa, and tortillas. On our way into the twisting, rambling market, I took a photo of the street corner where we entered so when we got lost I could point to it like a speechless chimp, which we did and I did.
We meandered with vague purpose. Or rather, with the specific purpose of finding carnitas, but with no specific carnitas in mind. We landed on a stand called Ricas Carnitas. The sign featured an unlicensed rendering of a famous cartoon pig, popping out of a cauldron with arms wide open. Two aproned men ran the operation from behind a vinyl-lined t =able, and a group of satisfied-looking customers spilled over the sides of tiny colorful plastic stools in front. I’ll make no claims about this stand serving the best carnitas in Mexico City. But if you’re cruising through a busy market, and you spot a crowd of finger-licking patrons hovering around a rack of deeply browned pork dripping fat and juice back into its cooking liquid, you can safely bet they’re not going to be the worst carnitas in Mexico City. Such a rack rests prominently in front of Ricas Carnitas, easily within view and scent of passing foot traffic. I couldn’t help but imagine the liquid in the simmering cauldron beneath it as something akin to the sinister dip from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In goes the pig, and out comes a deconstructed pile of bronzed snout, ribs, shoulders, intestines, his hat, and his overcoat.
When it’s taco time, the meat takes a quick plunge into the dip, then gets cleavered out of recognizability, jumbling together fatting and gelatinous with chewy and tender. Everything goes onto two tortillas heated on a smoking plancha, then is covered with a flourish of onions, cilantro, and a user-administered dose of simple salsa consisting only of raw tomatillo and chili. Beside the large stone malcjete that holds the salsa, a dense bouquet of papalo sprigs sits in a cup doubling as a vase. A leaf or two of papalo— an herbaceous plant related to cilantro, with leaves bearing a s light resemblance to nasturtium leaves— serves as a post-taco digestif.
We ascertained the purpose of this little outlying shrub through a combination of gestured questions directed at the vendor, and watching the diners around us finish their tacos and then pop the leaves into their mouths. I find it useful to keep my eyes trained on what people are eating around me.
Think of it as the Finger-Bowl Method: if someone puts something in front of you and you’re not sure what to do with it, look up before you go drining your hand-washing liquid.
We employed this practice again later at a chain joint called El Farolito. All around the market we’d seen tortillas sitting out on curbs and on milk crates, wrinkling and puckering slightly as they dried out in the open. Rather afraid to eat of the literal streets, I didn’t make any movements to investigate. But then, while seated at the wraparound counter at El Farolito (one can also pull up in a car outside and place an order in situ: street food), we spotted a stack of the same dried tortillas. Toasted on the grill, then topped or served plain with salsa or brothy beans, these tostaditas were a world apart from their fried cousins. Crunchier than crisp, and less oil-logged, their relative lightness gave us the moral high ground we needed to overdo it on the rest of our order: alambres (a scramble of bacon, steak, cheese, onions, and chilies), tacos al pastor, cebollas (spring onions blackened and topped with Worcestershire sauce and lime), and a foralada. The farolada is a house specialty that Danny discovered on a prior visit, again by watching others. A piece of pan arabe (pita bread)is split open and stuffed with stringy Manchego cheese and steak, then pressed on the grill into a crisp wafer. By my count, the cross-pollination of Lebanese influence with Mexican cooking has yielded at least two wonders: al pastor and now this. Free restaurant idea: Taqueria al Beirut.
The no-duh assumption at the heart of the Finger-Bowl Method is that if it looks good, try it. Easier than looking for a particular stand you saw on TV or in a guidebook, it to keep your head on a swivel and nose on alert. As fast as information moves, street food still moves faster. A change of ownership, an off day, an ambitious owner trying to cash in on a TV appearance— any number of factors can ruin what was a sure thing a week ago. Making laps around another market, Mercado San Juan no 78, I waffled on trying a few more exotic dishes I recognized as quintessential market offerings that a responsible correspondent would do well to acquaint himself with. The smell of cleaning agents turns me off, and we had arrived at the market in the late afternoon after the lunch rush, as the merchants turned their attention to washing the floors and counters.
But near the entrance, open to the sidewalk and free from Mr. Clean’s special odor, was a rotisserie-chicken stand. Plump birds were crammed ass to shoulder on spits, dripping juices from the upper levels down onto the lower decks as they spun. Between the skewers of whole chickens were even more crowded spits of chicken wings, pressed together in an overlapping line like cruise-ship passengers vying to get on the last lifeboat. Everything was roasted to the same dark-orange hue, with spots of charred black. And while a whole chicken was unmanageable for street-side consumption, I could not pass on wings. The chicken man peeled a few from the spit for us, dropped them into a plastic bag, and added a few shakes from a bottle of Valentina hot sauce.
Perched on a cement divider across the street, we divvied up our loot. I pulled a wing from the reddened bag, and considered it quizzically, not sure that I had ever seen a wing trimmed to look this way. We pulled skin and meat from bone with our front teeth and realized immediately that what we had were not chicken wings but chicken necks— a most delightful betrayal! Even in our increasingly offal-and-off-cut friendly world, the neck remains largely confined to the stockpot. But it has everything the gluttonous carnivore desires. It is, after all, mostly skin and fat— in this case rendered delicate and sticky with a few crackling burnt ends. The meat takes work to get at, probably too much for your average American looking to keep both eyes on the game while snacking, but for those willing to toil a bit, the chicken neck is the superior cut.
Mexico City is a sprawling behemoth. When standing in the middle of it, you experience both the sense of being enveloped in a metropolis like Manhattan and being overwhelmed by the endless outward reach of Los Angeles. Often, finding good street food comes down to dumb luck. Our hotel was in the Condesa, a relatively chichi neighborhood, away from the markets and heavily trafficked late-night streets. But just a short two blocks from our front door, we came across a couple of women in blue aprons who had set up a comal next to a stone planter on the sidewalk. There, they pressed blue corn masa intro delicious huaraches and quesadillas filled with huitlacoche, stewed squash blossoms, and just a few crumbles of melty cheese. Various plastic containers of salsa and toppings crowded a folding table covered in a floral-print tablecloth. Napkins hung in a bag stapled to a nearby tree. There were no other vendors around.
Great crossover YA: You and I Eat the Same brings the world to the table
Great crossover YA: You and I Eat the Same brings the world to the table #netgalley @themadfeed
You and I Eat the Same, edited by Chris Ying & René Redzepi, (Oct. 2018, Artisan Books), $19.95, ISBN: 9781579658403
Ages 13+
MAD, the Danish word for food, is a cultural symposium founded by chef René Redzepi and editor of the food magazine, Lucky Peach, Chris Ying. You and I Eat the Sameis the first in a series of MAD Dispatches the two plan to release, with essays on how food brings different…
Alain Ducasse in Conversation with David Chang, Daniel Patterson, and René Redzepi
Alain Ducasse in Conversation with David Chang, Daniel Patterson, and René Redzepi
The legendary French chef Alain Ducasse sat down for a conversation with David Chang, Daniel Patterson, Chris Ying, and René Redzepi in which he discussed his career, risk-taking, fear, and how to use his fame to positively influence diners.
Curbing Carbon Emissions in Dining: A Conversation with Zero Foodprint
We’re excited to announce the THIRD event of our 2016 public lecture series! Join us for a conversation on reducing carbon emissions with the co-founders of ZeroFoodprint: Editor-in-Chief of @luckypeach Chris Ying, climate-change expert Peter Freed, and Chef Anthony Myint of SF’s The Perennial. Curbing Carbon Emissions in Dining will be held at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall on Thursday, May 19th at 7pm.
“The point of starting your own magazine, or the only real benefit I think, is being able to do whatever the hell you want. And we always wanted to have fiction in a food magazine.”
From Capital New York, a sixty-second interview with editor-in-chief Chris Ying.
