“The restaurant is closed, guys,” Redzepi tells the tourists. “We’re about to rip it all down. It’s over.”
The foods of regional Mexico are in a gastronomic world of their own, a fascinating and many-faceted world, but alas, far too many people outside Mexico still think of them as an overly large platter of mixed messes, smothered with a shrill tomato sauce, sour cream, and grated yellow cheese preceded by a dish of mouth-searing sauce and greasy, deep-fried chips.
—DIANA KENNEDY, The Art of Mexican Cooking
Everybody started painting one hand Day-Glo and opening it and sticking one vast vibrating Day-Glo palm out at the straight world floating by comatose…
Kesey held another briefing, and without anybody having to say anything, they all began to feel that the trip was becoming a…mission, of some sort.
—TOM WOLFE, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
There was so much in Mexico. So much to eat, so much to learn about. So many ingredients—chiles, spices, leaves, coconuts, insects, fruits—and so many preparations. But if there were two elements of Mexican cooking that Redzepi felt he needed to tackle before he could embark on the pop-up in Tulum with any real confidence, they were tortillas and mole. One was seemingly the height of simplicity—corn flour and water mixed into the magic putty called masa and griddled into patties on a comal—and the other was the very prototype of complexity. To try to define mole was to lose one’s grip on its definition. Mole was everything and anything. It was an infinitude of blended juxtapositions. You could say that mole was a sauce and you could say that it tended to incorporate chiles and aromatics. (But not always.) You could say that a mole distinguished itself from a salsa by virtue of its density, its meconium-like viscosity, its compression of multiple ingredients cooked slow and low, and you’d be mostly right, but not always. The very word “mole” felt like a code-switching trick of language used by the indigenous people as a method of perpetually throwing Spanish invaders off their tracks. Mole could be red. Mole could be yellow. Mole could be green. Mole could be black. Mole could be so black, in fact—conjured from the charred parchment of chiles that had been burned to the brink of outright ash—that it tasted like a Goth bisque. Imagine ingesting flakes of night.
Tortillas were tortillas. Mole was all negotiation, but tortillas were nonnegotiable. They came in different sizes and hues and gradations of thickness, of course, but their function remained central to the very existence of a Mexican meal. Perhaps it is a paradox all too applicable to a man as complex as Redzepi, but I never saw him master a tortilla. He tried and tried, watching as women in Mexico would deftly place coasters of masa on the comal, looking for hints as the masa would eventually bubble up as though it were being inflated by invisible elfin sorcerers. He didn’t have much luck with them. His tortillas rarely if ever bubbled up. People called him the best chef in the world and yet you could see in his eyes the blunt, wistful realization that he’d never get the art of the tortilla the way a sizable portion of the female population of Mexico had mastered it.
Mole, though. Maybe he could do something with mole. Not something better per se. There was nothing better than a true Oaxacan mole—he knew that. But he could do a Noma version of a mole, maybe, as a gesture of love for the country he had to keep coming back to. A thesis behind Noma Mexico was that the perfection of traditional dishes like cochinita pibil and mole poblano could never be topped. There was no point in trying. (To attempt to “top” them would, of course, be colonialist and autocratic, and offensive in that regard, but it would also be…patently impossible.) The Noma way—in Japan, in Australia, and here in Mexico—was to strip vehicles back down to their component parts and try to rebuild them or reimagine them from the ground up. (At its best, the act of doing this would foster a sort of cultural conversation between different regions of the world.) First, though, you had to understand what you were taking apart. Taking apart mole was like taking apart a river. Mole was fluid and endless. Its very nature was elusive. You couldn’t “get to the bottom” of it. It was more of a mosaic of sauces than a sauce per se, more a manifesto than an ironclad recipe, and yet mole meant to Mexico what pesto meant to parts of Italy and tahini meant to the Middle East. A great mole might have twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty ingredients, the potential proportions of each ingredient pretty much infinite, all of them like pieces of an edible jigsaw puzzle that, when completed, revealed a different image each time. Redzepi, a competitor at heart, remained haunted by the mole madre that chef Enrique Olvera had made him swoon over at Pujol—a kind of Earth Mother mole, aged and alive and almost incalculable in its sedimentary layers of spice and funk.
* * *
—
The quest would require more than one person. To spelunk in the ancient caves of mole, Redzepi had called together a team of superfriends. You may wonder, rightly, how a chef could presume to “comprehend” the cuisine of an entire country, such as Mexico, with its regional styles that shifted in nuance from village to village. Did Redzepi turn to cookbooks? No. His process was more hands-on than that. Like the head of an intelligence agency, he selected scouts to accompany him. His cooking depended on reconnaissance. He handpicked the scouts based on their aptitude for flavor location. Like Lord Baltimore, the Native American tracker in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid who leads the search posse by recognizing patterns in hoofprints, cracked underbrush, threads of human scent, swirls of dust, and faint echoes of neighing in the canyon air, the Noma Avengers seemed to have highly honed antennae. They did not qualify, across the board, as experts on Mexican food. In fact, they seemed to have been chosen so that there was a sort of counterweight between expertise and beginner’s mind. Rosio Sánchez and Santiago Lastra Rodriguez—for them, an understanding of Mexican food went all the way back to infancy. For Thomas Frebel, Mette Søberg, and Junichi Takahashi—from Germany, Denmark, and Japan, respectively—the ingredients of Mexico might as well have come from a distant moon.
Takahashi, who went by Jun and often accompanied me in the back of the van and who seemed capable of sinking into a somnambulist trance at any given moment, still couldn’t handle the sear of a hot chile on his tongue. Nothing in Japan could compare to the wallop of serious spice he’d encounter regularly on the road in Mexico.
Søberg (the quietest of the bunch) and Frebel came with a European sensibility, yes, but their creativity seemed limitless. Frebel, whose carapace of chiseled muscle masked years of his youth spent in the pursuit of hard partying, told me that when he was a boy in East Germany during the Cold War, with little in the way of luxury at anyone’s fingertips, an epiphany of flavor arrived in a box from the other side of the wall. In 1988 his mother was allowed to make a visit to West Germany, and she brought back with her a small assortment of mandarin oranges. Biting into the juicy citrus was, for Frebel, like pouring a flood of sunshine on the cinder-block gray of his East German surroundings. Was it any surprise, then, that as Noma Mexico unfolded, Frebel was often the first to greet the latest delivery of fruit from the jungles, all of it dripping with flavor?
Santiago Lastra Rodriguez was the fixer. It was up to him to lay down the groundwork before Redzepi and his fellow scouts came to town. His mission was simultaneously clear and impossible: find the best. The Best Ingredients. By any means necessary. Somewhere out there in Mexico awaited the best corn, the best epazote, the best octopus, the best escamoles, the best tiny bananas and young coconuts—Lastra Rodriguez just had to locate these delights and figure out how the Noma Mexico team could get access to them at the prime moment of ripeness and freshness. Sure. No problem.
Still in his twenties, Lastra Rodriguez had grown up in Cuernavaca, about ninety minutes south of Mexico City. Like many young chefs of his generation, he had come to a deeper understanding of cooking through the vehicle of the pop-up, that temporary mad-dash mode of food service that resembled a scavenger hunt crossed with an episode of Top Chef sponsored b
y Airbnb. Noma Mexico would be a pop-up, as had been its antecedents in Japan and Australia, but the Noma throwdowns had the depth of graduate dissertations compared to the average pop-up. Lastra Rodriguez liked to land in a place where tacos (and Mexican dishes in general) were exceedingly rare—Sweden, Italy, Taiwan, England, Russia—and find a way to cook them with the available ingredients. “It’s a good way of exploring your culture,” he told me. “You really miss that flavor. If you go to Russia, there are three hundred Mexicans in the whole country. No one knows what it is. When you see Mexican restaurants there, you don’t want to go.” For tortillas in Russia, he had relied on Armenian lavash. “Russia’s very weird because they don’t import anything,” he said. In Moscow he had roasted shrimp with chipotle cream and stuffed it into the lavash with sauerkraut. That was the closest he could get.
If there were taco amateurs and acolytes here in the van winding around Mexico, Lastra Rodriguez could be counted among the latter. He was a student of the sauce dynamics and the counterpoints of texture and temperature that could make a taco sink or soar. Perhaps more important, his skill at navigating foreign marketplaces suggested that he had mastered the necessary hustle of finding the Best Ingredients regardless of obstacles. If the man had managed to make something close to tacos in Moscow, imagine what he could achieve in his home country.
“You see that billboard up there?” Redzepi said. “Straight ahead?”
The van was pulling into Zimatlán de Alvarez, a city near Oaxaca, and perched above the squat buildings with beaming maternal majesty was a photo of the chef Juana Amaya Hernandez, into whose orbit we were about to enter. All across Mexico there were young chefs bringing innovative twists and turns to the mysteries of mole, but if you wanted to journey into the depths of mole tradition, you would find no better a Virgil than Juana Amaya Hernandez. This was evident as soon as Redzepi and his posse stepped into the courtyard of Mi Tierra Linda, her restaurant and school in Zimatlán, where what she had set out for us looked like a museum devoted to the evolution of the chile.
“Wow,” Redzepi said. “They’re ready.” Under a balcony, wood fires crackled in preparation for the parade of pots and pans that would, in intricate sequences of steps, usher us a bit closer to mole enlightenment. But the centerpiece of the display was a long wooden table with chiles of all colors and shapes laid out and labeled. Chile ancho and chile guajillo, chile de agua and chile chilcostle and chile onza—“This chile onza I’ve never heard of,” Redzepi said—and chile chiltepe and chile solterito. Hernandez smiled sagely as Redzepi surveyed the smorgasbord of sweetness and heat.
Redzepi picked up a fruit called nanche and recognized it. “These need to be pickled, right?” he said. The discussion turned to escamoles, the white silky ant eggs harvested for a few days each spring. “It’s like caviar for us,” Hernandez said, with Lastra Rodriguez translating. The fact-finding mission seemed to be unfolding immediately. Redzepi was feeling ill, but he managed to mask that. I had never seen Redzepi sick in Mexico, but when I looked at him here in the courtyard in Zimatlán, I could tell. His skin had a greenish pallor. His energy had slowed, slurred—as if he were a wind-up soldier click-clacking to the end of its mechanical march. His face suggested that he had drunk too much of a liqueur called jaundice. He teetered, trying to hide his intestinal distress from his troops, but when he dashed away to the loo at Mi Tierra Linda for perhaps the seventh time, I knew something was up. Or down. (The reflexive ugly-American wisecrack about Mexico has always been “don’t drink the water.” It’s a phrase that, like pearl-clutching warnings about “bad neighborhoods,” tends to tell you more about the xenophobia of the person warning you than anything you need to be anxious about. I did not get sick in Mexico. I ate a lot of fruit and brushed my teeth with faucet water and never suffered anything more than a gentle loosening of the internal caverns.)
“I’m a little queasy,” Redzepi told me.
Pain was shooting all the way into his joints. He was getting chills. His forehead had the clammy stickiness of the back side of Scotch tape. It was not an auspicious start to one of his research trips through Mexico with the team, and it was not the ideal condition in which to consume six or seven varieties of mole. He persisted anyway. Whenever he found himself in a situation like this one, with a respected expert at hand, he became like a five-year-old boy who can’t stop repeating the question: What’s that? What’s that? What’s that? You could almost watch the facts taking up residence in the absorptive encyclopedia of his brain. There were at least two hundred moles in the Oaxaca area. The wood being used to heat up the comal was encino, or live oak. The frothy, porridge-like brew—it’s called atole, and it was made with maize. “This is for breakfast?” he asked. “It’s delicious. When you have it with the cold foam on top, it’s like eating at El Bulli.”
He took another sip. “But this is better,” he said.
Redzepi had learned that the drink was pre-Hispanic; it was an echo of the era before the arrival of the conquistadors.
“What’s that flavor? What is that flavor?”
Redzepi kept saying this to his team. He wanted to narrow it down. He wanted to eat a tortilla with nothing but salt so that he could follow its melody of flavor without interference. There it was—the chalky whisper of limestone, a residue of nixtamalization. “But it makes it more juicy,” he observed.
He passed around an herb, a leaf. It looked like a fan held by a duchess enduring a heat wave. “Smell it,” he said. “The hoja santa here…” Hernandez was serving a breakfast of beguiling simplicity: two tortillas with an egg in between them and a floppy green leaf of hoja santa. She pinched it closed like a dumpling.
“Do you like it?” she asked Redzepi.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m learning. The leaves here are so powerful. The leaves here are very, very strong.” He reached for a little ball of mozzarella-ish white cheese. “This is delicious. It has a little bit of the ferment, but that’s nice.”
There were conversations about the ubiquity of lard in this region—“You can feel in the cuisine of Oaxaca the fat of the pork—a lot, a lot,” Lastra Rodriguez said—and the Olmecan domestication of cacao, how the ancient priests used a cacao-chile brew as a ritual beverage. People from the Noma team took turns trying to puff up tortillas on the comal and grinding chocolate with the molcajete.
But…how would all these conversations and meals manifest themselves on a menu? “We have no clue yet,” Redzepi said. “We are just absorbing everything.”
There were more than flavors to absorb. There were sights, experiences, jolts to the system. Two days ago, north of Mexico City, they’d watched a lamb slaughtered for barbacoa. Days later they’d witnessed a volcano, Popocatépetl, casually exhaling puffs of smoke like a fat professor with a pipe. As we traveled along, we’d turn a corner and see a newlywed couple marching up a hill accompanied by a brass band. Now we piled into the back of a pickup truck and headed for some fields. The truck slowed down eventually, and we clambered out to survey stalks of sugarcane. A farmer waved his machete and cut some down.
“Sugarcane?” Redzepi said. “What’s the season for sugarcane?”
“Right now,” Lastra Rodriguez said.
“Have you ever been to Okinawa?” Junichi Takahashi asked me. “They have this—sugarcane.” A chopped shaft of cane was passed around in case anyone wanted to gnaw on it. “Everybody’s chewing on wood,” Redzepi said. Then he spied something else. “Guys, that’s wild lemongrass here.” It was overwhelming how much there was to learn. The history, the people. “Without that, you make food that’s soulless,” Lastra Rodriguez said. How the milpas, the traditional farms, had a trinity: corn, beans, and squash, all three of which worked together to nourish the soil and prevent moisture from wicking away in the dry air. There was the way the names of the chiles changed when they were dried and when they were pickled. There was the awareness of ingredients hiding wit
hin other ingredients, like the pixtle that came from inside the seeds of the mamey fruit and that played a role in the creation of tejate, the pre-Columbian quaff that Redzepi had drunk in the markets of Oaxaca. There were the detours of what-if speculation that took on the form of a jazz improvisation whenever a new flavor presented itself. This little yellow-orange bulb—what was it? Nispero, they were told—the Spanish word for loquat.
“How do you spell this?” Redzepi said, taking a nibble. “Nispero. This is an amazing fruit.” It was sour, like a kumquat, and it had somehow made the journey from China to Mexico. “And you only eat the fruit? You don’t eat the leaves?”
Thomas Frebel chimed in. “At one of those fancy restaurants in Oaxaca, do you think they have a dehydrator? Take the seed out. Dry it. It’d be the best raisin in the world.”
* * *
—
All the fruits, all the chiles, all the nuts, all the herbs.
You could come to a knowledge of them individually, but even to brush up against the surface of the identity of Mexico, even to pretend to get it, you’d have to make mole. It all came back to mole. Lightning wouldn’t even threaten to strike unless the everythingness of mole could be meditated upon. Redzepi wasn’t there yet. He was inching closer. He was like a monk sitting and waiting for enlightenment. On the preceding night the team had gone to bask in the presence of Celia Florian, another master of traditional moles. They had sampled eight of them—seven mother moles, the foundational pillars, as well as an insect mole with a formic base of chicatana ants. “Green mole to black mole to everything in between,” Redzepi said, a trace of weariness in his voice—maybe the stomach bug was lurching back with force. There was a sense that the consumption of these moles had been inconclusive, ornamental—like looking at a vintage Mustang without having the opportunity to take it for a spin. “We have some ideas,” he said. “Of course we will.” We will make our own. This is where Juana Amaya Hernandez stepped in—proudly and forcefully. “Everything that you want to know”—she made it clear to Redzepi in Spanish—“I know.”
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