Rick Bayless is chef of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo in Chicago, creator of Frontera gourmet foods, cookbook author and host of Mexico - One Plate at a Time.
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Hello, El Canelo!Our group drove out from the look-at-me stateliness of colonial downtown Guadalajara to where the busy road became just two lanes. It was a constant blur of tire repair shops, car dealers and make-shift little eateries. El Canelo, tucked off to the right, at first seemed to me an unremarkable destination as we pulled into its large, mostly unpaved parking area. Meandering into this expansive-roofed, open-sided restaurant, we found a big brick cooking pit the size of a Honda Civic. Stuck around the perimeter of its sandy soil bottom were iron stakes – probably 40 of them total – skewering primal cuts of locally raised suckling lamb and pig, goat, quail, chicken, tongue, and on and on. As I watched the stakesful of meat leaning casually toward the massive oak fire in the center, their contents roasting slowly, I was struck by the earthiness and honesty of real Mexican cooking. It’s food that’s a genuine expression of the people, of the land. Thousands of miles from that inspiration, we strive to capture a bit of that same immediacy at Frontera/Topolo. We get lamb, for example, from Janie Crawford in Wisconsin, vegetables from the Polleys in Plainfield, lettuce from Diane and Jared in Mineral Pointe – all with the goal of weaving together flavors as uniquely of our land as El Canelo’s is of theirs. (Excerpted from Rick Bayless’s longer piece on the restaurant’s yearly staff trip to Mexico, this year to the state of Jalisco. Look for more installments about life in Tequila country – Jalisco’s production of Mexico’s best tequilas has earned it that moniker – complete with descriptions of rustic distillery visits, classic dishes from the 70-year-old cook of the famed Herradura Tequila family, homemade pozole at a taxi-driver’s house, mariachis and more.) RB
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About Rick Bayless |
