The challenge was part Iron Chef, part Survivor: Shop for an hour and fifteen minutes in a Mexican market you’ve never seen, creating the idea for a show-stopping dish as you go… to serve thirty-five. Cook in six arbitrarily chosen teams of three (a culinary leader—most were sous chefs—plus a restaurant manager and a waiter)… in an unfamiliar kitchen at the slowing elevation of 6,000 feet. Use only one cutting board and one burner. Complete the dish in under two hours.

Tlaxcala, Mexico. At 6:30 p.m. on July 3, 2001, in the teaching kitchen of food anthropologist and long-time friend Yolanda Ramos, the two-hour count-down toward dinner began.

The teams of Frontera/ Topolobampo staff scrambled to secure their ingredients from the ice chests and jute bags we’d filled earlier in the day. Fresh Gulf snapper, crab and shrimp, velvety thick crema with nutty tang, pale pink pork loin, freshly-dressed rabbits, an embarrassment of vegetable riches (from tender, milky fresh field corn to wild malva greens and squash blossoms), aromatic fresh lychees and sugary field-ripened pineapples. And perhaps the most special ingredients of them all: some 20 pounds of wild mushrooms collected with a local university mycologist the day before

To call the scene that ensued a perfectly choreographed culinary ballet, a flurry of precise chopping, sautéing, grilling and poaching, punctuated by inspired moments of masterful seasoning—well, that would be stretching it. In some ways, we’d created a microcosm of our restaurant in this foreign land, fitted it neatly into a pressure cooker, snapped the lid on tightly and set it over high heat. Within moments, there were the same struggles for space we have in our restaurant kitchens, the same edginess any cook feels when the spoon or herb or salt has been moved, the same personalities being rubbed raw (or rubbing others raw). The same swallowing of emotion all of us in the business feel from time to time when restaurant guests are about to arrive with higher-than-high expectations, preparations still have to be finished, and there’s just no time before “show time” to sit down and talk out what’s bothering you.

Some contend that under pressure, true creativity shows itself. Though there’s no way to turn words into flavor (many of these dishes did, however, appear on Topolobampo’s August menu), I think you’ll get a hint of the magic we created as you read this spontaneous (and, from an Iron Chef perspective, victorious) menu.

• Fresh field corn soup with lemongrass, bacon and crispy tortillas
  
  
• Fresh Gulf shrimp and linguini with slow-cooked garlic, vine-ripe tomatoes, dried serranos, basil and mint
  
  
• Gulf snapper with creamy crab filling poached in epazote-mushroom cream with wild greens
  
  
• Grilled porkloin with roasted tomatillo-cilantro sauce, red-skin potatoes and grilled calabacitas
  
  
• Pan-seared rabbit braised in pulque with roasted poblanos, chilacayota and squash blossoms
  
  
• Tropical shortcake with fresh lychees, field-ripened pineapple, Manila mango and strawberry-plantain ice cream