From Mexico City to Michelin Stars

Chef Enrique Olvera’s Latest Cookbook

By Anthea Gerrie | Photography by Araceli Paz

He fed me ants in Mexico City, grasshoppers in London, and some very particular corn husks in Los Angeles. But I never expected Mexico’s first two-Michelin-starred chef and patron of its most internationally awarded restaurant to so proudly dish up a perfect taco.

But here was Enrique Olvera, five thousand miles from his Mexico City flagship restaurant Pujol, at El Pastor, the UK’s most authentic Mexican restaurant, serving wonderful Sinaloa cod tacos to enthusiastic diners who had sold out the tables for his one-night takeover.

It turned out, when we had the chance to sit down for our first chat in a decade, that tacos are closer to the heart of the godfather of modern Mexican cooking than I ever realized. And now, in his latest book, he has made it his mission to teach the rest of us how to properly prepare this essential staple of his native cuisine.

“I have always loved tacos, but it took me more than a decade after opening Pujol to start experimenting, taking a deep dive into what made the best ones great,” he admits.

Sunny Days, Taco Nights has a cover redolent of tequila sunrises and Mexican beach sunsets, a seductive motif which is intentional. “I wanted to make a cookbook people would actually use,” he explains. “I felt nobody was cooking from my first book, which was more like a catalog of Pujol dishes, so it became a necessity.”

While the authentic predominates in this colorful book, the recipes are anything but ordinary. Think, for example, Korean tacos: “We Chilangos of Mexico City embrace Korean cuisine,” Chef Olvera enthuses about Asian-flavoured pork ribs wrapped in lettuce leaves instead of tortillas. Then there are the filet mignon tacos popular in Mexican bullrings and, not for the faint-hearted, clam tostadas with chicatana ants. “It’s surf and turf, but instead of meat, we use insects,” he laughs, praising the umami quality of this homegrown “turf.”

Fine dining influences have also crept in through the avocado flautas, which were Pujol’s first nod toward the taco, an elegant dish of seasoned shrimp wrapped in sliced avocado on a bed of cilantro-infused oil, and a corn taco packed with the sea bass tataki inspired by travels in Japan and pineapple puree.

Olvera, who now presides over an international restaurant empire, has come full circle since shocking his parents by choosing the kitchen over the corridors of learning. “I was always more interested in things that I could make than things I could think of,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine wanting to be a lawyer or a doctor, and in high school, I realized cooking could be a career.”

He continues, “After a few months, my parents accepted the idea. My dad said, ‘You can do whatever you want, but I want you to have a bachelor’s degree.’” He ended up at the Culinary Institute of America, one of the few cooking schools with a bachelor’s program. “There were two thousand other crazy people like me, and it was a great experience. It was peak time for fine dining in New York, with Thomas Keller and all these other great names. But no one at the school was there with a view to being a famous chef; we were just there because we loved cooking.”

Despite being raised on steak-and-potato dinners in a home where Mexican food was seen mainly as a treat to eat out at a market, it did not take Olvera long to realize that the USA was not where his future lay. “I stayed for only four months in the Chicago restaurant I worked at after graduation. I missed Mexico and my friends, and after four years, I was ready to go back.”

He recalls, “A friend of my father’s wanted to open a restaurant with me, but it didn’t happen because he miscalculated how much money was needed. I was looking for my own place when another friend of my dad’s wanted to partner in a huge space. I said, ‘I’m twenty-four, I can’t run a restaurant that big,’ so we found a smaller location and opened Pujol in 2000.”

The original offering harnessed high-class western ingredients, such as foie gras and lobster. “But it turned out that even in upscale Polanco, people didn’t want seafood with beurre blanc; they wanted tacos, and all the taquerias were packed,” Olvera says. “There was one Mexican fine dining chef, but he was a crazy man, and his restaurant closed down; the other fine dining restaurants were franchises, like Maxim’s. Pujol evolved with a lot of mistakes, but in our fourth year we started to understand what our clients wanted: Mexican ingredients and Mexican technique, refined and polished.”

The native fare Olvera served in his original tiny, dark, rustic room was always innovative, with a famous appetizer of baby corn on the cob served with a mayo seasoned with coffee, chili, and those chicatana ants. Thanks to its elegant service and unexpected treats for the palate, Pujol put Mexico on the map as an international dining destination.

The restaurant made it onto the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2011, the year the awards were launched, and became a fixture, ranking fifth in the world in 2022. Meanwhile, the Casamata empire, whose success Pujol founded, has grown to include wildly popular eateries in Los Angeles and New York as well as throughout Mexico.

As the most visible of awarded Latin American chefs in the decade before Michelin sent its inspectors to Mexico, Olvera traveled widely, gaining inspiration—but then sharply edited his ideas. “All those trips helped me to find my own style of cooking. The more I traveled, the more I realized I needed to stop doing what everyone else was doing in the fine dining world. It made no sense in Mexico, where we have our own strong culinary tradition.”

The new Pujol expanded from the tiny room with just forty-eight covers into a nearby former kitchen showroom, by which time Olvera had already opened his New York flagship, Cosme, as well as a popular string of sandwich shops in five Mexican locations. The highly acclaimed Damian was designed to be a West Coast twin of the sophisticated Cosme, and draws visitors to its almost hidden warehouse on the edge of LA’s Arts District, close to his casual taqueria, Ditroit.

But Olvera particularly loves his New York taqueria, which properly showcases the ancient varieties of corn that have been Mexico’s agricultural heritage for centuries, and he scrupulously nixtamalizes them (the lime-washing technique essential for an authentic tortilla) and grinds them in his own mill. “We’re interested in the taste of the corn itself, so we only make tortillas with corn from the region whose cuisine we’re showcasing,” he explains. “We normally use three varietals at the same time.” Although he once eschewed flour tortillas, he specifies them for the Sinaloa cod taco featured in the cookbook, “because the northern states of Mexico have wheat instead of corn because of the climate, and they make super flour tortillas, while in Jalisco they make a beautiful tortilla by combining wheat and corn together.”

Perhaps the one recipe that best sums up Olvera’s multi-faceted approach to cooking is a simple taco of green beans wrapped with a perfectly poached egg yolk. It started as a childhood memory: “My mother used to make scrambled eggs with green beans, which we piled onto a tortilla at home.” This dish was elevated to what could be considered a preposterously fancy version at Pujol, with “haricots verts paired with Hollandaise sauce,” before being simplified for the new book, but Olvera makes no apologies for the Frenchified version he enjoyed creating. “I’m not making a case that Hollandaise will ever be Mexican, but I think we can be playful as well as serious, and a taco is the most playful vehicle we have in the kitchen.”

— V —

---

Sunny Days, Taco Nights is published by Phaidon. It is now available for purchase! Visit Phaidon.com to learn more or follow Chef Enrique Olvera on Instagram @enriqueolveraf.