Tradition and Technique

Chef Roberto Santibañez Leads with Creativity

By Anthea Gerrie | Photography courtesy of Fonda Restaurant

He may be the only proprietor of a Mexican restaurant with a diploma from the world-famous Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, a place of rigorous techniques a world away from the typical comedor kitchen where intuitive knowledge, rather than weighing and measuring, is considered the route to the best results. Indeed, the only one. “However in vogue Mexican food has become, there are no systems,” sighs Chef Roberto Santibañez of the astonishing fact that there is no academy of Mexican cooking in Mexico.

Like his countrymen winning awards far beyond their borders, Santibañez, who has three Mexican restaurants in New York City and three more in Washington DC, learned the basics at home. “I was raised by a family of gluttons,” he says, “who thought and talked constantly about food. It was an extended family who had breakfasts, lunches, and dinners together, and fortunately, they were very good cooks.”

One of his grandmothers came from Oaxaca and the other from Veracruz—“the best cook of all,” he says. He also remembers how his parents constantly packed him up to travel the country with them in search of regional delights. “My father would want to go to one state to taste some specialty someone had told him about and then another; we went all over the country to eat. There was a special beach outside Acapulco where someone would cook pescado a la talla—fish sliced open and spread with red adobo on one side and green adobo on the other. We would head south to eat that dish, head north to Monterrey or Saltillo for cabrito, and east to the Yucatan to eat cochinita pibil and relleno negro in Merida.”

In 1986, when his stepfather was commissioned to design a museum in Paris, Santibañez and his mother, an anthropologist and art historian, moved to join him for a couple of years, opening up the chance for the eighteen-year-old (whose best friend in Mexico City was French) to pursue formal training in the cooking career he had set his heart on. The school was not receptive to modern shortcuts. “Food processors were coming in, but we had no machines—we had to learn to do everything by hand.”

But even as he was acquiring the skills to become a French fine dining chef while living in the swanky Wagram neighborhood of Paris, the young expat could not get the flavors of home out of his head. “I missed my grandma’s tamales, the tacos I enjoyed with my high school friends, the salsa that used to be on the table every day; we never had plain eggs in Mexico! It was always exciting when someone from the embassy occasionally brought us a taste of home.”

After returning to Mexico City with his two-year diploma from Le Cordon Bleu, Santibañez founded three critically acclaimed restaurants in spite of his unorthodox kitchen being considered “scandalous.” He says, “I’d mix fresh green and dried chiles in the same sauce or fill vol au vents—very French—with huitlacoche (corn fungus)—very Mexican—in a cream sauce. But eventually, the Mexican took over.” The exception to his never-ending love affair with Mexican food is The Grill, his American restaurant in Washington DC: “We make a great burger!” DC is also home to three branches of his Mi Vida restaurant, celebrating Mexican culture and evolution.

We are always Mexican, but we are also contemporary

The legendary restaurateur Josefina Howard brought Santibañez to New York in 1996 to join her kitchen at Rosa Mexicano. “It was the first Mexican restaurant to open here with tablecloths, copper underplates, and linen napkins—an institution.” He rose to become Rosa’s culinary director. Still, he left in 2008, tired of overseeing what had become a nationwide behemoth with eighteen branches, and the following year, he branched out on his own with Fonda in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It is a success story that has spawned two more branches in Manhattan’s Chelsea and Tribeca neighborhoods. We are chatting in the former, which fields a real party vibe with its busy bar, eye-popping art, and thumping music.

The music may not be folksy, but the menu is strong on rigorously authentic dishes like possibly the world’s best tortilla soup and a mole negro from Oaxaca, both made “religiously to tradition.” Given his creativity, there are also highly original dishes like duck in creamy habanero sauce. “We are always Mexican, but we are also contemporary,” the chef says.

Santibañez sees it as his mission to teach as well as fire up the stove; his cookbooks seek to share knowledge with outsiders who have not had the privilege of being steeped in the kitchen traditions of their mothers and grandmothers. They detail the processes involved in making salsas, adobos, and other fundamentals, setting down the basics in a way that has never been done before, like the intricacies of roasting different varieties of chiles. His first cookbook, Rosa’s New Mexican Table, was nominated for a James Beard Award, and his second, Truly Mexican, was named one of the year’s most notable cookbooks by The New York Times.

At age sixty, Santibañez has absolutely no thoughts of retiring; with his mother still working at eighty-five and his gynecologist father having reached age ninety-five, he makes light of the rigors of long hours traveling when not supervising the stoves. “I’m very hands-on; I have to be in the kitchen. But I do look after myself when I’m not in the restaurants. I bike, run, and make a lot of time for art.” He lives with his life and business partner of thirty-three years, Marco, in New York City’s financial district. “Within a couple of blocks, we have the ocean and the Hudson River meeting at the tip of Manhattan.” He also loves collecting art for his restaurant spaces as much as for his own home. “There is a clear connection between art and food,” he says, proud of following the same creative process in dreaming up dishes that a painter would use to figure out their next subject for a piece. “Painting and cooking are both forms of creative expression that have to be cultivated,” he says, clearly still dreaming of that fish dressed with adobo forming the green, white, and red of the Mexican flag, which lit up an Acapulco beach in the vacation dinners of his childhood.

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To learn more, visit FondaRestaurant.com.