By MARK BITTMAN
It was bound to happen: contemporary, creative, smart no-name food made by an American of Mexican extraction in Mexico. Jair Téllez’s restaurant in Mexico City, MeroToro — “mero” is grouper, “toro” is bull; it’s a made-up word, kind of a play on surf ’n’ turf — would be equally at home in L.A. or in New York, which goes to show just how “American” its neighborhood, Condesa, feels. (Condesa’s gentrification has paralleled that of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, though it is a naturally more beautiful place.)
Immigration patterns and income levels aside, the United States may soon have more in common with Mexico than with Canada, and in any case the food is clearly better to the south. In fact, of the handful of countries that retain magnificent, nearly unsullied regional cuisines, Mexico ranks near the top. But Téllez is not doing much indigenous cuisine at MeroToro; rather, he’s doing American-influenced cuisine with local ingredients, and he’s doing it beautifully.
He’s doing it honestly too — he was a border kid. Born in northern Mexico (several hours south of Tucson), he was raised some in the States and some in Tijuana (“I ate sushi before I ate mole,” he says), trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York and then worked in New York, Mexico City and San Francisco, doing “mostly” French food before deciding “I wanted to find my geography and made the improbable choice of coming back to Mexico.”
He landed in Baja, in a village called Valle de Guadalupe, about 20 miles north of Ensenada. “We built a restaurant on a piece of land in the middle of nowhere,” Téllez told me. The idea was hyper-local food and wine. The restaurant grows most of its own vegetables and makes wine, and the menu changes every day. But although he’s still involved in it, like many chefs, he needed to prove himself in the big city. “I’m not the kind of guy who is going to spend his whole life defending a piece of land,” he said.
He is, however, the kind of guy who knows a good situation when he sees it, and Mexico City is rich in ingredients in very much the same way Madrid is. It’s centrally located, surrounded by millions of acres of productive land and close enough to the Pacific, Caribbean and gulf coasts (in Madrid, obviously, it’s the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Bay of Biscay) so that, on a daily basis, MeroToro’s kitchen has a mind-blowing array of gorgeous fish — camarónes (big shrimp), percebes (gooseneck barnacles), mussels, fin fish (some alive) and fresh land animals. (A whole pig was being carried in the morning I arrived to cook.)
In the food, you can plainly see the tension between what’s Mexican and what’s not, but describing it is not so easy. In theory, it’s the cocina of Baja California, but even Téllez says that’s the “advice of the marketing people.” Clearly, it’s personal cuisine and comes from a deliberate process from an inspired and, for his age (he just turned 40), experienced chef.
Crisp blood sausage with octopus is unexpected and magnificent in both flavor and texture, but the dish that really put me over the edge is a kind of risotto (which it’s not, really) whose flavor was mysterious beyond belief. It turns out it comes from a combination of winter squash and shrimp essence, and it was as delicious a “new” rice dish as I’ve had in years. That’s the dish that convinced me that I wanted to cook with this guy, and the day I visited him, I remembered this fine, complex (and not, frankly, uncomplicated) ceviche and the ultrasimple scallop salad. I don’t care what you call this food: Pan-American, Amerexican or what — it’s super.
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