Eating in restaurants in Oaxaca dilutes the chances of enjoying the best rate

True Oaxacan food remains a mystery to most visitors to Oaxaca City and its central valleys. Most hotel managers, tour guides, and others in the business have a preconceived idea of ​​what tourists want when they come to Oaxaca for culinary indulgence. And reasonably, since visitors to the city arrive with their guidebook restaurant lists, including the likes of Casa Oaxaca, Los Danzantes, La Catrina de Alcalá, La Biznaga, and La Olla; and they systematically cross each one off the list over the course of their vacation.

But ask any chef in Oaxaca what he likes to eat, or where, and pesos para pozole will tell you about a roadside restaurant, a country comadre, or a restaurant down the block from his own establishment. A colleague’s fancy downtown restaurant usually doesn’t measure up.

It is not really a fraud on foodies that is being perpetrated, but rather a hoax, partly unintentional.

Realization gradually came to this writer in three ways:

• after several gastronomic experiences with a chef friend in Oaxaca;

• within the framework of organizing a gastronomic tour for fans and critics of Mexican food, and;

• sit at a table with five Oaxacan couples at a monthly gathering for dinner, drinks and conversation.

A Chef’s Guide to Indulging in Oaxaca

The Oaxacan chef occasionally dines at the aforementioned restaurants in downtown Oaxaca. But it’s the roadside restaurant an hour’s drive from Oaxaca, El Tigre, with no fanfare (not even electricity), that tickles your palate: the freshest food possible (El Tigre doesn’t know organic or farm-yard, because that’s all there is), on firewood. Each dish is prepared at the moment, even sauces and tortillas.

Another favorite spot, El Caminito al Cielo, is a small restaurant one block away, of all places, from the largest cemetery in the city. And a third, specialized in the cuisine of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, is on the outskirts. How often does someone in the tourism industry (except this writer) recommend leaving the quiet and familiarity of the city center for lunch or dinner at the cemetery?

Oaxaca Gastronomic Tour

The Oaxaca Food Tour was designed to give participants a foundation in the richness and cultural diversity of the central valleys of Oaxaca, with a focus on lunch and dinner. The restaurants included four of the five notable “hardcores,” which in theory represent the best of Oaxacan cuisine. But as might have been predicted, the quality of service and fare at a couple of the restaurants was not exceptional. The service is often provided by waiters and even cooks with no vested interest, and the food is often institutional. No matter how high-end the cuisine, it often doesn’t truly reflect the food that has given the state of Oaxaca its reputation for gastronomic greatness.

The tour was a success and there were no significant disappointments in the restaurants. But most of the praise went to the non-tourist experiences that the organizers wanted to highlight, two of which are noteworthy.

Lunch with a rural family on their farm took center stage, the food materializing over open flames, as has been the family custom for generations. The welcome was warm, the air of informality struck, and everyone had a chance to collaborate. Sopa de guías, beans, beef jerky, aguas frescas and a traditional dessert – a typical Oaxacan meal, with a Oaxacan family.

A unique restaurant, Caldo de Piedra, provided another primal yet exceptional gastronomic indulgence. It reproduced the practice of pre-Hispanic hunters and gatherers who cooked freshly picked herbs and vegetables along with the loot from the hunt, on the spot, in the pot. In the palapa-roofed restaurant, diners watched as an herbed tomato broth was served in half gourds, snapper or shrimp was added, and then red-hot stones were carefully placed in each individual receptacle, making the meals will be poached before your eyes.

Oaxacans cooking for themselves and their friends produces pure magic

Each month, a group of friends gather at a couple’s home on a rotating basis for a fabulous meal prepared by each couple, 1960s style, but without Bob or Carol, Ted or Alice. Although the concept is dated, trying the best food based on traditional recipes passed down from generation to generation is second to none.

The opportunity to experience homemade dishes eludes most, if not all, travelers to Oaxaca. This is the food from which the modern recipes of Chef Pilar of La Olla, Chef Alejandro Ruiz of Casa Oaxaca and Chef Juan Carlos before La Catrina have emanated.

fly in the ointment

But Oaxaca’s modern chefs take the history and diversity of the state’s cuisine to new levels. His cooking reaches an extreme, a point in time, along a continuum of constant progress. And so, new faces are forced to continue forging unknown ground in the Oaxacan culinary scene. In fact, its restaurants should continue to be frequented by residents and tourists alike, for this reason alone.

Oaxacan natives will continue to appreciate both the humble roots and the Spanish influence of contemporary Oaxacan food. The region’s culinary development is part of its heritage, as the couples around that table boast each month with every bite. It is the visitor from Oaxaca who is likely to lose out.

Continue enjoying the restaurants in Oaxaca praised by guides and critics. But take any opportunity to attend a party, accept an invitation to dine at the home of a Oaxacan native, or go wherever the locals are dining.

Epilogue

In 1969, a young Canadian hippie, hungry for experience, knocked on the door of a rural house, intrigued by the smoke coming from inside a thatched-roof dwelling. They invited him in and he tasted his first handmade tortilla along with beans and salsa, and nothing else. Decades later the memory lives on.