Mexican food in the United States seems to exist in an endless state of identity crisis, a constant cycle of commercialization, bastardization, and occasional hybridization. At its worst, Mexican cuisine has been reduced to yellowy queso at Chipotle or bland fajitas on sizzling plates at any number of Tex-Mex restaurants. Closer to its best is the recent infatuation with the cooking of “authentic” Mexican food, be it the proliferation of taco trucks across the country, more formal restaurants that mimic Mexican classics, or the Instagrammable taco and burrito culture that has invaded cities like New York, Austin, and San Francisco.
But now there’s a new standard for Mexican food in America. Chefs are beginning to use locally sourced ingredients creatively to express the flavors and the sentiments of traditional Mexican cuisine without claiming authenticity. This “modern” Mexican movement features newcomers to the California-Mexican scene like Gabriela Camara’s CALA in San Francisco and Ray Garcia’s Broken Spanish in Los Angeles, which both offer adventurous takes on Mexican dishes.
Yet Californios, Val Cantu’s jewel-box restaurant in the Mission, is spearheading this movement in Mexican cuisine with a stylish 16-course menu that retains authentic flavors and a sense of tradition.
Though Cantu rejects the label “modern Mexican” in favor of “contemporary Mexican,” his restaurant embodies the movement’s commitment to imagination and local produce. The menu is seasonal, and relies heavily on local farms.“When we source ingredients, we pay attention to what’s in season. When we opened the restaurant, we always wanted it to be site-specific,” he said. This locational specificity leads to dishes that are very much Californian and incorporate timeless elements of Mexican cooking–dishes like tamales made with heirloom, yellow masa, tacos de hongos with smoked and grilled mushrooms, fall pumpkin empanadas with jicama, pepitas, and trout roe, and blood orange sorbet with passion fruit juice sourced from a farm in the Santa Cruz mountains.
Cantu’s young restaurant, opened in 2015, has already attracted high praise from The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Michelin Guide, which awarded it two stars in 2017, noting its ability to “turn your entire understanding of this nation’s cuisine on its head” and to provide an experience that feels “intimate” and “personal.” It is this sense of personality that has made Cantu’s most distinct impression on the San Francisco scene and separates his cooking from other “modern” Mexican chefs.
Cantu, who is of Mexican and Venezuelan descent, grew up in his father’s Mexican restaurant and tortilleria in Central Texas. “Our food is always a very personal expression of Mexican cuisine. It’s unique to San Francisco, uniqueto the aesthetic that we’ve developed over the past three years, unique to the flavors that I love, and unique to the flavor memories that I have,” said Cantu.
Cantu’s cooking is contemporary in its expression of personality but traditional in its mindset. His favorite ingredient is corn, followed by beans, lemons, and limes, all pulled from the canon of traditional Mexican cooking. “I don’t see myself as an avant-garde chef by any means. I feel that what I’m doing is an extension of traditional [Mexican] cooking. It just looks different. It’s plated a bit differently. It’s in a different setting, but that doesn’t mean that the food is not at its core, at its heart, traditional.”
Yet what makes Californios such a consummate example of the contemporary Mexican trend, and what makes the trend important in the restaurant world, is its stripping away of pretension and gratuitous risk-taking. Cantu prefers to focus on hospitality and comfort, which allow him to prepare food that is inventive and enjoyable if not strictly authentic. “I’m aware that our guests come in and they’re anxious. They’re anxious as to what they’re going to eat, they’re anxious as to if they’re going to have enough food, they’re anxious if it’s going to be delicious. So, hospitality that provides warmth and comfort is important to me and to the cuisine… It doesn’t have to be all shock and awe.”
For some, the U.S. has produced contemporary Mexican restaurants– Californios included–that surpass what Mexico has to offer. While that claim is premature,it does point to a rapidly-changing tableau that is altering the ways in which diners understand and judge Mexican cuisine worldwide. While Californios again received two Michelin stars in 2018, its renowned counterparts in Mexico are not reviewed by the guide, which ignores the ingenuity of restaurants like Pujol, Enrique Olvera’s street-food inspired establishment named one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2016, Quintonil, serving reinvigorated-but-familiar Mexican cuisine, and Contramar, Camara’s original seafood house. These restaurants are serving upscale and sophisticated food in a city of almost nine million people, yet it is the Mexican cuisine being produced in the U.S. that is gaining a reputation as some of the most diverse and individualistic at the highest price points.
This surge in attention, for Californios and other San Francisco restaurants has raised questions about where the best new version of Mexican cuisine resides. For Cantu, it’s a question without an answer, and one that is far too fluid to pin down. “I think the [Michelin] guide will eventually go to Mexico, but you don’t even need it. There are a lot of places that I think would have stars, probably multiple stars. There’s great cuisine in Mexico City.… (Mexico) is a beautiful country, rapidly changing and growing just like anywhere else.”
But there is no reason that chefs in the Bay Area, with access to California’s wealth of farms and ingredients, cannot bring a new respect for the broadness and diversity of fine Mexican cuisine to the U.S., despite an image that has been cheapened by typical Mexican food in America. If the nearly-immediate success of Californios is any indication, there is an important future for great Mexican cooking outside of Mexico City.
Said Cantu, “I think [Mexican cuisine] is growing. I think there will be more Mexican chefs who will rise to make more delicious food. People are definitely exploring their own culture and cuisine and going in different directions. That’s pretty awesome.”
Brian Aubrey Smith 