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“Californios: San Francisco at the Frontier of a Mexican Food Movement” — from the April 2020 (San Francisco) issue of Drift Magazine

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.” 

Is 2018 the Year of the Mini-Album?

Published on Bluntiq.com: http://bluntiq.com/2018/04/05/is-2018-the-year-of-the-mini-album/

A week ago, The Weeknd released ‘My Dear Melancholoy,’ a six-song EP that was received with as much hype and excitement as some of his recent albums. The EP totaled a playtime of twenty-one minutes, a tiny piece of work by The Weeknd’s own standards. ‘Kiss Land,’ released in 2013, included only ten songs but ran for fifty-five minutes. Not only was ‘My Dear Melancholy’ The Weeknd’s first official EP release, but it also includes the shortest and most compact package of songs in his discography.

Two weeks before that EP was released, XXXTENTACION debuted ‘?,’ which clocked in at only thirty-seven minutes despite featuring 18 songs. Unlike The Weeknd’s EP, this release was not out of character for XXXTENTACION, as his 2017 ’17’ included eleven songs but only carried twenty-two minutes of music, a relatively minuscule project that was still labelled an album.

2017 seemed to hint at a movement towards shorter projects. Two of the most anticipated joint releases of the year, ‘Super Slimey’ and ‘Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho’ totaled forty minutes and forty one minutes, respectively. Going further back, this trend seems to have grown out of the increase in collaborative mixtures. 21 Savage and Metro Boomin’ combined to produce the thirty-two minute ‘Savage Mode’ in 2016, while Drake and Future’s 2015 ‘What A Time To Be Alive’ included forty minutes of music.

But now, short albums are becoming the domain of individual artists, not just the product of partnerships, as illustrated by the work of The Weeknd and XXXTENTACION. As 2018 continues and we await releases from Cardi B, Flatbush Zombies, Schoolboy Q, Travis Scott, and maybe even Drake, it will be important to notice who is releasing shorter projects and to understand why that might be the case.

Are artists unable to carry an album with over an hour of music? Are they shying away from feature-heavy releases and thus producing shorter songs? Or is this a conscious decision to create shorter songs and shorter albums that will appeal to a young listening audience that might prefer to consume music in half-hour sessions?

The answer might be a combination of all three, but it seems most likely that artists are making a commercial decision to release shorter albums. Certainly, The Weekend and XXXTENTACION are not artists who make music thoughtlessly and without a great deal of intentionality. The Weekend is a massive global superstar, so surely each of his decisions is carefully managed to ensure commercial success and to create as much buzz and attention as possible. Of course, XXX is not on nearly the same level of stardom as the Toronto singer, but if his decision to include instructions for listening on the first track of the album, a track titled “Introduction (instructions)” indicates anything, it is that the artist has certainly considered how he wants his music to be heard and the type of experience that he wants to create for listeners.

Not only do these decisions seem to be calculated, but they are paying off creatively. ‘?’ in particular is an instructive example of the potential benefits of releasing a boiled-down collection of songs. The blend of metal rap, emo rap, rock, and even Latin music that XXXTENTACION includes on the album is a risky mix, and there are undoubtedly sounds that he will discard as he continues to grow. Tracks like “Floor 555,” “Pain = BESTFRIEND,” and “I don’t even speak Spanish lol” are sure to divide opinion and would normally alienate many listeners.

But on an album of only thirty-seven minutes, listeners are more likely to endure short tracks that they don’t enjoy when they know the album’s potential hits are only one track away rather than three tracks and twelve minutes away. The best, or at least most popular, songs like “Moonlight,” “SAD!,” and “going down!” appear next to each other or just a couple of minutes apart, making for an easier listening experience that earns the artist some leeway with if a couple tracks fail to hit.

The Weeknd’s ‘My Dear Melancholy’ is far more mainstream and far less risky than ‘?,’ but the decision to release such a short EP all but guarantees that fans will stick around for all six songs rather than bouncing around the release. In this strange way, making a shorter album allows an artist like XXXTENTACION to get away with more musical risks, as listeners can commit themselves to a half hour of listening time rather than an hour or longer.

What would a cut-down, forty minute Drake album sound like? What if Travis Scott gives us only his best thirty minutes for ‘Astroworld’? If the trends we’ve seen in 2017 and early 2018 hold, we might have the answers to those questions soon.

BlocBoy JB Releases “Rover 2.0”

After “Look Alive” and its Drake feature racked up over one hundred million listens on Spotify, BlocBoy JB has released a follow-up featuring 21 Savage. “Rover 2.0” showcases a sound that is very similar to “Look Alive,” but this time JB himself occupies the first two minutes of the track rather than allowing 21 to steal the song. With back-to-back releases featuring verses from bigger-name stars, it will be interesting to see whether BlocBoy JB builds on the buzz generated by “Look Alive” and “Rover 2.0” with more feature-heavy releases or if his next songs will be all his own.

4 Must-Hear Tracks from YFN Lucci’s ‘Ray Ray from Summerhill’ (for bluntiq.com)

http://bluntiq.com/2018/03/19/4-must-hear-tracks-from-yfn-luccis-ray-ray-from-summerhill/

YFN Lucci might not be the most widely-known name in rap at the moment, but his music has been nearly ubiquitous recently. From “Key to the Streets” to “Everyday We Lit” and “Boss Life”, Lucci has produced several catchy hits that are recognizable even if the artist behind them is less so. But the Atlanta-born rapper has also been highly prolific in the last year, releasing an EP and three mixtapes since the beginning of 2017, the most popular being the most recent Wish Me Well 2. Last week, Warner Brothers released his debut album Ray Ray from Summer Hill . If you’re only familiar with Lucci’s work on “Everyday We Lit” and “Boss Life”, here are four worthwhile songs from his rookie release that showcase a surprising range for a debut album.

1. Too Much

YFN Lucci is at his best when his finds the middle ground between the slow, hyper-auto-tuned rut he sometimes falls into and  tracks that lack his signature blend of singing and rapping. “Too Much” finds a comfortable middle ground that is Lucci’s sonic sweet spot. He also selects the perfect feature for this type of track in Wale, who we haven’t heard from enough recently.

2. The King

If you’re here for the hits, this is the song for you. The King has a pace and sound that’s reminiscent of Boss Life, but it’s a track without features, which is a risky decision for Lucci to make with one of the best beats on the album. Yet the track is solid, and though it’s under three minutes, he is able to carry it alone. There is a crowd-pleasing balance of his sing-song signature tone and more traditional verses, and if there’s anything on this album with the potential to blow up, it is this song.

3. Street Kings

It’s a Meek Mill feature in 2018. Who knows how many of those we will hear? A must-listen for that alone.

4. When I’m Gone

Like “Too Much,” this song is just a good fit for YFN Lucci’s voice. The lyrical content isn’t anything special, which goes for the rest of the album as well, but it’s an enjoyable listen nonetheless. It’s the eighteenth of twenty songs on the album, but it feels like a natural bookend in that it points to Lucci’s strength, making music that is uncomplicated and enjoyable, and weakness, which is a lack of differentiation from other artists with the same sing-song sound. If YFN Lucci can build on this very listenable foundation while carving out a more personal sound, Ray Ray from Summerhill might be remembered as the debut of another Atlanta artist on the rise.