Ay Caramba! Toronto's World Class Mexican Cuisine
(Photo: Dahlia Katz)
By Mark Schatzker, Conde Nast Traveler
In the winter of 1991, a Canadian chef named Chris McDonald was cooking at a hotel in Zihuatanejo, Mexico—making a Yucatan dish called papadzules—when Diana Kennedy walked in. Diana Kennedy, for those who haven’t heard of her, is widely considered the world’s foremost eminence when it comes to Mexican cuisine. She is a recipient of the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest award the Mexican government bestows upon foreigners.
It takes a brave chef, in other words, to cook Mexican for Diana Kennedy, as McDonald found out. She took one bite of his papadzules—tortillas filled with hard boiled eggs, basically—and spat it out. The problem? The pipián (a sauce made from pounded seeds) had garlic in. Many a pipián contains garlic, but not the pipián this particular dish called for.
“It was a humiliating moment,” McDonald recalled a few days ago at his tapas restaurant Cava, in Toronto. Over the past 21 years, McDonald has not only recovered from the papadzules episode but has become one of the city’s most acclaimed chefs. And on this particular night, he was once again feeling brave enough to cook for Diana Kennedy. The occasion was the publication of Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy, Kennedy’s most recent culinary tome. Kennedy, along with a full restaurant of admirers, was presented with a trio of Oaxacan appetizers, followed by a Veracruz-style ceviche verde, and Oaxacan mole of pork and chicken. But no papadzules.
Between courses, McDonald got up and reminisced about the good ol’ days in Mexico when Kennedy would drive her beat-up pick-up truck six hours through the mountains and show up at his restaurant to talk food. “It was a little like having Wayne Gretzky drop by to play shinny,” he said. (This is how Canadians actually talk.) Afterward, Kennedy got up and described the challenge of finding a publisher for a regional Mexican cookbook of biblical thickness that contained a recipe for iguana. (Other recipes include pork spleen, cow brains, and turtle eggs.) No one wanted anything to do with it. Until the University of Texas Press stepped up, that is, at which point others suddenly wanted it. Her words were followed by roaring applause.
Back in the kitchen, I asked Kennedy to weigh in on the state of Mexican cuisine north of Mexico. “It’s getting better,” the 89-year-old pronounced, sounding almost relieved. In some areas, she admitted, Mexican food is still where Chinese and Italian food were in the ’40s and ’50s. “You know,” she said, “chop suey and chow mein or spaghetti and meat balls.” One of the biggest problems is a failure to understand the diverse, almost magical, properties of chilies, she explained. “You use them in such interesting ways. They can be a vegetable. They can be a spice. They can be stuffed or pickled.”
As though to underscore Kennedy’s point, one of McDonald’s trio of Oaxacan appetizers was jalapeños rellenos de Tuxtepec, a pickled chili stuffed with ground beef, clove, garlic, onion, almonds, and about 13 other things. It was eye-wateringly spicy, but that was it as far as heat, exploding another Mexican food cliché.
In truth, the meal didn’t taste anything like “Mexican” food. No cumin, tomato, and gooey cheese. And that, of course, is the entire point.
But did it taste good? In this hungry reporters opinion: Big Time. Especially the ceviche, which was made according to a still unpublished recipe Kennedy collected long ago.
Kennedy agreed. “The ceviche,” she told me, “was outstanding.”
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