Bourbon country meets Mexico City at Pujol, the world-famous restaurant by Enrique Olvera.
Is it truly the world's 12th-best restaurant? Who cares? Our three-hour meal was full of flavor and revelations about how food can tell powerful stories. That made two Kentuckians feel right at home.
By the time our servers delivered the mother’s mole to the table, I had begun to reluctantly believe that yes, even a dish as seemingly plain as this one – one ladle of sauce spread thinly in a four-inch circle on a white plate, with a second, smaller ladle spooned on top, served with a basket of fresh-made corn tortillas – could stand in for the complexities and surprises on display everywhere in Mexico City, one of the world’s great metropolises where one civilization after another has piled itself on top of another for nearly 1,000 years, creating a city of enough charm, misery, and joy to break your heart.
We had spent Saturday night at Pujol, Enrique Olvera’s iconic redoubt in the tony Polanco neighborhood which was named in 2019 the 12th best restaurant in the world, and numero uno in North America. It was a dining experience like none other I’ve had and has left me reflecting on the way in the right hands food can be used to tell stories about the people and place it comes from.
That’s an ethos that runs through the very DNA of a publication like Bourbon Story, of course, and somewhere between the crisp Mexican sparkling wine with which we started and the smoky, complex mezcal note on which we ended, it became clear that the ties between Mexico and Kentucky’s bourbon country run a lot deeper than the routes migrants forged between the old country and the horse farms and tobacco fields in the new. (Editor’s note: Check out a full gallery of the tasting menu at Bourbonstory.com.)
Over the span of our three-hour meal, my friend Chris and I feasted on a master class in the marriage between soil, history, artistic creativity and cultural loyalty of a sort that any of Kentucky’s most famous distillers would drink to.
Pujol, which celebrated its 21st anniversary last week, is housed in an exceptionally pleasing space, with a Mid-Century feel of the elegant home it once was and a courtyard lively and trim enough to make even the most over-served guest considering lingering quietly into the evening. The chairs are comfortable, the lighting is low but not too low, and a gentle spring air flowing in from the city, toys with the formality of the starched white-and-black uniforms and exquisitely choreographed service.
We began with the amuse-bouche, an ear of baby corn, drizzled generously with a coffee and chile mayonnaise flavored by chicatanas, the flying ants of Oaxaca. Found only at the beginning of fierce rainy season of their home region, these elongated, reddish insects spice this dish in a way I am having trouble describing. But the tang of the mayonnaise and the sweetness of the uber-delicate baby corn make for a combination that does, just as the old French masters had in mind with the very idea of a amuse-bouche, amuse the mouth.
The first course of the tasting followed, and like the five that came later, arrived almost as soon as the plates were cleared from the previous morsel. Each time, a pair of servers arrived to sweep away the plates and a new pair arrived to deliver in perfect unison the new offering. Our glasses, too, had been replaced and our host for the evening was explaining the wine he had selected for our next two courses: A cool, tight and citrusy white from Gavi, Italy, made from grapes in the Fontanafredda region famed for its Barolo.
On the new dishes in front of us were single tostadas, covered with a thin layer of tiny tomatoes sliced like you might slight tiny pepperonis for a pizza if your goal was to leave no millimeter of what lies beneath the slices visible. It was only by biting into the tostada did the rest of the ingredients reveal themselves with a mouthful of flavor. Beneath the tomatoes were thin slices of scallops, bound together with a kimchi mayonnaise that worked like the best-tasting glue you’ve ever had.
The second course came soon after: A sizeable bowl of cubed amberjack filet made ready in citric acid with large rings of fermented cucumber, all served in a puddle of the juice of cacahuazintle, the heirloom corn that is one of endless varieties of the vegetable Americans have been lulled into believing come only in a few flavors.
In fact, until a few years ago, it was becoming increasingly difficult even in Mexico City to see heirloom varieties of corn, thanks in large part to NAFTA and the arrival of higher-yield varieties from the United States. But a local movement had begun to change that. Restauranteurs like Olvera and a handful of others have refocused on using varieties of corn grown only in Mexico, and now even some of the famed tortillarillas that line seemingly every neighborhood street use heirloom corn. As Olvera told AFAR Magazine in 2109, “I see how people know the difference between instant coffee and drip coffee, but for some reason in Mexico, the conversation about tortillas has never been like that,” Olvera says. “But we are not trying to create a luxury tortilla. We are just trying to make the best tortilla we can, and that starts with the corn.”
As we finished off the Italian white, it occurred to me that there is a lesson here, too, for Kentucky’s bourbon industry. Unlike so much of what we had been tasting in recent days in Mexico, the Bluegrass’s most famous product is made of very few ingredients: You have your water, your corn, which must be 51 percent of the mash bill, and then your mix of other grains, oats, barley, rye, wheat – and so on. But nothing else.
How much emphasis does a distiller place on the quality or variety of the corn they use? What difference might organic corn, for instance, or even an heirloom variety that’s no longer mass produced, make in the flavor profile? What relationship if any does the corn that flavors our bourbon today have to the stalks the settlers raised on Corn Island in 1778 when George Rodgers Clark arrived to settle the city of Louisville? Any?
As it happens, my friend knows a bit about bourbon and how it’s made. He works for Brown-Forman helping manage the Old Forester and Woodford Reserve brands, and told me both source all of their corn from Kentucky farms. Brown-Forman is partnering with the University of Kentucky on an experiment to grow rye, which is usually imported from colder climes, locally, too.
Bad corn makes bad bourbon, he told me. “If you start with poor ingredients, put it in the barrel and let it mature, it’s not going to cover up the poor corn you started with,” Poynter said.
A small experiment with heirloom corn in Kentucky is underway, and the company is eager to learn what changes it might bring to how bourbon can taste, he said.
As it happens, my friend knows a bit about bourbon and how it’s made. He works for Brown Forman as brand manager and director of partnerships for Old Forester and Woodford Reserve, and told me Woodford Reserve sources all of its corn from Kentucky farms, Brown Forman is partnering with the University of Kentucky on an experiment to grow rye, which is usually imported form colder climes, locally, too.
Bad corn makes bad bourbon, he told me. “If you start with poor ingredients and put it in the barrel and let is sit, it’s not going to be able to cover up the poor corn you began with,” Poynter said.
A small experiment with heirloom corn in Kentucky is underway, and the company is eager to learn what changes it might bring to how bourbon can taste, he said.
I was still musing about the many splendors of maize when the surprise of the evening arrived: Eggplant negro relleno under a deep-black sauce of squid ink and spicy xnipec, a kind of pudding that is usually made with chicken or pork but which shone as one of the evening’s stars, despite containing no meat. (Pujol stopped serving meat two years ago, with our server explaining that the restaurant grew wary of the livestock industry’s impact on climate change.)
When the pudding was gone, the sauce remained – but not for long, thanks to the steady flow of tortillas that turned out to be excellently outfitted for mop-up duty.
By now the wine had changed, too, and the 2008 red from Portugal’s Dao region couldn’t have been a better choice. Earthy, minerally, and full of tannin it was a great counterpoint for the grilled octopus, carrots and chintextle, the magic paste that Mexicans have been crushing into flavor enhancers for eons.
I’d had ordered grilled octopus earlier that week at a rooftop café that had arrived spilling over the edges of a plate the size of a Frizbee, and despite two of us working at it, had left more of the Nautilus at the table than we had eaten. So octopus wasn’t high on my list Saturday, and a few bites of what Pujol had on offer were enough to convince me that it was succulent, tender and packed full of flavor -- but not enough to persuade me to eat all of it.
Besides, by then I was already waiting for the madre mole, the dish for which Olvera has become famous. The larger dollop of older mole has been cooking for seven years, each night’s new batch added in like an ancient vintner’s use of heirloom vines or a baker who has kept alive his yeast for a generation.
As a result, the flavors in the older sauce are complex beyond explaining – more than 100 ingredients mixed nightly for, as our menu noted, 2,485 days.
Our server suggested to first drink the mezcal that had magically arrived and then taste the old mole first, moving to the daily creation – and then “mix them up as you please.”
It was good advice, and the mezcal didn’t disappoint. Smoky in a way that invited comparison to southern reaches of the Isle of Islay, but with a counterbalancing smoothness that sawed off the roughest edges in a way that some of peat-heavy Scotches don’t. Mezcal has another thing in common with Kentucky brown: Making it requires patience. Unlike tequila, mezcal is made using any of endless varieties of agave, but an agave plant requires 12 to 15 years to grow before it can be used to make the spirit. Its aged long before it even distilled.
We sampled the moles first with our spoons, and then with the wonderful special warm tortillas they brought out. The new mole in the middle –made that day – had a sweetness to it that reminded us both of chocolate, and the sea of mother’s mole on which is sat was savory, and spicy and nutty in a way that made me ask for more tortillas.
Next was a palette cleanser, a spoon full of sorbet on top of a bed of little balls of clear aloe vera that tasted like a mix between caviar and Jell-o. Palette cleansed, the finishing touch of strawberry honey, sorbet and drizzled sake.
Dinner was over, and we were both feeling fat and happy. It was expensive but not ruinously so, and it was deliberate and slow but not a marathon. The evening seemed just right from about every angle. It’s hard to know whether a restaurant is truly one of the world’s best, 12th or 112th, but if the measure of a meal is how it makes one feel before during and after it happens, Pujol scored spectacularly high.
The appropriate thing to do would have been to accept the invitation to order another tasting of mezcal or perhaps have taken up our host’s suggestion to finish with sake or a 20-year tawny he seemed especially happy with. We were tempted. He hadn’t steered us wrong yet. But we were also ready to idle out into the gentle night, thankful for the food and for the slow, surprised revelations of the connections that tie Mexico and Kentucky – two things that not many people in ether place often put of the same page.