The fiery red pork meat of tacos al pastor is a favorite of both Mexicans and foreigners alike, but one Yucatán taquero, or taco cook, has put a regional twist on the recipe, proving that the cuisine is a living tradition.
The black tacos al pastor of chef Roberto Solís from Mérida are on the cusp of spreading across the country.
Instead of red chiles and the crimson pigment of the annatto plant, Solís uses a traditional Yucatán salsa called recado negro (literally, black message), which gets its dark color from the blackened skin of roasted chiles.
The taco made its debut in an event called Hokolvuh, a chefs’ conference organized by Solís himself. Not long after the conference, he heard that his black taco al pastor had already traveled across the country.
“About a year later they tell me, ‘Hey, I saw your black onions and black pastor in Monterrey,’ and I said no, it can’t be, and when I looked, they really were being sold in the restaurant [there],” he said.
Chef Solís of Mérida.
The recipe may have been appropriated but luckily Solís still got the credit for the taco he created to be the signature dish of his Taquería Kisin, in Mérida. It was featured on the Netflix food documentary Taco Chronicles, solidifying his reputation as its creator.
Although its popularity is growing, curious taco connoisseurs currently must travel to either Mérida or Monterrey, Nuevo León, in order to try one.
A taquería in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City makes a black taco al pastor, but the color comes from the mole negro sauce used to combine the style with Oaxacan influences. This is not the yucateco taco invented by Solís.
The taco al pastor is a product of the influence of Mexico’s Lebanese immigrant community, which created the dish in Puebla in the mid-20th century when it combined the vertical spit of the shawarma with Mexican chiles and spices.
In central Mexico it is traditionally served with fresh diced onions, cilantro and a slice of pineapple. In Yucatán, however, it is not served with pineapple, but salsas made with Greek yogurt, ground fried chicharrón pigskins and guajillo and xcatic chiles give it its own regional identity.
The National Electoral Institute (INE) is facing unprecedented hostility, institute President Lorenzo Córdova said on Monday in a thinly veiled criticism of the federal government.
“In its 30 years of history, the institute has never faced such a hostile climate against it as it faces now,” Córdova said at a swearing-in ceremony for new executive director Sergio Bernal.
“These are very complicated times for the National Electoral Institute. … It’s very probable that we have never faced such an adverse and hostile environment against the institute,” he said.
Córdova’s remarks came four days after the lower house of Congress voted in favor of filing a constitutional challenge against the legality of the INE remuneration manual, which stipulates salaries for some electoral institute officials above that earned by President López Obrador.
The government has passed a law stipulating that no public official can make more than the president but INE filed legal action against it and has continued to pay some high-ranking officials – including Córdova – much higher salaries than López Obrador, who earns about 110,000 pesos (US $5,915) per month.
Also on Thursday, federal deputies approved the process to elect four new INE councilors. Government critics and some opposition lawmakers believe that the ruling Morena party, which leads a coalition with a majority in both houses of Congress, will attempt to install government-friendly councilors on the INE board.
In that context, Córdova said that current INE officials have a “historic responsibility” to “look after the institution.”
He called on officials to “close ranks” and ensure that the 2021 mid-term federal elections provide a level playing field for all political parties. INE doesn’t belong to any one person, party or political force, it exists to serve “all of Mexican society,” Córdova said.
The INE president came under fire from some members of the federal government earlier this month after he brought forward a vote to ensure the re-election of executive secretary Edmundo Jacobo Molina for a period of six years. Molina’s current term doesn’t end until April but a majority of INE councilors voted in favor of his re-election on February 7. If the vote were held at the end of his term, the four new councilors would have the opportunity to oppose the re-election.
Public Administration Minister Irma Sandoval was one official who called Córdova’s bringing forward of the vote undemocratic.
Córdova – who has a strained history with López Obrador – is determined to ensure that the INE doesn’t become a partisan institution, a position shared by the majority of current institute councilors, including Ciro Murayama.
Murayama said in January that the INE is at risk of losing its autonomy if Morena is allowed to install government-friendly councilors.
“The rules that allowed Morena to reach power are the same rules that should be operating now that it’s the government,” Murayama said, asserting that Mexico must continue to have an “impartial and autonomous electoral authority.”
Placing partisan officials in the INE goes against reason, he added, because a democratic government needs certainty, credibility and legitimacy at election time.
A January protest against a shortage of medications.
A shortage of pediatric cancer medications continues to plague Mexico’s public health system, heightening the anxiety of parents whose children desperately need access to life-saving drugs.
Israel Rivas, father of a young cancer patient, told the newspaper El Financiero that the situation is going from “bad to worse” in the nation’s hospitals.
He said that the federal government has not provided children’s hospitals with a sufficient supply of cancer medications, as Deputy Interior Minister Ricardo Peralta promised would occur by Monday at the latest.
Rivas claimed that the government appears to be “rotating medicines from one state to another … without providing a certain solution to the problem.”
“Medications only last a few days and then there aren’t any. We’re worse off [than before] … because they [the government] suddenly take [drugs] from Puebla to give them to Michoacán, for example, or they supply certain regions and leave others short. That’s what’s happening. They’re failing to keep their word. I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said.
“What I’ve found out is that … the situation is becoming more difficult in hospitals like the Siglo XXI [in Mexico City], the Ixtapaluca hospital [in México state] and the 20 de Noviembre [in Mexico City],” Rivas said.
He also said that no new children’s cancer drugs have reached Tijuana, supply is running out in Oaxaca and a very limited supply has been sent to Mérida. Rivas said that there is a nationwide or localized shortage of a range of drugs, including the chemotherapy agents vincristine, cyclophosphamide, ifosfamide and methotrexate.
Hermes Soto, a 5-year-old boy suffering from a rare and aggressive form of cancer that threatens his life, is one of scores if not hundreds of patients who have been affected by the drug shortage, which plagued hospitals for months last year after the government centralized drug purchases to reduce corruption and overpricing.
According to a report by the news agency Reuters, Soto’s chemotherapy treatment for the soft-tissue cancer in his arm was delayed by a week in January due to a lack of vincristine at his Mexico City hospital.
“He can relapse. The cancer can come back,” the boy’s mother, Esperanza Paz, told Reuters.
The crafts-maker said that the possibility of more shortages is of particular concern because “Hermes is now in the final stage of his treatment,” explaining, “we only need two cycles of chemotherapy to finish.”
López Obrador, left, and Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said on January 23 there were no drug shortages.
Andrea Rocha, a lawyer representing the parents of more than 60 children who have been unable to access the medications they need in recent months, has filed lawsuits aimed at compelling the government to provide an adequate supply of medicine.
“We didn’t have a first-rate health system before but since the change of administration, the problem of shortages has grown immensely,” she told Reuters. “There has never been such a big crisis.”
President López Obrador has claimed in recent weeks that Mexico now has sufficient medicines, explaining that shortages were due to resistance by pharmaceutical distributors to the new procurement system as well as the hoarding of medicines by hospital officials and supply problems with drug companies in India and China.
However, his claim is inconsistent with the experience that many parents, such as Rivas, are having in children’s hospitals. Parents have protested on several occasions, including at the Mexico City airport.
Reuters reported that two young boys have died in recent months due to medicine shortages and that non-cancer patients, including children who underwent organ transplant operations, have also been affected.
Monica Márquez, a 41-year-old handicraft seller, told Reuters that she had to pay out of her own pocket or rely on donations in order to buy Tacrolimus and Mycophenolic acid – immunosuppressive drugs – after her 7-year-old daughter received a new kidney.
However, due to shortages, the price of Tacrolimus increased from 2,500 pesos (US $135) to 14,000 pesos (US $755) for a two-week dose, making it prohibitively expensive for many families.
Márquez said that she was afraid that her daughter, who waited four years for a kidney transplant, will relapse and “go back to the way she was before.”
The government, she claimed, is “underplaying” the drug shortage problem. “They are trying to cover the sun with a finger when clearly there is a very big problem.”
That claim is supported by the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), which said that it received 552 complaints against health authorities for drug shortages between November 16, 2019 and February 11, 2020.
Of the complaints, 421 were against the Mexican Institute of Social Security, a major public healthcare provider, and 112 were against the State Workers’ Social Security Institute.
Both the Democratic Revolution Party and the National Action Party have filed complaints with the CNDH against the government due to the medicine shortage.
The López Obrador administration has also come under fire due to problems with the introduction of its new universal healthcare system, which replaced the Seguro Popular program on January 1.
One criticism has been that the National Institute of Health for Well-Being, or Insabi, scheme, is only providing primary and secondary healthcare for free, while low-income patients have to pay for specialist medical services in public hospitals.
However, the problem with those pledges, said Esperanza Paz, the Mexico City mother whose son Hermes is still in the fight of his life, is that “cancer does not wait.”
Residents in the capital are preparing for a day of traffic jams and difficult commutes due to a protest planned by the city’s fed-up bus drivers.
Members of the Mexico City public transit operators’ union, known as FAT, announced that they will carry out a mega-march on Wednesday to protest government inaction toward their request for a fare hike.
In a press conference held outside the Palace of Government on Monday, union members announced that they will begin Wednesday’s march at 7:00 a.m. from four different points in the city.
Marches will make their ways to the zócalo from Metro La Raza in the north, Metro Puebla in the east, Metro General Anaya in the south and along Constituyentes Avenue beginning at the Dolores Cemetery in the west.
“We apologize in advance to the citizens of the capital, but we have no other recourse to make it understood that we are people of flesh and bone, not politicians,” said FAT spokesperson Nicolás Vázquez.
“Every day we carry a great economic burden in order to be able to provide service … and we’re on the brink of starvation due to the improvements we’ve made to the transportation system in recent years.”
Union members claim that the dialogues they have had with authorities have fallen on deaf ears and that the government won’t make efforts to resolve the problems they face.
They said that they’ve been unable to renovate the entire fleet of buses because the fare they’re allowed to charge is insufficient. They requested that it be raised by 2 pesos to continue providing proper service.
The union’s requests to the Secretariat of Transportation (Semovi) for fuel subsidies have also been met with silence.
“[Semovi] had no details about the presented proposals. In exchange for maintaining the fare as it is, they should grant us a subsidy of between 8,000 and 10,000 pesos,” said Vázquez.
In response to the Mexico City government’s suggestion that drivers seek benefits from the Mexican Social Security Institute, Vázquez said that the union could not take the proposal seriously.
“According to what President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said, anyone can go receive social security services simply by presenting their [identification],” he said. “So where’s the benefit being offered?”
There was a “chain of negligence” in the investigation into the abduction of a 7-year-old girl whose body was found in a bag in southern Mexico City on Saturday, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said Monday, while President López Obrador claimed that the murder is linked to “social breakdown” caused by neoliberalism.
Speaking to reporters outside the Mexico City Institute of Forensic Sciences, where the body of Fátima Cecilia Aldrighett Antón was taken after it was found on a vacant lot in the borough of Tláhuac, Sheinbaum said that both the Attorney General’s Office (FGJ) and the Secretariat of Citizens Security failed to respond adequately to the girl’s abduction from outside her school last Tuesday.
“There is a chain of negligence at the institutions and to change that we need to know the truth from the beginning to the end. When was the first complaint [about Fátima’s disappearance] filed? … How did all the institutions act?” she said.
“We’re going to announce the complete truth because if we want the institutions to change we have to know the truth. That’s my commitment as mayor and I’m also going to devote more [of my] time … [to the issue of] safety for the girls and women of this city,” Sheinbaum said.
Family members claimed Monday that Fátima’s life could have been saved if authorities had responded differently.
Fátima Cecilia Aldrighett was abducted from her school on Thursday.
Sonia López, the girl’s aunt, said that “Fátima is not with us because the protocols were not followed, because the institutions did not give the attention they should have.”
She said that authorities wasted precious time after Fátima was first reported missing and that prior to the abduction, Mexico City health and family welfare agencies had failed to provide assistance to the girl’s mother, who has health problems.
An elder sister of the deceased girl said that police didn’t start investigating Fátima’s disappearance until Saturday, four days after she went missing – and the day her body was found.
While Sheinbaum conceded that negligence was a factor that may have contributed to the girl’s death, other Mexico City authorities appeared to apportion blame to Fátima’s parents.
Attorney General Ernestina Godoy said in radio interviews that the girl’s parents suffer from “senile dementia” and “mental illness,” while the DIF family services agency released a statement that said that it had records dating back to November 2015 that Fátima had been subjected to domestic violence, neglect and psychological abuse.
Asked at a press conference whether the DIF’s release of such information represented a violation of due process, Godoy said that she wasn’t aware of the details that were made public.
The attorney general also said that investigations into Fátima’s disappearance began on February 12 – the day she said she was officially reported as missing – and that if FGJ officials are found to have been negligent, they will face sanctions.
Godoy explained that the girl’s murder was not related to organ trafficking, as the National Commission of Human Rights suggested, and asserted that the man that Fátima’s mother accused of killing her daughter is dead.
María Magdalena Antón had accused a man by the name of Alan Herrera of murdering not just Fátima but also her sister and brother-in-law.
Responding to Godoy’s mental illness claim, she said: “I’m not crazy. Each one of you who mocks me, tomorrow it could be your daughters [who are murdered].”
Antón reportedly arrived late last Tuesday to collect Fátima from the Enrique Rébsamen primary school in the Tulyehualco neighborhood of the southern Mexico City borough of Xochimilco.
By the time she arrived, her daughter had left the school with an unidentified woman who allegedly took Fátima to a home in the same borough in a white car.
A police sketch of the woman sought in Fátima’s abduction.
Amid criticism that the school had failed in its duty by allowing her to leave the school with a stranger, the Mexico City chief of the Federal Education Authority, Luis Humberto Fernández, announced that the principal would be suspended while an investigation takes place.
FGJ spokesman Ulises Lara López said that a reward of 2 million pesos (US $108,000) is on offer for information leading to the arrest of the person or people involved in the abduction and murder of the girl.
For his part, President López Obrador said Monday that crimes such as the murder of Fátima are linked to a “process of [societal] degradation that is [in turn] related to the neoliberal [economic] model.”
“The extent of social breakdown produced by neoliberal policy cannot be measured; there is a profound crisis in loss of values,” he said.
The president blames all manner of problems, including corruption, violence and poverty, on the pro-market policies implemented by the past five “neoliberal” governments that ruled Mexico between 1988 and 2018.
López Obrador declared on Monday that the government is doing all it can to combat femicides – the death of Fátima came a week after the brutal murder of 25-year-old Ingrid Escamilla – and called on “feminists” not to “paint doors and walls” during protests, as occurred last Friday at the National Palace.
“We’re working so that there are no femicides. We’re not pretending,” he said.
Ruling party Senator Martí Batres also claimed that the high levels of femicide (a crime in which a woman or girl is killed on account of her gender) in Mexico – there were more than 1,000 victims last year – are a product of neoliberalism.
The Morena party lawmaker said that women who moved to Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, in search of jobs at factories on the Mexico-United States border were the first victims of neoliberalism-linked femicide. There were almost 400 victims of the crime in the border city in a 12-year period to 2005.
“Workers in the border factories, far from their cities of origin and their families, without a social protection network, were the first victims,” Batres wrote on Twitter.
“After that came the war on drugs [launched by former president Felipe Calderón in 2006] – and its consequences of rapes and massacres – which turned femicide into a national problem,” he said.
A Playa del Carmen beach picnic will protest what has been called the unlawful arrest of a pair of Mexican tourists who were detained for not patronizing the beach club in front of which they had laid their towels.
Tourist police responded to a 911 call from the Mamita’s Beach Club on Sunday in which the business allegedly complained that the couple was not consuming its products.
Videos posted to social media show the couple being detained by police. The woman identified as Asenet N. can be seen in handcuffs, crying and telling officers that they are hurting her.
She and her boyfriend state in the videos that they were threatened by the police, and officers can be heard threatening the citizens filming the event. Asenet said that she was bleeding at the wrists from the officers pulling her by the handcuffs.
Facebook users from Playa del Carmen have organized a beach picnic for next Sunday to protest the incident and raise awareness about Mexican citizens’ constitutional right to access the country’s beaches.
“Bring your cooler, your umbrella and invite your family to be part of this lovely celebration of the recovery of our public beach,” the post reads. “It’s time to remind them of Article 27 of our constitution. The beaches of Mexico are public!”
Article 27 states that the country’s beaches are public land and that private companies cannot regulate people’s access to them.
In a statement posted to Facebook on Monday, Mamita’s Beach Club said that the couple was asked to move to a different part of the beach, as they were in a pathway used by the club’s guests and employees.
It said that the police were called after the couple used “high-flown and threatening words” with its staff.
The club’s management claims that the police were called “at the request of the couple” and that its personnel left the scene after the police arrived. The club alleges to be unaware of the official reason for the pair’s arrest.
The Quintana Roo Human Rights Commission announced that it has opened an investigation into the actions taken by the Tourist Police for alleged abuse of authority.
A grilling fest comes to Azcapotzalco at the end of the month.
Calling all carnivores: the first-ever Feria del Asado (Grill Fair) in the Mexico City borough of Azcapotzalco promises to be a mouthwatering feast for hungry meat lovers.
The fair will bring together over 40 grillers from across the country and abroad to share the best recipes their regions have to offer in the borough’s Alameda Norte park at the end of the month.
Fair attendees will have their pick of a wide range of grilled meats, from American cuts like sirloin, T-bone, tomahawk and ribeye to Mexican favorites like arrachera, bistec, and pork and beef short ribs.
Also sizzling on the grill will be hamburgers, fresh seafood and artisanal sausages, as well as exotic meats like crocodile, ostrich, deer and more. And for those seeking something completely different, the Argentine chefs from the catering service Pablisho Parrillero will be grilling a whole buffalo.
Vendors will be selling artisanal non-alcoholic beverages to wash it all down, and musicians will provide a soundtrack to the feast. There will also be grill accessories for sale and raffles and contests to compete in.
The event will fill Azcapotzalco’s Alameda Norte park with grill smoke from February 28 to March 1 from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. each day.
The organizers from the grill-crazy association Resistencia Parrillera decided to make entrance to the fair free so attendees can spend their money on what really matters: the meat. So bring your appetite.
Pemex has found an onshore oil field in Veracruz that could contain as many as 5 billion barrels of crude oil and natural gas.
State oil company sources told the newspaper El Universal that the mega-deposit is potentially one of the biggest oil discoveries in recent years, stating that it likely contains much larger reserves than Zama, a shallow-water field in the Gulf of Mexico that was discovered by a private consortium of companies in 2017.
The unnamed sources said that the newly discovered Kuxum field, which extends across 200 kilometers of land in the Gulf coast state, has the potential to turn around the fortunes of the heavily indebted state oil company, whose output has been on the wane for more than a decade.
Pemex is also seeking control over the Zama field, CEO Octavio Romero said in late January. He said the state oil company believes that most of the crude found is in an adjacent block where Pemex has development rights, declaring that the reservoir is “shared.”
In light of the new discoveries, the oil company sources told El Universal that Pemex’s oil production could reach 2 million barrels per day (bpd) by December 2020 – 100,000 bpd more than a prediction made by Romero last month.
Meanwhile, Italian oil company Eni announced that it has discovered a reserve in the Gulf of Mexico that is believed to contain between 200 and 300 million barrels of crude.
Located 65 kilometers off the Veracruz coast, the Saasken-1 well is the sixth consecutive well drilled by Eni that has been successful in finding oil. The well appears to have the capacity to yield 10,000 bpd of crude, the company said.
Eni, one of several foreign companies that bought drilling rights at oil and gas auctions held after the previous government ended Pemex’s almost 80-year monopoly in the sector, said in 2018 that it expected to invest almost US $1.8 billion in three Gulf of Mexico oil fields by 2040.
The body of a 7-year-old girl was found inside a bag in southern Mexico City on Saturday, authorities said on Monday, the second shocking murder of a young female in the capital in the space of a week.
The Mexico City Attorney General’s Office (FGJ) said that the body found in the borough of Tláhuac was that of Fátima, a primary school student who was kidnapped outside her school as she waited for her mother to collect her on February 11.
Prosecutors said that the body was identified by genetic testing but didn’t state the cause of death.
FGJ spokesman Ulises Lara López said that a reward of 2 million pesos (US $108,000) is on offer for information leading to the arrest of the person or people involved in the abduction and murder of the girl. A woman who was captured by security cameras with Fátima outside her school is of particular interest to investigators, he said.
Lara said that security cameras also recorded a white vehicle in which the girl may have been traveling. The vehicle traveled to an address in the borough of Xochimilco that has been searched by police, he said, adding that the FGJ has taken statements from five people who live there.
For her part, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum pledged on Twitter that the crime will not go unpunished.
“It’s shocking, perverse and painful that someone is capable of hurting a girl,” she wrote, adding that Mexico City authorities will work tirelessly to arrest those responsible and bring them to justice.
Sheinbaum personally accompanied Fátima’s mother, María Magdalena Antón, as she completed paperwork to formally file murder charges and attended a Mexico City morgue to take possession of her daughter’s body.
“Justice has to be done, for my daughter and for all women,” Antón said with notable fury ringing in her voice.
She accused a man by the name of Alan Herrera of killing not just her daughter but also her sister and brother-in-law. In addition, Antón accused the same man of kidnapping her two nephews.
She said that she didn’t know the woman seen with her daughter outside her school but charged that she was sent to abduct her by Alan Herrera.
“He was the partner of the daughter of my husband. … He passed himself off as dead but he’s more alive than I am,” Antón said. Asked by a reporter why she believes that the man killed her daughter, she only replied: “He is the culprit.”
Antón also said that investigators had made her family wait hours and travel across Mexico City to file a missing person’s report after Fátima disappeared last Tuesday.
The Associated Press reported that the girl’s aunt, Sonia López, said that her niece “could have been found alive but nobody paid attention to us.”
She also said that there had been concerns about the capacity of Fátima’s mother to take care of her daughter but Mexico City health and family welfare agencies failed to provide assistance.
The discovery of the girl’s body came a week after the murder of 25-year-old woman Ingrid Escamilla in the northern Mexico City borough of Gustavo A. Madero. Erick Francisco Robledo, 46, confessed to stabbing Escamilla to death after which he skinned her body and removed her organs.
That case triggered outrage and a protest at the National Palace and outside the Mexico City offices of a newspaper that published images of the woman’s mutilated body that were allegedly leaked by police and/or city government officials.
After news broke of Fátima’s murder on Monday, there was another outpouring of anger and condemnation on social media, with the hashtag #JusticiaParaFátima (Justice For Fátima) trending. A protest was also held at the deceased 7-year-old’s school with parents holding up placards that read “not one more [death]” and “we demand justice for Fátima.”
Speaking at his morning news conference, President López Obrador said that the girl’s death was “regrettable” and attributed it to family and social problems.
The problem must be treated at its root in order to ensure “well-being of the soul and body,” he said.
The Bajío restaurant in Mexico City's historic center.
El Bajío is a culinary institution in Mexico City with an international reputation, started by a “simple cook” who not only made it what it is but did so while raising five children alone.
Her legal name is Carmen Hernández Oropeza but she uses her late husband’s last names, Ramírez Degollado. To friends and family, she is known as Titita. She was born in 1940 in Xalapa, Veracruz, an area filed with herbs, spices, corn and perhaps most notably, coffee.
Ramírez learned to cook the area’s regional specialities in her family home with a strong maternal presence. She insists, “I am not a chef; I am a cook.”
She had never planned on being a restaurateur. Soon after marrying the couple moved to Mexico City, where Raúl Ramírez Degollado saw a restaurant for sale in the Azcapotzalco borough northwest of the city center. It was already serving carnitas, but Raúl was from Michoacán where the dish originated, and of course he had his own recipe. The couple bought the business in 1972, and Raúl renamed the restaurant El Bajío in reference to his home region. Unfortunately, not long afterward Raúl died of cancer, leaving Carmen with the restaurant and their five children.
She not only saw that the restaurant survived but thrived, allowing her to put all of her children through school.
Bajío co-founder Carmen Rodríguez.
The menu is a mix of the Michoacán food of her husband and the northern Veracruz fare she grew up with. She kept the name of the restaurant as well as her late husband’s recipes for carnitas, but she added menu items from her native Xalapa. It wasn’t easy at first.
“Imagine,” she says. “At first we served dishes such as xonequi, a bean soup with a leaf that goes by this name that is made in Xico (Veracruz). We served it with bolitas de masa (dough balls, similar to dumplings) and people put them aside, wondering what they were.”
Another of Carmen’s contributions to the menu is chipotleneco, or salsa negra, a condiment on all tables that is specific to her family. Other signature dishes at El Bajío include mole de olla, Xico-style mole and sopa de fideo.
She hires traditional cooks, not chefs.
Spanish chef Ferran Adrià called El Bajío one of the best Mexican restaurants in the world in 2002. He was particularly impressed by her dish called “gorditas infladas” (inflated and stuffed corn tortillas), on which he based a dish he called air bags.
For many years, the El Bajío name was only on the original restaurant. But in 2006, a regular came to Ramírez offering to become a business partner and open new locations in the city. By then her children were grown and co-owners of the establishment. They agreed and the second restaurant was opened in the Parque Delta shopping center, south of the city center. The chain grew quickly to the current 19, all in Mexico City. Daughter Maricarmen and her husband run most of the locations, along with one other daughter and a son who manages the finances.
El Bajío’s menu is a mix of food from Michoacán and Veracruz.
One daughter has even gone on to establish a successful food business of her own. With Spanish chef Juan Bagur I Bagur, Maritere Ramírez Degollado opened Sal y Dulce Artesanos, a chain of coffee shops/restaurants specializing in fine pastry.
The original El Bajío still stands in the Cuitláhuac neighborhood of Azcapotzalco borough. It is an older traditional building, located in a lower middle-class neighborhood. All the other locations have the same menu and prices and base their decor on the original. However, they’re not exact copies.
All but one are located in modern business or shopping centers, catering to businessmen and more upscale customers, and as such cannot exactly mimic the hominess of the original. The one exception is the newest restaurant, located on Bolivar Street in the historic center of the city in a 19th-century neo-colonial building under the protection of federal historical authorities.
Despite this, it had been neglected and used as a warehouse for many years. To restore the building to its former glory and make it workable as a restaurant required three years of renovation work under strict supervision.
Now in her 80s, Ramírez is still active with the restaurant chain, still travels and gives lectures and demonstrations, especially about food from Veracruz. Over the years, she has been invited to places such as the James Beard House Foundation in New York, the Ritz Hotel in Lisbon, the Mana Lani Bay Hotel in Honolulu, the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, the Marriott Hotel in Kuala Lumpur and the Les Dames d’Escoffier International in Atlanta.
She’s also done consulting work with various restaurants in the United States and Europe, won various awards in Mexico and was nominated by The New York Times as one of the two matriarchs of Mexican cooking. She has written two cookbooks in Spanish.
Her advice to cooks is to “never lack love, patience and a slow fire.”
