I want to be honest about my bias in my review of this new restaurant: from the very beginning, I’ve wanted to support Baldío’s project. A restaurant that attempts to be zero waste? That uses only local meat, fish and produce, much of it grown right here in Mexico City through an organic CSA? A space full of recycled materials? Nothing could be better for someone who wants to dine well but agonizes over the environmental impact of tourism and eating out.
Arca Tierra, the organization that started this restaurant, is one that I respect. They’ve done incredible work helping many chinampa island farms and farmers in Mexico City transition to regenerative, sustainable agriculture. Their producers now supply some of the best restaurants of Mexico City including Pujol, Maximo and Contramar.
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But there was a problem: friends told me they were underwhelmed with their experiences at Baldío when it opened four months ago. So I arrived conflicted to my first dining experience, a pop-up collaboration with the Bogota, Colombia-based Mesa Franca. If I had only had that first meal, I might have come to the same conclusion my friends did.
Located in Condesa, the restaurant, with its dim lighting and natural materials gracing the tables, chairs and walls is at once cozy and upscale. The kind of place you want to dress up for but that still feels like a great neighborhood spot. Waiters on both of my visits were friendly, quick and informed about the dishes and the overall concept of the restaurant. They seemed to actually like their jobs. When I met the chef on my second visit, she was equally charming.
Baldío has indoor and outdoor tables, all made with recycled wood, and a long open kitchen that dominates the dining room with high-backed chairs set up in front of it for a kind of chefs’ table experience. That’s where I sat that first night, watching the staff painstakingly slice the roast beets into delicate slivers and plate them with precision alongside various lettuce leaves straight from the farm.
But over half of the dishes I tasted lacked salt, acid and umami. A very mild ceviche, a just-okay grilled fennel with a lactofermented sauce, a beet with gochujang spice that wasn’t spicy. After two disappointing cocktails, I finally ordered the guanabana champagne; it had some good effervescence and an unexpected sharpness to it, but I still wasn’t blown away. There was a pork belly that I liked, with yucca foam that was sweet and crunchy, its muted purslane garnish somewhat plain but a balance to the richness of the pork. Overall, it wasn’t amazing.
I decided that I would have to return to taste Baldío’s regular menu on a different day, and when that lunch came around I was pleasantly surprised by the contrast. The esquites with buffalo machaca had a sprinkling of lime zest that gave each bite a floral citrusiness. The beefsteak tomato set atop sweet corn gruel with a hibiscus reduction drizzled on top was exactly what a fresh-from-the garden tomato should taste like. My favorite dish hands down, the grilled green beans, came together with the roasted garlic puree and peppery hoja santa mole in the perfect marriage of sweet, salty and smoky char.
And the trout had the same divine umami-sweet crunch as the trout featured in Baldío’s pop-up, but instead of the under-salted potatoes of the previous meal, this came with a gorgeous heirloom tomato, whose acidity was offset by sweet caramelized onions and a dusting of fresh oregano on top. Even the Italian squash with serrano chile power, was still floral and well-rounded, with a burst of umami from the milk sauce that accompanied it.
By the time Chef Cabrera came out to talk to me I was feeling positive once again about Baldío and speaking with her only made that feeling grow. Young and obviously passionate about her work, you might think she’d be a little pretentious after spending 10 years in Copenhagen working with the famous Noma group — considered some of the best fine dining restaurants in the world — as well as spending her formative years at Nectar, one of Mérida’s most lauded fine dining restaurants. Instead she was grounded, open and excited about her new project, expressing an important and vital skill for a head chef: she seemed to care about her staff and their development.
“The thing I wanted to bring from Denmark is a way of working,” Chef Cabrera said, “When I came back to Mexico I found so many people in restaurants just working to work, but not for the love of cooking.” To facilitate gusto for the job, she’s encouraging her staff to speak up with ideas, inspirations and experiments they want to try. She’s cross-training them between the production kitchen and the service kitchen, hoping to give them a greater appreciation of all the moving parts that have to function together to make a restaurant great.
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Working towards a zero waste kitchen has not been a breeze, and Cabrera has been counseled by British chef Douglas McMaster, co-founder of Baldío and owner, of London’s Silo, the first zero waste restaurant in the world. Still, she says, it’s important that customers understand that behind every spoonful of glaze or reduction is a mountain of work that goes unrecognized.
According to Baldío’s co-founder Lucio Usobiaga, there are several steps to reaching the restaurant’s zero waste goals. The first includes suppliers. In order to cut down on packaging waste, they needed to find ways to work with suppliers using reusable and recyclable delivery containers. The team they worked on reducing their kitchen waste by using processes like koji — which using fungi to inoculate rice that can then be used to make other fermented food — and garum, an ancient Mediterranean process that uses fish scraps to create a flavorful fermented fish sauce that can be used in all kinds of dishes.
They are also pickling, curing, utilizing lactofermentation and doing whatever they can to extend the life of their products, since it would be impossible to use everything in its fresh state. The final step is dining room waste, since we the diners also have a part to play in the zero waste sum. They are working with a team of biologists to compost all the leftovers from plates that may have oils, bones and other things that you can’t just throw in a compost pile. The final compost is then returned to the chinampas and reincorporated into the soil. It’s an extensive process that will take years to perfect.
I have a lot of hope for Baldío. There is room for growth and evolution, yes, but the menu is already on its way to becoming excellent, and their excited team seems ready to push this project forward. They can take pride in being the first zero waste restaurant in Mexico— it’s a lot of hard work but worth it for the future of the planet and dining out. I can’t wait to eat there six months from now.
Perfect For: Environmentalists who want to honor their convictions and still be well fed.
Recommended: The charred green beans with the garlic pure and hoja santa pipian and a glass of white from Valle de Guadalupe.
Lydia Carey is a freelance writer and translator based out of Mexico City. She has been published widely both online and in print, writing about Mexico for over a decade. She lives a double life as a local tour guide and is the author of Mexico City Streets: La Roma. Follow her urban adventures on Instagram and see more of her work at www.mexicocitystreets.com.
