A Moveable Feast (14 page)

Jim Benning lives in Southern California, where he has little trouble feeding his addiction to Mexican food. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the online travel magazine World Hum. His writing has appeared in
Outside
,
Men’s Journal
, the
Washington Post
and the
Los Angeles Times,
as well as in travel anthologies. His virtual home is
www.jimbenning.net
.

When Tijuana makes headlines north of the border, the news is never good. It was particularly bad in the months leading up to my visit. The war between the drug gangs and the Mexican government was raging. Murders were rampant. Bodies were found hanging from bridges. Even miles north in San Diego, where I was living, you could almost hear that heartbreaking old José Alfredo Jiménez song line wafting from the city’s bars at night:
‘No vale nada la vida.’
Life is worth nothing.

I hadn’t visited Tijuana in a while and I was missing its mad restlessness, its chaotic streets and, to be honest, its food. So
despite a newly issued travel warning urging visitors to ‘exercise extreme caution’, I decided to make a trip down there one afternoon for lunch. Which raises an obvious question: is the food so good it’s worth risking your life for?

At the ‘Last USA Exit’ sign, I pulled off the freeway and parked in a giant lot abutting the border fence. Dark clouds were rolling in off the Pacific, heightening a sense of melancholy I often detect at the crossing, a place of more goodbyes than hellos. I found myself walking towards the turnstile just as several Border Patrol agents who’d nabbed a young man were ushering him back into Mexico. And so he and I walked into the country together, the Mexican and the gringo, one of us by force, the other by choice, both of us hungry, albeit, on this day, for very different things.

A young woman in a polo shirt handed me a flyer. I thought it might be a coupon for a taco or margarita, a friendly ‘Welcome to Tijuana’ gesture from a restaurateur trying to drum up sales. But times had changed. In fact, it was an advertisement for life insurance, touting, in big, bold letters, ‘security for you and your family’. A Mexican soldier with a rifle slung from his shoulder looked on. My heart sank. I watched as the young man I’d walked across with disappeared into Tijuana’s streets, then I made a beeline for a string of yellow taxis.

I asked a driver to take me to one of my favourite restaurants, Carnitas Uruapan, a classic, fifty-year-old family spot specialising in live mariachi and
carnitas,
the rich, savoury pork dish originally from the state of Michoacán but popular throughout Mexico.

‘Of course,’ the driver replied in Spanish. ‘You know what they always say: “If you visited Tijuana and didn’t go to Carnitas Uruapan, you didn’t really visit Tijuana.”’

He hit the gas and asked what I did for a living. I told him I was a writer.

‘Please don’t write about how dangerous Tijuana is,’ he said. ‘It’s all lies. Americans don’t even visit any more. They’re scared. It’s hurting the city. If you’re in the drug trade, it’s dangerous. But if you just mind your own business, if you’re just visiting, Tijuana is not dangerous. Please be sure to write that. It’s the truth.’

A few minutes later he dropped me in front of the restaurant, with its weathered red and white façade and fading illustrated sign that got me every time. On it, a smiling pig wearing a chef’s hat and apron beamed, holding a platter laden with another pig, this one ready to eat. It’s the kind of anthropomorphising of a meal you rarely see in the United States. We Americans are soft. We’re uncomfortable seeing such visual, playful representations of the true sources of our delicacies.

I sat down at one of the restaurant’s long orange picnic tables just as the mariachis began trickling in for the afternoon, each in an elegant brown suit, clutching a trumpet, guitar or violin. I ordered a Bohemia and a plate of
carnitas,
and soon my lunch was before me: chunks of glistening pork alongside refried beans, sliced onions, tomatoes and coriander, accompanied by a bowl of lime wedges and a stack of steaming, freshly made corn tortillas.

I wasted no time in concocting a taco, piling
carnitas
on a tortilla, then adding sprigs of coriander, slices of onion, a squeeze of lime and a spoonful of salsa. It was a beautiful sight, and the first bite was exquisite. The pork – simmered in a mix of orange juice, lard and a little condensed milk – was rich, crunchy and, best of all, slightly tangy. I savoured the earthy tortilla, the spicy salsa and sweet onions, and washed everything down with a swig of beer. I was in heaven.

The mariachis struck up a tune, and soon a young couple with two small kids at a table near me called the men over to request a few songs. All nine mariachis – lean, jet-haired young men and plump, grey-haired elders – gathered around the table, string-players and singers up front, trumpet players behind.

They launched into a song and the couple ordered tequila shots, and then a round for the mariachis. Soon the woman at the table brushed back her long dark hair, sat up straight as a rail and began belting out the lyrics, so that the mariachis stopped singing altogether and simply played, giving her the spotlight.

I could feel the room heating up. The beer. The tequila. The plaintive violins and soaring trumpets, the deep thumping bass of the
guitarrón.

Later, the couple would tell me that they were from Guadalajara, near the birthplace of mariachi, and that they had been living in Tijuana for a couple of years. They were in the city for work and they didn’t like it. One day they would return to Guadalajara. But for now, they came to Carnitas Uruapan every couple of weeks to eat well, enjoy some tequila and immerse themselves in the music they loved.

The woman requested
‘Seis Pies Abajo’,
or ‘Six Feet Under’, a love song redolent with dark Mexican fatalism. As the mariachis played, she sang, her voice resonant and strong, if not always on key:

When she finished, several diners burst into applause.

‘Brava, señora!’
an older woman shouted.
‘Brava!’

And then it hit me why I’d come to Tijuana for lunch. Sure, I could probably find
carnitas
that tasted as good back in San Diego, a city known for its great Mexican cuisine. But we don’t eat food in a vacuum, and there is more to a meal than the sum of its ingredients. Much like the
terroir
of winemaking lore – the connection between grapes and the unique soil and climate they grow in – there exists a kind of cultural
terroir
related to our
food. To eat ethnic food in the place that gave it life, and to immerse oneself in the history and culture of that place, can transform an otherwise mundane meal into an extraordinary experience.

It’s why cappuccino tastes richer and creamier in Italy; why bratwurst is more satisfying in Germany; why you can order salmon
nigiri
all over the world these days, but it will never taste as good as it does in Japan. By my lights, it’s reason enough to travel.

After my meal, I left the restaurant and stood out front to hail a cab. A cold wind was blowing. Rain was on the way. The street before me was pockmarked, and many of the nearby buildings were ramshackle and rundown. I had every reason to feel gloomy. And yet, I didn’t. Between the
carnitas
and beer, the heart-wrenching mariachi and my fellow diners’ love for it all, I felt more grounded than I had in some time. I felt connected to this place. I wasn’t six feet under. I was utterly alive.

Andrew Zimmern is the host, co-creator and consulting producer of Travel Channel’s
Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern
. He is the Author of
The Bizarre Truth,
and the winner of the 2010 James Beard Award for Best TV Personality.

The celebrated French chef Paul Bocuse was born on 12 February 1926, which makes him only a few months older than my father. My dad is the most important person in my life, professionally speaking. He taught me how to travel, how to write, how to tell a joke, how to ‘take the room’, how to shop for socks, how to tie a tie, how to eat and how to cook. He devours life, literally.

Bocuse is arguably the greatest chef of the last century. Many people judge him in that light, so don’t take my suggestion for granted. Since the days of Apicius, everyone has wanted to know who cooks what and how they rate, and while Joël Robuchon has been given the title ‘Chef of the Century’, it is often thought that without Bocuse, there would be no modern food movement.
Without my dad, there would be no me, and whenever I think of my father, I think of Bocuse, and of one meal in particular, and I think of fathers and their sons, and of my son, and of what is possible thanks to the adventurous tug of the windward spirit and the aphrodisiac of travel that can change lives in the blink of an eye.

Bocuse, the Lion of Lyon, came from a family of millers who traced their love of food back seven generations to the mid-eighteenth century, when the Bocuse family opened a restaurant of sorts in their flour mill. Paul Bocuse was chosen by his ancestors for greatness and he began his career cooking with Claude Maret in a small restaurant in Lyon in 1942. World War II was raging and food was a black market commodity. He went on to apprentice at La Pyramide in Vienne with Fernand Point, a master of classic French cuisine.

Back then, there was only French cuisine – everything else was just great food. The world was different. There was no
Throwdown! with Bobby Flay.
There were no celebrity chefs, no Food Network, no shelf in the corner magazine shop stocked with arcane tabloids devoted to subjects ranging from hot peppers to barbecued ribs. The only place to eat Chinese food in New York City was Chinatown and no-one in America sold fresh rucola. I am only exaggerating a teensy-weensy bit for dramatic effect. The food world as you know it did not exist. And
that
I am understating in the extreme.

Point abandoned the rich heavy sauces of über-classical French cooking back in the early twentieth century. Bocuse always considered Point his master, and while widely and rightfully considered a classicist, he pursued a revolutionary idea to its conclusion: that food must be cooked to allow for the natural and true flavours of the ingredients to shine through, and that quality, technique, improvisation and fantasy all play roles in defining great cuisine. To cut to the chase: Bocuse went on to
open his eponymous restaurant in a suburb of Lyon in the late 1950s and earned one Michelin star in 1961, two in 1962, and three in 1965. He opened restaurants around the world before Wolfgang Puck was old enough to carry a spoon; he opened restaurants in Japan before there was a Nobu Matsuhisa and a cooking school in Osaka before there was a Culinary Institute of America. He branded wines and gourmet food lines with his name and opened the first world-class restaurant in Disney World in Orlando, Florida, in the French Pavilion. In the 1960s and ’70s he was a god in the food world. He was bestowed with the Meilleur Ouvrier de France in 1961. That’s almost fifty years ago. He has received the Légion d’honneur medal and is one of the men credited with developing nouvelle cuisine (Bocuse famously claimed that restaurant critic Henri Gault coined the term as a way to describe the food prepared by Bocuse and other top chefs for the maiden flight of the Concorde in 1969).

But I digress. As a young boy, I travelled a lot with my dad, and it was through him that I learned that going great distances, in the opposite direction of the herd, was the best way to see a country, a culture and its people. Hitting the road and travelling as far as we could in one day just for a great meal was how we rolled. When I was seven, we drove to Massachusetts for a ski weekend and got rained out, so we toddled into Boston on a Saturday afternoon in time for dad to get us to his favourite ice-cream parlour for a Broadway Sundae (coffee ice cream with hot fudge sauce). In Spain one year, he insisted we drive out from Madrid to a 400-year-old restaurant underneath the Roman aqueduct in Valle de los Calledos just for a real taste of roasted baby pigs and lambs, nearly foetal, weaned only on milk. They were awesome. I was ten.

The year before we hauled ass in his buddy’s flashy new Ferrari all the way from Milan to the little town of Bergamo simply because a restaurant there served up the best pumpkin gnocchi and grilled quail in northern Italy. As we feasted in that ancient setting, looking down the valley with the twinkling lights of Milan in the distance, I clearly remember deciding that if finding the perfect meal meant going to the last stop on earth, it was worth the trip.

My dad and I spent as much time cruising the food aisles at Harrod’s, exploring San Francisco’s Chinatown or shopping for socks at Marks & Spencer as we did looking at the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles. Dad argued that you can soak in as much Roman culture ordering shirts at Brioni as you can touring the Colosseum, and that when it comes to food, a little leg work – or putting an extra 200 klicks on your rental car – is worth it.

But dad insisted that this traveller’s creed didn’t mean that you had to leave the country – or even your area code – to practise it. He would often remind me that sometimes it’s easy to forget how much there is to explore right outside your own front door. When I grew up in New York City, during the 1960s and ’70s, really fresh food just wasn’t available the way it is today, but there were still amazing connection points to our food sources, the flip side of today’s food world. There wasn’t a whole lot of good eatin’ fish in the Hudson River in the ’70s and the whole urban farming idea wouldn’t catch on for a few more decades. So every summer, my dad would drive us out to Montauk, Long Island, from our summer home in East Hampton. It was only about twenty miles from home, but it felt a world away. We’d sit at the dock, watching fishing boats unload crates of fresh seafood pulled right out of the Atlantic. Like paparazzi hot on some young starlet’s trail, my dad and I would hound these crates to the clam bars on Montauk’s docks just to eat the freshest food we could.

There was one big family-style tourist restaurant on the docks of Montauk called Gossman’s. They had pretty fresh stuff, but their lobsters were kept alive in aerated, commercial tanks, standard ops, then and now, for larger commodity seafood restaurants, but minute by minute, day by day, the meat would break down and become less intense, mealier, softer, benign, less flavourful, less everything the longer they sat in those tanks. Time is the enemy of food, even when that food is still alive.

We skipped places like Gossman’s whenever we could, favouring smaller, local clam bars. In those days, Salavar’s was the working-class seafood shack – a small joint that started hawking doughnuts and egg sandwiches to commercial fishermen, stevedores and dock crews before the sun came up. It sat about 500 yards down the road from Gossman’s, but had a distinctive townie vibe. Real people ate, argued and hung out at Salavar’s. So did we. We adored places like Lunch the Lobster Roll and the Quiet Clam; unspoiled and unvarnished South Fork–style seafood was what we sought out. My dad was a savant hunting these places down. Remember, this was the 1960s, before the jet-set crowd had discovered the Hamptons. And these were the unspoiled clam shacks we spent our time eating in.

That was summer. In the winter we lived to ski. In 1976 we took a family ski trip to Val d’Isère in the Rhône-Alpes region of France. The first two days were insane: six inches of fresh powder fell each night, the March sun was warm and bright each day, and we were ecstatic. On our first night we dined in a little pizza place that our breakfast waiter at the hotel insisted we check out and I had my first pizza Bismarck, a tomato and mozzarella pie with double-smoked farmer’s ham and a single egg baked in the middle. Ripping off the crust and dunking it in the runny yolk reminded me of sitting in my grandmother’s house on weekends eating eggs-in-the-hole. I was in heaven.

On our third ski day, it began to snow, and by afternoon we had been forced off the mountain by white-out conditions that never stopped. It snowed so heavily, for so long, that food delivery to the Alpine ski village ceased after a week. Trucks couldn’t get over the pass. Worse than that, there was no skiing. Wet, heavy spring snow can bring about horrific avalanches, and the French Mountain Patrol insisted the snow would have to stop for twenty-four hours for them to dynamite the pistes to ensure the safety of the skiers. By day nine we were eating sardines and crackers in the hotel lobby three meals a day. We all anxiously awaited the first new truck deliveries over the pass. There was no such luck, but after ten days the snow stopped and cars were allowed on the roads. The ski patrol announced that skiing would resume in thirty-six hours, but ten days of no food and no skiing equalled no fun in our book, so dad piled everyone in the van and drove all day across France to Paul Bocuse’s restaurant in Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or in Lyon. Looking back, I can tell you that trekking to the absolute last, physical place you can get to, with the goal in mind to seek out a unique food experience, is the best travel advice that I ever learned, and I learned it from my father. He walked the walk.

Now remember, in the 1970s Bocuse’s restaurant was universally regarded as the world’s finest. Today, the idea that a chef’s food is only as good as his ingredients isn’t novel. Neither is the concept that simple food can be as good as, if not better than, highly complicated, technique-driven food. However, Bocuse cooked with a reverence for tradition and with a child’s curiosity in a time when heavy, highly stylised cooking was still the norm. Instead of elaborate sauces and ornate presentations, Bocuse relied on the fresh ingredients of Lyon and provincial France.

What was even more unusual was to see a vanload of Zimmerns and Vales (we always travelled with my dad’s best
friend and his family) and one Wakabayashi (my best friend Clark often joined us) pull into the driveway at Bocuse – four of us kids, no less! We had no reservation but got seated anyway, and as I walked through the restaurant, I can clearly remember the images of kitchen help, women in their fifties in traditional long skirts and head coverings, running out into the gardens for the season’s first herbs.

The dining room was ornate by any standards, impressive to a young man back then, and I was intimidated. Who wouldn’t be? But the aromas were deep and exhilarating, and many dishes were still being served and finished tableside. The action was intense. Everyone ordered a few courses; I think the adults ordered two first courses and a main. I remember the look of shock on my father’s face when I spoke, finally, to our captain, choosing my meal last as is still my habit, handing my menu back to the tuxedoed server and confidently ordering the chef’s tasting menu. Dad just shook his head in disbelief. He exuberantly supported my food life, but plonking down a few hundred dollars for the fine dining version of a Happy Meal wasn’t his idea of a good time.

I began to sweat, literally, as the first course arrived: it was a small pyramid, no bigger than a thumb tip, of mousse de foie gras, silky and unctuous, reeking of sauternes. When the waiter clearing it asked me if I liked the foie, I told him if he had another I would eat it right then and there. Was this guy polite or just a moron? I had licked my plate. Actually licked it! The meal, my meal, proceeded onward. I think I had four courses before the entire table was served a balloon of truffle soup
en croute,
arguably the hottest dish in the world that year. In February of 1975, Bocuse had served his famous
soupe aux truffes
for a presidential luncheon at the Élysée Palace on the day he was awarded the Légion d’honneur; ever since that day, the soup has been served at the restaurant as
Soupe aux truffes noires V.G.E.
– V.G.E. being the initials of the then French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The soup came in an enormous white bowl (technically a
gratinée lyonnaise
), crowned with a thin, brittle, buttery dome of puff pastry.

I think I got my first food woody when I tasted that dish. Deep and forested, the soup’s truffle intensity came on like a freight train, and in the bottom of the bowl, hidden beneath the consommé, was a
torchon
of foie gras and a fistful of sliced black Périgord truffles. I ate crayfish
au gratin,
and salt cod brandade served bubbling and hot in the style of Nîmes, sea bass and bream, trout and veal, beef and chicken, and of course I ate the chef’s famous Bresse chicken with morels and cream cooked inside a pig’s bladder, carved tableside and served like an antique, with rice and a small medley of vegetables. It was a revelation. I had never tasted mushrooms like this, seen truffles slid under the chicken’s skin before, or seen a pig’s bladder at all. The effect it had on me was staggering. I knew then and there that I would work at and live a food-driven life.