Mexican cuisine crosses borders into upscale territory

Nation's Restaurant News, May 17, 2004 by Amy Spector

The recent metamorphosis of the nuevo Latino restaurant Y Arriba Y Arriba in Anaheim, Calif., at the Downtown Disney mall, into the Patina Group's first Mexican restaurant,Tortilla Jo's, signals more than a change of ownership or interior design. It reflects the elevation of Mexican cuisine and the growing interest in Mexican products in this country.

California has countless casual-dining Mexican restaurants, but few boast the size or visibility of Tortilla Jo's, whose 18,000-square-foot venue is a prominent part of the Disneyland Resort's public-access complex. Even fewer have showcased Mexican wines on their beverage lists. Tortilla Jo's customers can choose from 13 bottlings, several of which are offered by the glass.

It's not that restaurateurs have lacked interest in Mexican wines, which date back to the arrival of Spanish colonists and missionaries in the 1500s. Ron Salisbury, the third-generation patriarch of the El Cholo chain, remembers sampling the wines 20 years ago and having trouble finding a brand that produced a consistent bottling.

Also, many of the boutique wineries in Baja California that create the finest examples have not made their way north of the border, according to Los Angeles Times staff writer and Mexican wine connoisseur Barbara Hansen.

But as Mexican fare continues its upscale march--led by pioneers like Chicago's Topolobampo and followed by New York's Zarela's and bicoastal Maya, Senor Fred in the L.A. suburb of Sherman Oaks, and Crystal City, Va.'s upcoming Oyemel--the demand for upscale Mexican products has increased as well.

Gary Sehnert's San Diego-based Wines of Mexico has helped restaurateurs, like Rick and Deann Groen Bayless of Topolobampo and Andre Guerrero of Senor Fred, find Mexican wines for their menus. Sehnert says the demand has grown from several hundred cases of wine exported six years ago to several thousand in 2003. Although much of the focus has been on the wines from Baja California, Sehnert suggests keeping an eye on the emerging wine trade from the states of Zacatecas, Queretaro and Coahuila, where Casa Madero has been operating a vineyard since 1597, he claims.

At a recent dinner sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Wine & Food, Senor Fred's executive chef, Juan-Carlos Leon, and restaurant chef-partner, Andre Guerrero, stunned participants with a five-course pairing of Mexican wine and food. The chefs tapped Ralph Amey, a chemistry professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and author of a guide to Baja California wines, to pair the beverages.

What excites Guerrero about such dinners, he says, is the opportunity they provide to an enormous pool of Mexican culinary talent in the restaurant industry who never have been able to express professionally their native cuisine. Leon is a perfect example: His first job in the United States was with a Japanese chef in a Euro-Asian fusion restaurant, where Leon "learned to speak Japanese before he learned to speak English," Guerrero observes. Leon then went on to work for Wolfgang Puck's fine-dining-restaurant division before leading the staff at Senor Fred. For the first time in his 14-year-long career as a chef, Leon is able to draw on his childhood food memories.

Of course, training Mexican chefs to cook what comes naturally will not come easily, as Patina Group co-founder and vice president Octavio Becerra learned. At Tortilla Jo's there were heated arguments in the kitchen over the best way to prepare a ceviche, assemble a mole or season the pork for carnitas as the recipes were being conceived, he says. Even Becerra himself, who has worked side by side with Joachim Splichal for 20 years, is treading new, but familiar, water--and wine.