A visit to Guadalajara turns out to be a playground for food and flavours, and incredible artistry at every turn
Manuel is on the field in Jalisco, Mexico, before the sun rises. He’s armed with a razor-sharp, round scythe-like tool, dressed in jeans, long sleeves and a baseball cap.
His job is to manually trim, layer by layer, the sharp fronds from the massive blue agave plants to get to the core — the heart of the plant.
He will work for hours before the sun is too hot in these fields outside the bucolic town of Tequila. There is no machine to do the job, just brute force and frequent blade sharpening as Manuel demonstrates the work he has performed for decades. The backdrop is row upon row of the distinctive blue agave plants, framed against the striking red soil.
It takes seven years for a blue agave plant to mature for harvesting. It then takes seven kilos of the heart of the plant to make one litre of tequila. This is not your spring break tequila, neither in taste nor price: it is balanced, fragrant and deserving of your respect.
This is a country of effort and care. Like so much of what Mexico offers, attention to detail and pride of workmanship is the modus operandi. Once in another Mexican town, Puerto Escondido, I had to wait twice as long for an ice cream cone to be filled because the person making the cone started over again as she wasn’t satisfied with her first attempt at perfectly rounded scoops. It might not have made a difference to me, but it did to her. In the vernacular: nothing here is half-assed.
Ruano crafts food with complex, layered tastes and clever presentations. His cecina dry beef appetizer is paper thin and melts in your mouth with a lovely salty taste heightened by guacamole and morita chili sauce. His mains are evocative: pork jowl with bean reduction, chicharron and chorizo powder, or the rich and tender braised veal with spiced chiliatole and bean confit. There are some dishes with insects — for the adventuresome. The attention to detail and the building of flavours create results that give this place the buzz it deserves. Be sure to try his rice pudding with cinnamon ice cream, toasted chocolate and soy milk flakes — this is nothing like what your mother made. Everyone should have a Ruano in the pantry.
Breakfast and lunch in Guadalajara don’t disappoint either. Birote, unique to this city and a staple of its cuisine, is a dense, chewy bread served traditionally alongside little pots of cottage cheese with chili oil and salsas — from the mild, to the heat of a rocket launch.
Breakfast — as any Mexican will tell you — is sacrosanct, and birote is typically served to start. Want authentic? Yunaites, a restaurant in the Mercado Centenario in the colonial area of Guadalajara, serves traditional corn tortillas stuffed with cheese and tender corn-leaf shoots, or breakfast bowls of tortilla with salsa, beans, avocado and topped with an egg.
Mora is a proud, third-generation charro, which is like a cross between a cowboy and a rancher. Charros are more like a medieval knight with an equipment upgrade. This is propriety: charros form a brotherhood where young boys may start to train before they are 10 years old and learn the skills of lassoing and horsemanship passed down through generations.
Between the meals, tequila tastings and charros performances is the beauty of art at every turn with neo-classical and gothic architecture in the historic centre, spires that dot the landscape, and massive art installations that rise up from the main streets.
Orozco epitomizes the notion of the tortured artist. Some of his works were destroyed in the U.S. in the early 1900s because he was seen to be immoral. He struggled for artistic recognition early on, but his murals in Guadalajara, titled Man of Fire, are referred to as the Sistine Chapel of the Americas. The murals are massive, spectacularly avant garde and were among those that influenced American painter Jackson Pollock.
There’s a humorous saying: Better dead than simple. It’s an expression from the El Parian cantina, which is the largest in Latin America and features more than a dozen restaurants, mariachis and dance performances every day for which everyone puts in the effort and dresses at their absolute best.
That saying could well be the mantra for Guadalajara.
If you go
The writer was a guest of Flair Airlines, which neither read nor approved this story.