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Home / Travel / Restaurants
Restaurants

A Look Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Menu

By Casey Hatfield on May 19, 2017

Noma Mexico is shining a spotlight on the depth of Mexican cuisine by showcasing the country’s best little known ingredients.

© Laura Sant

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René Redzepi is nothing without his ingredients. Though not the first to champion a close relationship between restaurant and farmer, menu and seasonality, chef and forager, he’s largely credited with setting off the current movement around the world. It’s little surprise then that the Noma chef would apply the same theories to his pop-up restaurant in Tulum, a stylish beach town on Mexico’s Caribbean Coast, knowing full well his ingredients would make or break his tasting menu.

So he dispatched a research team last October to scour the country. The search led his staff (some traveled more than 7000 kilometers in all) to small farmers and villagers who have been growing organic ingredients for Noma in their backyards. “It is very important that we are supporting the local farmers and producers. It is because of them and their efforts, that we are able to find such amazing produce,” says Rosio Sanchez, a former Noma pastry chef who also owns a taqueria in Copenhagen’s Torvehallerne Market. “It was a little reminder to us and people in Mexico that the amount of amazing products here is never ending.”

Getting these ingredients to the open-air restaurant, located in a tangle of jungle on Tulum’s busy Tulum-Boca Paila road, across from the upscale La Zebra beach hotel, in the necessary quantities has been no easy task. Noma Mexico has been working closely with organizations like Fondación Haciendas del Mundo Maya, a non-profit that helps support Mayan communities and their food traditions, to get ingredients from the garden to the plate. Dishes such as octopus with dzikilpak, a traditional Mayan sauce, and salbute, a puffed deep-fried tortilla garnished with chapulines (grasshoppers), showcase the country’s natural bounty, but Sanchez insists they’re not making Mexican food per se. “We took inspiration from Mexican culture and allowed the Mexican products to lead,” she says.

Indeed, a deep respect for Mexican culture emanates from every aspect of Noma Mexico, from the Mayan women in embroidered dresses who sit in front of the raised kitchen, almost like a stage, making tortillas by hand, to the Mexican made pottery and baskets used to serve.

During our meal, we got the chance to learn more about some of the most unique and delicious ingredients that make up the worth-every-penny $600 menu. Read on for a closer look.

 
Casey Hatfield

Ixil Onions

This rare onion variety grows in very particular soil conditions in the Yucatán Peninsula. Sweet and easy to chop (it’s soft like a shallot and doesn’t make your eyes water), Mayans mainly use it to build flavor as a condiment or as part of a sauce. At Noma, Redzepi uses the delicate onion to create a play on a traditional dzikilpak—a pumpkin seed–and-tomato sauce made in many Mayan households—using the root vegetable’s stem and bright purple head and pepitas (see more below). The silky brown concoction is topped with a single octopus tendril so tender you can cut it with a spoon. Families in Yaxunah, a village deep in the Yucatán (about a two-hour drive from Mérida), are growing this ingredient for Noma Mexico in their homes’ gardens.

Casey Hatfield

Yaxunah’s Naal Teel Corn

I went with Traspatio Maya, the gourmet food division of Fondación Haciendas del Mundo Maya, to visit Yaxunah and dine at Los Compadres—the one-table restaurant when Redzepi tried the tortillas he’d declare the best he ever tasted.  These fluffy handmade creations are made of freshly milled Naal Teel Corn, the heritage corn from the village. (Corn is the basis of the Mayan diet and seeds are passed from generation to generation.) Women from the village make the tortillas by hand each night (groups rotate so all the women from the village get a chance), and they come filled with Cerdo Pelón (roasted suckling pig) with a side of local banana that tasted like sweet plantain. Our server instructed us to slice up the banana and add it to the taco for one sublime combination of sweet, smoky, and salty.

To visit Los Compadres contact the travel agency Catherwood Travel (catherwoodtravels.com), or call Los Compadres directly at 521-985/858-1189.

Casey Hatfield

Piñuela

This fruit native to the Yucatán is closely related to a pineapple plant. It’s so acidic, if you eat too much of it your mouth will blister. (At Noma Mexico it is blanched until the interior is white and sweet.) As a wild ingredient that grows in the bush (wild animals enjoy it too), Piñuelas can be scarce. Traspatio Maya has helped supply Noma Mexico with the ingredient from the villages of San Antonio Chun and Tixcacaltuyub. At Noma, the fruit arrived at the table splayed and topped with grasshopper paste and cilantro flowers. We did as we were told and ate it with our hands. It made my mouth pucker, but I enjoyed the earthy sweetness.

Casey Hatfield

Chaya Leaves

Many Mayan’s grow this hearty green leafy vegetable in their backyards and with the help of Traspatio Maya, that’s exactly where Noma is sourcing it from. Many traditional Mayan dishes use chaya, including Brazo de Reina, tamales made with pumpkins seeds, eggs, and masa, or as a popular taco filling when chopped and cooked with egg. At Noma Mexico, chefs are flipping the script, serving the chaya leaf as a tortilla filled with plump Bahia Falsa oysters served alongside a kelp bulb injected with a mussel-flavored michelada.

Casey Hatfield

Melon Clam from the Sea of Cortez

One of the most memorable dishes at Noma in Copenhagen is the Mahogony clam, a chewy and slightly sweet shellfish in a reddish-brown shell that can live to be over a hundred years old. The giant clams from the Sea of Cortez are not as old, but they are similar in size and have a sweet flavor and chewy texture. For the pop-up’s Melon Clam dish, the raw clam is dusted with powder made of different beach greens foraged in the Yucatán and garnished with a very rare little orange called Naranjita de San José. It’s sour but has enough sweetness that it can be eaten whole, skin included. Only a few families in Yaxunah and Tixcacaltuyub still grow them.

Casey Hatfield

Melipona Honey

Melipona honey comes from the stingless Xunan Kab bee of the Yucatán Peninsula. Richer in nutrients than any other type of honey in the area and full of medicinal properties, it’s traditionally used in Mayan medicine. The bees have nearly become extinct due to disease and predation. At Noma Mexico, honey—obtained from a town in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site eight hours from Tulum—is used in the cold brew coffee sourced from the hills of Chiapas. It’s served with a chili filled with chocolate from native Jaguar cacao.

Casey Hatfield

Salt from Celustun

Noma is using Espuma de Sal, an artisanal and mineral rich salt harvested along the beaches of Celustun in the Yucatán, to flavor its dishes. It’s still extracted the same way Mayans began cultivating it 1,500 years ago: running sea foam through a sieve to harvest very fine salt crystals. "To put a pinch of salt finally on your dish is like adding the place you are in," says Redzepi.

Casey Hatfield

Roasted Chapulines

The first time I tried Mexican chapulines (grasshoppers) was in Oaxaca, a region in Southwestern Mexico famous for molé. I remember marveling at how they were piled high in barrels at the market and shoveled into a paper bag and enjoyed as a snack, much like popcorn. Here they get the Noma treatment by being fermented and turned into a dark paste that is salty like soy sauce. A dollop of this is served on the piñuela, but chapulines are also mixed into a cream sauce served with salbute, a puffed, deep fried tortilla typical of the Yucatán. Oaxacan chapulines are also served as a garnish along with dried tomatoes.

Casey Hatfield

Pepitas

Pepita is the local name for the seeds of the xtop pumpkin, a large and strong flavored variety. Producers generally eat the pumpkins themselves and grind the pepitas for selling. At Noma Mexico, they’re being used along with Ixil onions in the dzikilpak sauce with octopus. (Dzikil means pepita and pak means tomato in Mayan.)

Laura Sant

Young Coconut

After dinner, I was welcomed into the kitchen for a close up look at the Noma process. My eyes were immediately drawn to two young chefs cutting young green coconuts in the back with a saw, a labor-intensive job. The coconuts were sourced from Ozkuxcab in the Yucatán and when the stunning dish was brought to us during dinner we were instructed to spoon out, and eat the delicate inner membrane that was topped with lime zest, a dollop of Russian caviar, and sprinkled with “kelp salt” made from seaweed collected at the nearby beaches, dried and broken into little bits.

Casey Hatfield

Coriander

Wispy coriander plants (also known as cilantro) with white flowers seem to thrive in the backyards of Yaxunah. The flowers, sourced from growers in the area, were used to top the piñuelas at the beginning of the meal.

Casey Hatfield

Ibes

Corn, pumpkin, and beans are the basis for the Mayan diet because these ingredients grow symbiotically in the milpa (Mayan field). Noma cooks and layers Ibes, a white bean variety, with other ingredients on the tostada with escamoles, a stunning dish that looks like a tiled mosaic. Escamoles, often referred to as Mexican caviar, are edible ant larvae that are harvested from the roots of agave plants in Central Mexico. The light and crispy tostada is made with corn from Yaxunah.

Casey Hatfield

Bull Horn Flatware

In Yaxunah, villagers are doing more than just growing ingredients for Noma—they’re also producing handcrafts like cutlery and flatware. When I visited, local women were busy producing an order for place settings made out of black bull horn. The pieces were being cut and polished until they had a marble-like sheen.

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