When we think of Mexican food, we automatically imagine certain flavors and ingredients (chiles, beans, tomatoes, mild cheese, tortillas made with corn or flour) and certain basic forms (tacos, enchiladas, tamales, salsas, and so on). Whether our frame of reference is Rick Bayless or Taco Bell, the Yucatán or Amarillo, we generally know more or less what to expect. But sometimes what is actually put on the table in front of us in Mexico itself confounds our expectations, a fact that is perhaps nowhere demonstrated more vividly, or closer to home, than by the “Baja Med” cooking of northern Baja California—food based on the excellent raw materials of the region but owing more to the culinary traditions of Italy, Spain, Provence, and sometimes the eastern Mediterranean than to the cocina mexicana of our imaginations.
I first encountered Baja Mediterranean cooking a few years ago at Laja, Jair Téllez’s culinary oasis in the Valle de Guadalupe, just north of Ensenada in the heart of the Baja California wine country. The delicious food was based on vegetables and herbs just out of the garden, wonderful fish from the nearby Pacific, and locally raised lamb—but it was accented with things like porcini oil, homemade pancetta, baby arugula, and preserved lemon (as opposed to, say, huitlacoche oil, homemade chorizo, baby epazote, and pickled jalapeños). At first this discomfited me. But then it dawned on me that Baja California was as “Mediterranean” in climate, agricultural production, and cultural heritage as what the Spanish used to call Alta California—the part north of the Mexican border. And if restaurants in Santa Monica and Berkeley (and beyond) can draw inspiration from the Mediterranean, why shouldn’t those in this most agreeable corner of Mexico do the same?
Nobody called it “Mediterranean” back then, but there has been Spanish food (above all, paella, which is something of a regional obsession) and Italian food (in many guises) in northern Baja—and specifically in the notorious border town of Tijuana and the lively fishing port of Ensenada—for generations. One of the leading exponents of Baja Mediterranean cooking today, Tijuana’s popular Villa Saverios, in fact, descends from a pizzeria—said to have been the first in Baja—called Giuseppis, opened by a pizza-loving local named Juan Plascencia in 1967.
Plascencia’s son Javier now oversees the family business, which today includes, besides Villa Saverios, four branches of Giuseppis and a “continental” restaurant with Greek and Spanish accents called Casa Plasencia (spelled without the first “c,” as in the city in Spain) in Tijuana and a new “Baja Med bistro” called Romesco, in Bonita, on the American side of the border. The younger Plascencia literally grew up in the business, doing his homework in the kitchens of his father’s places and napping on bags of pizza flour. Later, he joined the culinary program at San Diego Mesa College, took courses at the Culinary Institute of America in the Napa Valley, and worked for several U.S. restaurant and hotel chains before returning home.
Villa Saverios is a terrific place. The dining room is warm and comfortable in a quasi-Tuscan-villa style, with bare wood floors, mottled walls, ample white-napped tables, and a glass room divider etched with images of grapes. In the open kitchen at one end of the room, chefs work with quiet proficiency—Javier Plascencia is himself the executive chef, but the day-to-day cooking is done by a talented, diminutive young man named Manuel Brito—and ovens and grills glow with mesquite embers. “In Tijuana, we love the flavor of mesquite,” says Plascencia. “We grew up eating tacos al carbón on the street, and the meat was always mesquite-grilled.”
Possibly the most definitively Baja Mediterranean dish on the menu is an appetizer of grilled octopus—the little purple kind, like Italy’s moscardini—in a sauce of garlic and red chiles, atop a coarse chickpea purée with a few drizzles of parsley pesto around the edges and small homemade corn tortillas and a pot of dense yogurt on the side. The effect is somehow Middle Eastern, Italian, and Mexican all at once, combining flavors of sea and earth with both heat and cooling acidity. Unconventional ceviches include one of tuna with jalapeños, avocado, ginger, and soy vinaigrette (there have long been Japanese farmers and fishermen here); another of baby abalone—farmed abundantly in northern Baja and a local favorite—with flecks of dried chile and a few twigs of sea bean; and another of scallops with minced Persian cucumber and olives. And speaking of unconventional: Plascencia has created a rosy-hued mussel cream soup with “sea urchin ice cream”—a frozen urchin roe emulsion stirred into the hot liquid—garnished with a slightly sweetened crouton, almost like a slice of biscotti. Extraordinary.
“When we opened Villa Saverios in 2000,” he says, “we were very Italian, and we used mostly imported products. We didn’t even know that there was olive oil in Baja. Today, we use as many Baja products as we can, and not just seafood. And growers work with us.” The quality of Saverios’s produce was demonstrated by a grilled vegetable risotto, inset with tiny haricots verts, baby broccoli, wiry asparagus, and miniature yellow squash, all vivid in flavor and distinctly smoky, and topped with bits of finely chopped roast suckling pig. “This tastes like the countryside,” said somebody at the table. Of which country didn’t seem to matter.
The sign outside la querencia, just across the street from Villa Saverios, reads “Baja Med Cocina.” The young chef-owner, Miguel Angel Yagües, grew up hunting in Baja with his grandfather—“a farmer who owned ranches all over northern Baja”—and fishing and diving off the Baja coast. He studied law in college, but gave it up to go to culinary school in Mexico City, and then opened his own restaurant, the original La Querencia, in 2002 in the laid-back beach town of Rosarito, about 20 miles south of Tijuana. Yagües grows many of the herbs and some of the vegetables he uses on family land, and makes his own sausages and Spanish-style ham.
The new La Querencia—he moved from Rosarito to Tijuana last year—combines a casual, contemporary--industrial look (with concrete floors, lacquered steel tables, and exposed ducts overhead) with low-tech touches like mounted game trophies on the walls, a tropical fish tank at one end of the dining room, and a row of rusty old cooking implements hanging between the open kitchen and the dining room.
Blackboards display the menu. Standard items include baguette sandwiches and an assortment of tacos and burritos—filled with things like smoked marlin, oysters, skate, and roast duck—but there are always specials and surprises. One lunchtime, along with herb-crusted bread served with a ramekin of puréed oysters and tuna (in lieu of butter), I ate a tissue-thin “carpaccio” of grilled beets drizzled with vinaigrette and scattered with crumbles of blue cheese; another carpaccio of duck with preserved lemon, pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, and baby greens; Baja oysters in chipotle cream seasoned with soy sauce and Japanese dried bonito flakes; Ensenada mussels stuffed with a risotto of mushrooms and ancho chiles, resting in a thick, salty broth of roasted red pepper and tomatoes; baby lamb and goat cheese ravioli in red wine sauce enhanced with green chiles, goat cheese, and cream; and grilled mahimahi with its roe sac, also grilled, on the side.
“What I’m doing,” says Yagües, “is really a combination of Mexican, Mediterranean, and Asian. In the future, we won’t call this ‘Baja Med.’ We’ll just call it Baja California cuisine.”
The pioneer of Baja Mediterranean cooking in the modern sense was Benito Molina, who discovered the Mediterranean in a roundabout way: A native of Mexico City, he “somehow,” as he puts it, ended up studying cooking at the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, then cooking in Boston at Todd English’s original, very Mediterranean, Olives. “I walked into Olives,” he remembers, “and my vision of food changed forever. It made so much more sense to me than the traditional French way. I asked myself why I had wasted all that time turning vegetables into those ridiculous shapes.” (Of course, it didn’t hurt that his boss was En-glish’s then sous-chef, Suzanne Goin, now chef-owner of the L.A. restaurants Lucques and A.O.C.)
After a year tending the wood-burning oven at Olives, Molina returned to Mexico City, cooking at several restaurants before ending up at a place called La Mesa de Babette. “This was my crazy period,” he says. “I would make swordfish with ground dried grasshoppers or wild boar and chilmole [dried chile paste] risotto with both land and sea snails. I’d go to the seafood market at four in the morning, look for the weirdest fish possible, and start from there.” Word of his adventurous cuisine traveled, and in 1996 he was hired as chef at La Embotelladora Vieja (“The Old Aging Room”), the restaurant attached to the Santo Tomás winery in Ensenada.
“I came to Ensenada and thought ‘This is paradise,’” recalls Molina. Remembering his Boston-Mediterranean training, he began to serve dishes like Mediterranean-style seafood stew, scallop ravioli in lobster sauce, and rosemary-scented braised lamb shank, in addition to swordfish with pork rinds and chipotles and braised beef tongue with green mole sauce.
In 2000, Molina opened his own restaurant in Ensenada, in partnership with his wife, Solange Muris, also a chef. Dubbed Manzanilla (as in the Spanish olive), the place is modest in size, with about a dozen tables on two levels and walls filled with art, including watercolors of undersea life by Molina himself. Lettering on the outside windows reads: “Rare Mezcal, Fine Wines, Live Abalone.” Seafood is the focus, and shellfish comes in many forms: raw Manila clams, tiny, sweet, and salty, with lime wedges and soy sauce on the side; smoked littleneck clams topped with crumbs of Gorgonzola (much better than it sounds); thin-sliced abalone (from a tank in the kitchen) in a sauce of smoked tomato, epazote, and cream; small Baja-grown Kumamoto oysters lightly mesquite-smoked and glazed with tarragon and dried chile butter.
Tuna is fattened in pens off the coast at Salsipuedes, just north of Ensenada, and while most of it goes straight to Ja-pan, Molina gets a bit of it, serving very thin slices of buttery raw tuna belly flavored lightly with ginger alongside an eloquent tartare of the fish. Calamares Manchez is a dramatic preparation of grilled squid with beets, enlivened with ginger, garlic, assorted chiles, and several kinds of citrus juice, invented by Molina for his friend the architect Alejandro Sanchez. (The name of the dish is a pun: mancha is Spanish for “stain”—as in what you’ll have on the front of your shirt if you’re not careful while you’re eating.) Simply grilled Baja lobster is served with black-bean risotto and a fresh tomato and chile salsa—another veritable definition of the Baja Mediterranean style.
Molina and Muris have just opened a little oyster bar on the Ensenada waterfront, or Malecón, called Muelle Tres. And in warm weather (which in these parts means May through October), they run an open-air grill restaurant called Silvestre (“Wild”) in the Valle de Guadalupe. A single multicourse menu is offered daily, featuring simple dishes like local oysters, cold marinated beef tongue, grilled fish with nopales, and chickpea salad with ancho chile chicken.
The other young culinary star in the Ensenada area is the aforementioned Jair Téllez of Laja. Born in Hermasillo, Sonora, Téllez studied at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan and did a stage at Daniel, then cooked at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mexico City and at La Folie in San Francisco before returning to Baja to open his own place.
His Laja is a spacious, handsome restaurant that suggests a stylish osteria in Italy, with wooden floors, beam ceilings, fieldstone and whitewashed walls, and big, sturdy bare wooden tables. There are two four-course fixed-price menus, changing every week, or a seven-course combination. The raw materials are scrupulously fresh and local, and Téllez’s cooking is superb, expressed with the kind of confident simplicity you’d expect from a place like, say, Chez Panisse.
Having lunch at Laja late last year with Benito Molina and Solange Muris, good friends of Téllez’s, we ate: a straight-forward cream soup of leeks, turnips, carrots, and orange squash; a salad of wonderfully flavorful little greens and herbs with roasted beets; triangles of seared rare bluefin tuna with caramelized bits of roasted eggplant and sweet pepper; big squash ravioli panfried with cheese; meaty, sweet black cod fillets with an assortment of tiny sautéed vegetables (including the smallest okra I’ve ever seen); various cuts of roasted local baby lamb with more beets; and finally, sorbets of orange and anise-flavored pineapple over a pomegranate granita.
“Everything was here,” says Molina, as we finish dessert. “The vegetables, the wine, the olive oil, the best fish in the country… . We just had to see it.” Yet he confesses, he is having second thoughts about the Baja Mediterranean idea. “The truth is,” he says, “I’m not happy with the term now. Yes, we are in the Mexican Mediterranean—but I believe we have to dig deeper into our own roots, too. After all, what is more Mediterranean than the tomato? And the tomato came from here!”
Laja
Km. 83, Carretera Tecate-Ensenada, Valle de Guadalupe (52-646-155-2556)
Manzanilla
Riverol 122, Centro, Ensenada (52-646-175-7073)
Muelle Tres
Boulevard Teniente Azueta 187-b, Centro/Malecón (No phone, but reservations may be made through Manzanilla)
La Querencia
Boulevard Sanches Taboada 3110, Esq. Escuadrón No. 201, Local 1 y 2 Zona Rio, Tijuana (52-664-972-9935)
Restaurante Romesco
4346 Bonita Road, Bonita, CA (619-475-8627)
Villa Saverios
Boulevard Sanches Taboada 3151, Esq. Escuadrón No. 201 Zona Rio, Tijuana (52-664-686-6443)
Silvestre
Km. 73, Carretera Ensenada-Tecate, Valle de Guadalupe (No phone)◊
The Details
Drinking There
The first commercial winery in Mexico opened in 1597, far from Baja California, in the state of Coahuila. Baja got its first winery, Santo Tomás (still going strong), in 1888, but the Valle de Guadalupe, today the heart of the Mexican wine industry, was first planted with grapes commercially only in the 1930s—and most of the top small producers there today have been at it for fewer than a dozen years.
Hugo d’Acosta, a former winemaker for Santo Tomás, is the star of the valley. He makes an elegant unoaked Chardonnay and a silky blend of Tempranillo and Cabernet Sauvignon (the valley’s most expensive wine, commonly priced at $125 or more on local wine lists) under his own Casa de Piedra label, as well as an ever-changing assortment of other wines labeled Acrata, including a red that’s roughly half Grenache and half Carignan with a touch of Duriff. He also works as winemaker or consultant for several other wineries, including the American-owned Adobe Guadalupe, and has just launched another winery called Paralelo, from which he will release two different reds annually, both blended from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Barbera, Zinfandel, and Petite Sirah, but in different proportions, from different vineyards, and aged in different kinds of oak.
Eccentricities like this are common in the valley—all kinds of stuff has been planted here. There are no rules, no sacred traditions. Thus, Antonio Badan, who is of Swiss extraction, makes a white from a patch of Chasselas (the principal wine grape of his homeland), along with an elegant blend of Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Cabernet Sauvignon. Juan Carlos Bravo, the gym teacher at the local school, produces an Andalusian-style white from Palomino, and a luscious old-vines Carignan. Adobe Guadalupe’s rich rosé changes composition every year; the 2002 vintage contained Syrah, Grenache, Nebbiolo, Ugni Blanc, and Moscatel!
A few Baja wines are available in the U.S., mostly in the San Diego area but also elsewhere in California and in New York City. The larger producers, such as San Tomás, are best represented, but to sample most of the better boutique treasures, you’ll have to venture south of the border.
Staying There
Casa Natalie (Km 103.3 Carretera Tijuana-Ensenada, 7263 El Sauzal de Rodríguez; reservations: 888-562-8254; from $252). Ensenada’s only luxury boutique hotel, a converted private villa on the sea with seven suites, all handsomely furnished, as well as a mini-spa and pool. Breakfast and dinner are available to guests only.
Adobe Guadalupe Vineyards & Inn (011-52-646-155-2094; from $168) has six modest but pleasant rooms at one of Baja’s best wineries. Home-style meals are served on request, to guests only.
Las Brisas del Valle (818-207-7130; from $175). A beautiful new Tuscan-style villa on a hilltop overlooking much of the valley, with six attractive guest rooms. Breakfast is served, as is a fixed-price dinner for guests, prepared by V. Omar Garcia Salazar, a young veteran of La Embotelladora Vieja in Ensenada. Eileen Gregory, proprietor of Las Brisas, describes both the hotel and his cooking as (groan) “Mexiterranean.”