The tale of the Chicagoan-in-Mexico usually goes something like this: Chicagoan picks a destination—Mexico City, let’s say. Upon hearing that he’s going to Mexico City, his friends spill over with recommendations. The Zócalo, they say, is really something. The cathedrals—they’ll change your life. And the museums? Some of them take an entire day to get through, but no son buenos—son muy buenos.
But the truth is, all the Chicagoan really wants to do is eat. In his luggage he carries scraps of napkins scribbled with the recommendations of people he’s met in bars. His first stop is a hip marisquería for tuna tostados, then a random panadería for dessert. Dinner is at the best restaurant in Polanco. The next day, it’s nothing but street food.
It’s all delicious, every bite. And yet he can’t shake a certain feeling. “It’s incredible,” he says to his traveling companion and fellow Chicagoan, who just shakes her head in disbelief. “It tastes just like home.”
The secret of Chicago is not that we have beaches to rival Malibu’s. It’s not that the gorgeous summers make up for our overhyped winters. It’s not even that our real estate, when put up against that of comparable cities, is almost criminally affordable.
No, our secret is the perfect 3 A.M. steak taco from La Pasadita, in Wicker Park. It’s the mocha tres leches cake from Bombon Bakery, so moist it’s a miracle it stays on your fork. It is, furthermore, the fact that, while Texas has its queso and California its fish tacos, within our city limits lies a conglomerate of Mexican restaurants so vast and varied, so attuned to regional nuance, that no other city in America can compare.
In fact, some cities in Mexico can’t compare either. Rick Bayless—the chef who 18 years ago gave Chicago Topolobampo, its first fine-dining restaurant dedicated to regional Mexican food—believes that Chicago may have the best tortillas not just in the country, but in the world. He tells the story of trying to find a tortillería in Oaxaca that still made tortillas from fresh, stone-ground masa (as opposed to Maseca, the powdered stuff so many tortillerías now use). “They only had one,” he remembers. Meanwhile, in Chicago, a city some half a million Mexicans call home, “There are a dozen tortilla factories making fresh masa every single day—sometimes three or four times a day.”
It’s possible to spend an entire day hopping from one tortillería to the next—El Milagro alone has three locations in the city, some of which double as taquerias. But the fact is you don’t have to. Because from South Side taquerias like La Cecina (don’t miss the namesake citrus-tinged beef) to Maiz, in Logan Square (where fresh masa is converted into heavenly tamales and sopes the size of dinner plates), fresh tortillas are not just a matter of pride but are second nature. “That’s the great thing about Chicago,” says Bayless. “It embraces the real thing.”
In the 1960s, the expansion of the University of Illinois at Chicago forced hundreds of Mexicans out of their West Side homes. They settled south of the city’s center, in a neighborhood called Pilsen, where today a uniquely Mexican energy bubbles up from the sidewalks. Even the El station here is different—it’s painted with colorful murals, promises of the lively culture you’re about to encounter.
Chicagoans come here in droves and cram into places like bustling Nuevo Léon, which plates piles of refried beans and taquitos with incredible speed and consistency. Or Carnitas Uruapan, where the question is not whether you’ll order the luscious, eponymous pork, but how many pounds of it you’ll ask for. (The restaurant also offers menudo and fresh chicharrones, crunchy pork rinds that melt in the mouth.) The truly dedicated go farther southwest, to another Mexican neighborhood, Little Village (or La Villita), where restaurants are so densely packed on a single strip that they seem to bleed together. There, diners seek out the tacos at La Casa de Samuel, or order a cool agua fresca right on the street.
Lately, thanks to the recent opening of the National Museum of Mexican Art and other newcomers such as Vespine Gallery and EXPgallery, Pilsen has also morphed into an arts district of sorts. Young creative types and wannabes pile into Café Jumping Bean, where they lose themselves in their lattes and laptops, then retreat to Skylark for beers and fried chicken. Or they grab a bottle of wine and head to Eusevio Garcia’s Mundial Cocina Mestiza, a sunny, slightly upscale BYOB that offers Mediterranean dishes like risotto-crusted halibut alongside its squash-blossom empanadas.
While some lament the encroaching gentrification of the area, others take solace in the fact that Mexican Chicago no longer ends at Pilsen’s borders. Neighborhood favorite Bombon Bakery (which also has a location in Little Village) became so overwhelmed with requests to deliver to the Loop that its owners recently opened a Bombon Café in that part of town. “You wouldn’t believe how many people in the Loop buy a tres leches cake for their office,” says chef-owner Laura Perea.
On Sundays, a three-block stretch south of the Loop is transformed into New Maxwell Street Market, a flea market with the same frantic, delirious energy as the famous Merced Market in Mexico City. Just like at Merced, there are plenty of discounted T-shirts and radio parts to be had. But there is also fresh fruit and produce and, more important, makeshift restaurants constructed of folding tables and plastic tarps. Regulars wax poetic about the fiery cheese-and-pepper tamales at Tamal Oaxaca and the saucy huaraches at Rico’s Huaraches (especially those topped with succulent asada), but there are also lesser-known, unmarked stands that serve up juicy barbacoa tacos that can run to the ethereal. In a city where the police do their best to prohibit a real street-food culture from taking off, the market is the primary recourse for addicts in need of a fix.
Miles away, on the northwest side of the city, another habit is being enabled at Sol de México, the kitchen that Clementina Flores calls home. If Bayless is the king of Chicago’s Mexican cuisine, Clementina is its queen, and Geno Bahena, her son—well, he’s certainly one of its princes. Bahena worked with Bayless at Topolobampo for more than a decade before opening Chilpancingo and Ixcapuzalco (both are now closed). He put his mother on mole duty at both places, and mole fanatics have been dreaming of her ever since. At Sol de México, Flores makes the sauces and kneads the masa while chef-owner (and son-in-law) Carlos Tello works the grill. Flores swears that Bahena is now better at making mole than she is, but one taste of the chorizo-laced mole manchamenteles that tops Tello’s pork chops will have you wondering if that could be possible.
Still, Geno Bahena is thriving—he opened Delicioso y Sabroso, near the Chicago-Indiana border, in May, and he’s having great success with Tepatulco, a neighborly outlet known for its fantastic queso fundido. Perhaps not surprisingly, his main competition comes from other Bayless protégés. Two years ago, Raul Arreola left Topolobampo after 11 years to open Fonda del Mar, a modern-day marisquería where the focus is on the seafood but the standout dish is the impossibly tender lamb chops in mole negro. And in 1995, Priscila Satkoff, Bayless’s personal assistant, opened ¡Salpicón!, which to this day is packed with people who know it’s the only place in town bold enough to offer quail in ancho chile sauce and recommend washing it down with a Gewürztraminer from Sandusky, Ohio.
Though not a student of the Bayless school, Dudley Nieto draws a following wherever he goes. In January he opened Xel-Ha, a Yucatecan spot whose citrusy venison tacos, among other things, have been wowing diners from the get-go. (Nieto’s reputation for offering extensive tequila lists and perfect Margaritas hasn’t hurt.) These days, local websites are also buzzing about another Yucatecan place, Xni-Pec. Located in the sleepy industrial suburb of Cicero, it’s a place nobody would have given a second glance—until word got out about its luscious cochinita pibil and its complex relleno negro, a mixture of chicken, beef, and eggs in a spicy sauce that tickles the back of your throat.
Chef-owner Antonio Contreras is thrilled about the packed dining room, but he’s a little bewildered by his patrons’ blasé attitude toward Mexican food. “They don’t realize how good they have it,” he says, comparing Chicago’s Mexican restaurants to the less-than-memorable meals he’s sampled at places in Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Antonio. “But sometimes in life, you don’t know it until you lose it.”
Luckily, we here in Chicago aren’t in danger of doing that anytime soon.