The Future is Ancestral
Following Taste, Finding More
Baldio | Mexico City, Mexico
The best and only way I can explain it is I arrived at Baldio in Mexico City ready to feast. From the moment I took my seat at the counter, I pored over the menu trying to maximize the number of dishes and flavors I could try while saving just the right amount of room at the end for dessert – a caramelized banana cake – that had caught my eye the moment I made the reservation.
Baldio has a more unconventional concept than most restaurants but a familiar commitment to the land, its people and their culinary roots. Wherever I chose to dine in Mexico City, I felt that reverence baked into every dish, mixed into every cocktail and set delicately on every table.
Baldio’s concept pushed that one step beyond. They are Mexico’s only zero-waste restaurant and in being so, they have found innovative ways to generate even more taste on the plate for their guests. They also hold Mexico City’s only Green Michelin-star. To partake here was to subscribe to their belief that sustainability didn’t have to be a crutch; it could be a catalyst for creativity.
And it was. One could literally taste that.
That banana cake? They emulsify the banana peel, and it becomes part of the dish instead of part of a landfill. What really inspired me was, it wasn’t just sustainability for the sake of the environment, it was sustainability with a deep nod of appreciation to the people and customs rooted in the land.
Baldio was admirably channeling Taste toward a cause and commitment to preserving and protecting what’s come before in the hopes that those practices and legacies would continue to flourish and nourish us. Dining here felt almost spiritual.
Food and drink were just one expression of the richer, more impactful story they were trying to impart and impress. While dish after dish was a gift for stomach and soul, it was Baldio’s staff t-shirts of all things that moved me. They read El Futuro es Ancestral (The Future is Ancestral). I immediately copied it down. Something in these words had activated something mysterious and urgent inside of me.
I had walked into Baldio, and into Mexico City too, in fact, ready to run a menu like a program, but what I got was so much more than fed and full. For perhaps the first time ever, I was invited to dine with a different sense of mindfulness, obligation and most definitely connectivity. Up until that point I had venerated Taste as a multi-sensorial experience, as art, as calling and purpose, and now I could see it as a heartbeat that connects our present and our future to our past.
Taste wasn’t just my compass, it was ours.
