It Finally Clicked in Mexico City
How meaning accumulated absorbing culture, taste and collision in Mexico's intoxicating creative capital
Mexico City was a decision made not so much out of the blue, as it has long been a city I’ve admired and wanted to tease apart, but out of sequence. I thought I had other places I was meant to be in the world, first and next. But I didn’t.
The buildup around the summons was almost mystical but searingly persistent and consuming. The mysterious draw started a month after I returned home from a restorative three-week trip to New Zealand. I had learned there, by structuring my itinerary around taste, I could access a higher level of creative energy that awakened and activated me across mind and body, gut and soul.
I would even go so far as to say that in New Zealand I had stood just on the precipice of something real and telling about the shape of my future. The more I traveled there, the more I felt like I had been intentionally knocked off balance. I was moving and tasting leaned in, as if I might tip over, trip over that which was meant to finally find me in Aotearoa.
Whatever “it” was, I felt it hatching most feverishly when I returned home. I am certain something shifted – something that I was meant to see through. But then I entered an agonizing spell of nothing.
In a frenzied state of tilt, I felt desperately stalled and stymied, as if the nullifying grey and mercurial spring of Chicago were draining me minute by minute of any and all momentum. My one and only monocarpic bloom susceptible to frostbite now, stagnation and a traveler’s worst nightmare – inertia.
If I was indeed that close to opening the Pandora’s Box of my purpose and calling, it made sense that Mexico City, and Mexico City alone, felt like the immediate salve. Here, after all, was a destination pulsing with taste and creativity. And I was absolutely ravenous to take long, concentrated hits of both.
I would have said I anchored my trip around three restaurant reservations – Quintonil, Pujol and Rosetta. But the truth is I anchored my trip to Mexico City around seduction and intoxication. I had become drunkenly captivated by its eclectic culinary credentials, its cultural spunk, and its relatable obsession with texture and color. I knew Mexico City had something to offer and I had something in turn I was looking to reignite.
I arrived ready to siphon and ingest.
Of all the places I have ever visited, my movement has never arced and culminated as seamlessly as it did in Mexico City. I was as captivated and hungry once on the ground as I had been throughout my research. And I was as enthusiastic during my research as I have been planning any trip, ever. It was almost as if Mexico City had been waiting for me.
But this was more than a trip landing just right or me finding my rhythm. That elusive, enigmatic feeling that I was off-balance and leaning in was back. I felt like a runner on her block just before the starting pistol fired.
Being here, I could actually feel fragments and moments, thoughts and ideas aligning, coalescing and connecting. It was as if the grand and complete formula of my life’s meaning was being written out on an ethereal blackboard in front of me. Pieces slid into view everywhere I went. As I moved from museum to museum, plate to plate, storefront to storefront, I felt them: click, click, click.
Everything I’d been reading, curious about, following up on, up until that point, was colliding right in front of me.
Again. It was almost as if Mexico City had been waiting for me.
***
I was awestruck the moment I passed through the Anthropology Museum’s ticket hall into its commanding, gasp-worthy courtyard. There, a resplendent fifty-five-foot tall fountain set the tone for the magnitude and sheer beauty of the storytelling inside.
The museum, from start to finish, was curated to perfection. Exhibit halls with soaring ceilings and serene companion gardens housed stunning, sweeping murals, colossal artifacts and meticulously detailed displays. Each hall, elegantly outfitted, transformed the origin stories of man, culture and society into art and cinematic-grade tales of heartbreak, resiliency and triumph.
I had to remind myself more than once to breathe.
A sign at the entrance to the first hall reminded visitors that the difference between humans and other species was our ability to both reason and create culture. I’d heard the first half of this plenty of times, but “create culture” pierced me in a way I didn’t yet know what to do with.
Click.
Later that day I splurged on a chef’s counter lunch with Mexican wine pairing at World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ third-ranked: Quintonil. Those words, that concept, “create culture,” crept back into view here. What Jorge and Alejandra Vallejo have created at Quintonil from service to ambiance to taste is its own living and breathing culture.
Earlier this week in Collision 00009: The Most Important One of All,I shared an encounter that made this culture real for me personally. I had just settled in at my seat when the Maître D’ approached. He noticed I collected pins. The Untethered Traveler-branded shopper that I had checked in with the hostess had over a dozen pins collected from countries I had officially visited as a travel writer.
The Maître D’ then very charmingly exclaimed that I was missing, however, the most important pin of all: Quintonil’s. He then unfastened the Quintonil pin from his lapel and handed it to me. I was absolutely stunned by the gesture. I was grinning ear to ear. When I thanked him later and told him how much the gift meant to me, he humbly explained that these unexpected surprises and delights are ways his team can connect with guests beyond the plate and make them feel special.
The food was beyond. While prepared and plated as the two-Michelin-star restaurant Quintonil was, it was the Maître D’s act of kindness in acknowledging me as generously and creatively as he did that will forever be my connection to Quintonil, Mexico City and a top-ranked restaurant of the world. Culture. Stories that travel.
It also just might be my favorite collision in all my travels so far.
Click.
Everywhere I moved in Mexico City, but it seemed most especially when strolling the lush, vast parks that inevitably connected agenda point A to agenda point B, I walked into more layered moments of alignment and meaning.
Three days into my trip, I had finished reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Not yet ready to move on from the powerful text that I’d spent so much time absorbing, I became obsessed with putting real-world context to this incredible story of resilience. While that would eventually mean a trip to Cape Town and Robben Island later in the summer, for now I was happy to settle for any Mandela trace or breadcrumb.
I noticed how Mexico City named its streets after iconic, notable contributors in the arts, humanities and sciences. There might be a Nelson Mandela street too that I could take a walk down. That’s when I discovered I was staying just one block from the Nelson Mandela Cultural Center. I paid a visit the very next morning and felt just a touch closer to the man who had so deeply moved and inspired me.
Click.
There were also micro-encounters – the smallest collisions with works from artists I had recently discovered like Tarsila Do Amaral, and scholars whose work I was starting to study more intently like Joseph Campbell. Click.
I found myself connecting ingredients and wines back to the first places I ever tried them. Kitchens reminded me of other kitchens. Storefronts and their shopkeepers struck familiar chords. Click.
Even before I left, recent Netflix bingeing on documentaries about the origins of the universe seemed to pave my path to the right here and right now. Click.
I am not so self-absorbed as to believe each one of these clicks had been laid out just for me. But I am convinced that because I was making a sincere effort to be present in my journey of becoming in Mexico City, because I had been putting in the work to follow my passions and proclivities in the first place, I had found flow. Each example, big or small, was stoking my creativity and feeding my stamina, encouraging me to stay on and trust the course and keep building a life around my purpose and calling.
One fortuitous click caught me mid-bite, at Baldio, as I was oohing and ahhing over the best grilled avocados I’m certain I’ll ever eat. I locked in on one of their servers’ t-shirts. It read, “El Futuro es Ancestral“ (The Future is Ancestral).
Baldio is a green-Michelin-star restaurant, the only one in Mexico City and Mexico’s only zero-waste restaurant. The elevated concept is executed flawlessly with a skillful blend of innovation and reverence. Not only had the output on the plate been memorable: flavor-packed grilled avocados, bright heirloom tomato salads, and melt-in-your-mouth grilled fish, but this phrase also felt like an accelerant now to something I barely understood that had been taking shape inside of me.
I carried the residue of that mysterious exchange with me into Pujol the next day. It was Pujol that had first inspired me to consider Mexico City.
Enrique Olvera’s two-Michelin-star Pujol celebrates the long and rich history of Mexico’s relationship to taste. The menu reflects the kitchen’s commitment and deep respect for land and tradition. Each dish is a modern interpretation of Mexico’s regional customs and cuisines. Pujol does all of this with the help of a sexy, open and airy dining room. The space is serenely spectacular.
My tasting there was a serious but unrushed, easy-going experience. I came home with unforgettable memories of an almond soup with fish minilla toast, a never-could-I-ever-imagine zarandeado and a nonnegotiable must-order guava tamale for dessert. My whole body turns to satiated, satisfied mush just typing out those words – guava tamale.
But the real star of the menu is the mole, which punctuates the celebration tasting section of the Pujol menu. Decades ago, I fell madly in love with mole during my college years in southern California. But this mole, the Mole Madre with a Cumin and Peanut Mole, felt like the start of a whole new far more grown-up love affair.
I smelled it before I saw it. When it did arrive, it looked at first like a dish missing its main ingredient. Only it so very, very wasn’t.
There was one glorious and gorgeous flattened dollop of dark brown mole in the center of a big white plate. It sat perfectly positioned inside a bigger circle of black mole. The center mole, as I would come to learn, was old-style, a recipe from the old world. The outer ring was a more modern expression.
“Try each first on their own,” the waiter offered. “And then,” he explained with the uncontained enthusiasm of a knowing gourmand, “go ahead and mix them both together.”
I did just that.
I tasted the old-world one.
And then the modern one.
And then, I leaned forward and mixed them just as he told me to – both together.
I closed my eyes and felt Taste.
Click.
When I opened my eyes again, I thought the future is both. Ancestral and right now. They’re meant to be tasted together.
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The clicks you feel in motion - in a museum, mid-bite, mid-block - are your Mosaic assembling itself in real time. Start uncovering yours.
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