Taste Beyond Flavor
How art expanded my definition of taste in San Miguel
I have come to believe that there are a handful of places on this earth each one of us is meant to find.
Inexplicable and inevitable connections to these places pierce something deep inside of us.
They permeate our senses, souls and memories and redefine the parameters of our passions, identities and pursuits.
These places are at once an oasis, a laboratory and a playground. They settle and recharge us, challenge and provoke us and surprise and delight us.
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico is one such place for me. I have been eager to reexamine San Miguel through one of my Tessera reflections as I suspect doing so will reveal unmined meaning and virtue.
A friend and I visited San Miguel at the end of 2021. The world was finally out and about again. San Miguel was just tipping to the masses as the new it destination. Though I had done it many times before, celebrating the start of a new year on the road suddenly felt like a blessing and a sacred badge of honor.
In the back half of 2021, I had been on a breakneck mission to make up lost time for places unseen during the Covid lockdown. San Miguel marked my fifth and final trip that year out of the continental U.S.
I can remember absorbing tremendous energy from my travels during this unprecedented season of reopening and renewal. Even without intentions set, an emerging purpose on my horizon or enough space to fully digest what I was experiencing, I recognize now that travel was starting to awaken and affect me in ways it had never done before.
As it patiently primed me for what still lay in wait years ahead, I found myself more intuitively and consistently turning to taste and creativity for inspiration and joy on the road.
My main travel objective remained restoration through escape but something I couldn’t yet name inside of me was directing what caught my attention and shaped my movement.
I couldn’t have identified it then, but I was finally turning to travel to explore the world more meaningfully through the lenses of what I loved. It was during this window that travel felt like an insatiable craving begging me to feed it with sharper self-awareness and a stronger, more urgent sense of self-discovery.
In 2021, it would take me through Croatia, back to Venice, inside the electric vibrancy of Berlin and into the artistic and soulful paradise that is San Miguel de Allende. The only way it seemed I could quiet its unrelenting call to adventure was to move with clearer, more deliberate direction towards my passions and proclivities. In doing so and unbeknownst to me, I was putting up the scaffolding for my ikigai, my life’s purpose.
The timing of this specific reflection once more feels serendipitous and purposeful. Even more so, as I’ve spent the last several weeks sharpening my thesis around Intentional Travel and the role our memories, senses and mind, body, gut and soul play in shaping how we internalize travel’s transformative motion and meaning.
Initially, I questioned if I passed through San Miguel too soon to gather and glean all that was meant for me there. The deeper I dig, however, the more it proves to be just the lived lesson I needed to have, at just the right time.
Two places I eventually turn for fleshing out memories of my travels are my iPhone’s photo gallery and Google Maps. But in striking comparison to the rich and colorful mental images I conjure up at the mere mention of San Miguel, I find myself scrolling a short list of hurried snaps and sloppy compositions instead. The lack of food pics in a town with a sensational culinary scene stuns me the most.
I wish desperately to go back in time and chronicle this journey with the delicate, discerning eye it deserves.
Not all is lost. Clicking through my saved green flags in Google Maps does bring back quite an unexpected flood of memories. While I know there won’t be any digital corroboration for these smoked out bites and sips and undocumented detours and collisions, I am grateful to have jarred loose more of what I love about this charming town and its people.
I remember a once forgotten dinner at El Manantial and then another on the rooftop at Trazo 1810. My mind floats back to browsing the stalls at Ignacio Ramirez Market and popping in and out of artisan shops lining the storied Calle Recreo. My only vividly recalled memory of flavor makes my mouth water as I relive the smells, sights and tastes of a completely next-level, epic brunch spread at The Rosewood Hotel, an unplanned gift from the travel gods after our flight was delayed and pushed back a day.
It’s hard to resist the lure of all I’ve stirred up in going back there. Sub-zero Chicago temperatures are no match for the teleporting magic of San Miguel. I feel the warmth of its golden sunshine on my arms as its crisp winter breeze cools my face.
I am jostled from my daydream by the realization I was never going to find proof San Miguel had affected me so deeply by combing through a photo feed. All the proof I ever needed was already safe and perfectly accessible in just the format I need right inside of me.
Now, the abundance of San Miguel’s flavors, textures and colors come together with profuse and prolific clarity and resonance.
I am – every part of me – mind, body, gut and soul – a living testimony of exactly how San Miguel moved me. And when I sit in stillness with that realization, a most spectacular perspective on “why” San Miguel emerges.
While quite uncharacteristically I can’t recall so many of the plates and flavors here, it’s not because I didn’t find taste that moved me. Taste, my compass didn’t fail me on the streets of San Miguel. It simply and unselfishly fixed my focus on something else. Something that was always meant to find me in this very place.
Something that from this trip forward would calibrate, underscore, complement and accentuate Taste for the rest of my life.
Art.
The art scene in San Miguel is like no other place I have ever been. I was ecstatic to discover just how much it stretched and sprawled across the Centro Histórico, San Miguel’s old town. Galleries, workshops and artisan boutiques were everywhere, nestled in alongside the city’s many restaurants, bars and hotels, down unassuming side streets and perhaps my favorite – clustered together at the Fábrica La Aurora, a converted textile factory.
San Miguel is truly an artist’s paradise.
What I loved most and was struck most by, is art here was not pretentious or intimidating. It was approachable. There was something for everyone.
This democratization of art and creative endeavor from end to end made the scene in San Miguel all the more endearing and compelling to explore. For a new and novice art collector in particular, it was also a welcoming and easy way to get started. And get started I did. So much so, I came home with five pieces.
I bought a trio of abstract oil paintings from a young emerging artist on exhibit at the Fabrica La Aurora. I knew I had to have them the moment I laid eyes on them.
I can still remember the way I felt when I saw the oils on display in the window of Daniel Rueffert’s gallery. My friend and I had just finished a late lunch across the street at The Restaurant. The gallery was closed but I was immediately taken by the works of this local icon, known in San Miguel and throughout Mexico for his post-impressionist style. His use of color, the texture that comes from his palette knife strokes, the light and shadows and above all the mood – they entrance.
I was smitten. It took a couple of days, but I finally made the move, to make one my own.
The very first piece I bought in San Miguel and how it came to find its place on the wall above my bar is a lesson in the mysterious ways art can move us. I had just popped into a fabulous gallery with huge paintings, that while not my style were impressive and mesmerizing, nonetheless. Just before I turned to leave, a painting from the back of the room, unlike any of the others on display, caught my eye and hijacked my full attention.
I naturally assumed because it was so out of place here, it had to be outrageously expensive. But I took a chance and I asked the owner to tell me more about it. His eyes lit up and my heart started to sink a little knowing I was about to walk head on into a potentially embarrassing situation.
But the piece was not expensive. It was quite affordable in fact. As it turns out, the work that had just taken my breath and quickened my pulse was the creative genius of another artist in the man’s family – his four-year-old son!
Sold.
As if to signal inspiration can, will and should come from anywhere, San Miguel laid out the works of a local legend, a rising star and young prodigy with a paintbrush before me. It opened up my entire being to recognizing and absorbing the complementary, additive powers of creativity.
Over the years, by sensing how creativity has hummed faithfully behind every nudge and force that moved me, I have come to add exponentially more shape, texture and depth to my writing, my purpose and to Taste.
I have no doubt this reflection helped me metabolize and manifest those last bits of meaning from San Miguel. And I have no doubt that my feet landed in San Miguel just as and when they should have. I also have no doubt that only in looking back right now could I see what moving in San Miguel really set in motion – me.
Every week, I send one new Tessera Blog on taste, travel and the truths we collect along the way. If this piece resonated, I’d be honored if you’d share or subscribe.
