The only thing that distinguishes El Califa de Leon by sight, is the guy whose sole function is to take the cash. Few taquerias splooge on such a luxury, but El Califa needs an efficient system, given the swarms of Americans whose Iphone cameras clash like sabres in front of the plancha.
Those who follow such things will be aware that this hole-in-the-wall taqueria in Mexico City was awarded a Michelin star last year. It’s not the first taqueria to get a star, there’s one in Copenhagen owned by a Noma alumnus. Though fairly traditional, the Danish taco stand does apply some of that contemporary technical magic that you’d expect from an ex-Noma chef, say, cooking the pork in a plastic bag at 68°C. I prefer that no plastic bags are harmed in the tenderisation of the pork, but I’m old school.
I can tell if I’ll like a restaurant by asking a single question – has it been doing the same thing for ever? It could be a fancy French hotel, flambéing a crepe tableside, or St John serving hard boiled eggs to men in suits, Etxebarri with their Xtuleta, a trattoria of your choice. Because pleasure in eating is not simply the action of prepared food on the taste buds. Every gustatory experience is mediated by assumptions, habits and memories. We know how entwined yumminess and familiarity are – think about your favourite childhood dessert. So an eatery’s adherence to food traditions, for me at least, is an important precondition for pleasure.
The chef at El Califa de Leon, in the relatively humble San Rafael neighbourhood of Mexico City, tells me that they’ve been doing exactly the same thing since it opened almost 70 years ago, right down to the salsa recipe. They make no attempts to refine or modernise, and there’s not a plastic bag in sight.
You choose between four cuts of meat, 3 of which are from a cow that was slaughtered this morning, the other is from a pig, whose time of death is not advertised. The meat, the chef proudly tells me, has never seen the inside of a fridge, not even a glance. He peels back a dishcloth to show me the stacks of slithered muscle. They’ve been speckled with pieces of beef fat, which will render and coat the lean cuts when they hit the plancha. They look good, well dried and the vibrant red of haemoglobin-rich beef.
There are no seats, just a narrow bar with standing room for three slender diners to rest their plastic plates. One guy flips the meat, a woman cranks tortillas out of a pillow of masa, cooking them to order.
We each take a Gaonera and a Costilla, which I pair with a can of Canada Dry. Costilla means rib, but this is a thin slice of the belly muscle. The Gaonera is their signature, it’s beef fillet, a cut you rarely encounter in Mexico because they export their fillets to places where people pay a premium for lean, lower-flavour cuts. Here it works well, the rendered beef fat and deep sear boosting the underpowered muscle.
Pink meat, cooked to cuisson, is not the national style. Meat is either cooked til it falls apart (eg Carnitas) or it’s nailed by high heat (such as El Pastor), in which the pleasure is closer to that of crispy bacon – lots of maillard reaction, a deep salty flavour and a total rejection of juiciness. It works, it’s just very different to the European style. Here, the tranche of beef fillet, cooked with a pinch of salt and a few drops of lime juice, is slightly pink! Hallelujah.
The tortilla is tender, almost mallowy, radiating the aroma of toasted corn. Both the meat and the tortilla are the best I’ve had in Mexico, but I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is simply that both elements are at their best – the tortilla only cooked thirty seconds ago and pressed 30 seconds before that. With no moisture lost, it steams as much as it toasts on the plancha.
I keep seeing people describe El Califa as ‘elemental’. As if by distilling tacos to their bare essentials, they have captured nature itself. Frustratingly, I find myself agreeing.
The current Mexico City taqueria du jour, Orinoco, is so dominant that a phenomenon known as Orinocificacion is documented on Tiktok. Taquerias all over the city are copying Orinoco’s red and white branding, and their short but toppings-heavy menu. They offer 6 salsas, roasted onions, a free side of crispy smashed potatoes, pineapple slivers and the usual raw onion / cilantro dice. As a sauce-orientated man who wants always for more, Orinoco is liable to give more pleasure than El Califa. El Califa’s great but sometimes I want a whole apothecary of toppings.
In Mexico it’s surprisingly difficult to get good ingredients. Almost half of the fruit and vegetables are imported, mostly from the US, who’s agricultural output is known to be about as bad as it gets. So, I wondered if this distinguished taqueria would be making its masa from ancestral Mexican maize? On asking, I found that no, the chef did not know where the local tortilleria got it, who delivered the dough each morning. He knew little more about the beef, but as the taqueria’s owner also owns a butchers, we imagine they get fairly good stuff. It seems that traceability and sourcing are not imperatives. Leave that for the likes of Maizajo and Paramo, the forgettable upmarket Mexican restaurants, banging on about heritage blue maize varietals.
I wondered, interrogating the chef while the checks backed up – are traceability and animal welfare bourgeois fetishes? Do they really matter? The chef had no truck with the notion that we must love our livestock. For him, good beef was fresh beef that hadn’t touched a fridge. For me, good beef is pasture-raised and has hung around, maturing in a fridge for at least a month. That’s the beauty of eating food from another tradition, you have to accept that the assumptions you bring to food are just that – assumptions or cultural tastes, and not universal truths.
This leads me to my next question. How, then, can a French tyre manufacturer judge the quality of a taqueria?
When appraising a cuisine you know little about, the best questions you can ask are – does this food work? Does it feel right for the place and time? Does is excel at what it intends to do? But your answers to these questions are still mediated by your assumptions. I want to eat cold, light food during the hot summer months, but try telling that to an Achari Murgh vendor in Delhi. You can certainly say ‘this dish pleases me’, but is it a stretch for the Eurocentric bible of food quality to rate taquerias?
It makes sense for Michelin to award Pujol 2 stars, their style of dining (if not the food) is modelled on Western fine-dining principles. But to come to Mexico City and say ‘this is the best taqueria’, is pretty absurd.
For me, Michelin cannot maintain its values whilst being more inclusive. This is the problem of a universal rating system. For a French company to have a monopoly on food quality assessment is just another example of a cultural hegemony, where certain flavours, styles and behaviours are rewarded because they appeal to the old-world gastronome.
Michelin’s taco dictates are, at best, under-informed. And little known is that nations pay Michelin to have their restaurants assessed. Somewhat unfairly, the poorer the nation, the more they pay. CANIRAC, Mexico’s national restaurant association paid a record 10 million dollars for their 16 stars, the most of any country. For comparison California paid $600,000 and won over 100 Michelin stars. In 2017, Thailand paid 4.4 million dollars, while the year before, the much wealthier South Korea paid only 1 million dollars.
As our tastes shift away from white tablecloths and fawning waiters, Michelin’s attempts to stay relevant do seem to be working. The hype surrounding the Mexico guide has, according to several featured restaurant owners, massively increased their custom.
But when I spoke to the owner of three restaurants in the city, which hit the criteria for a Bib Gourmand but didn’t make it into the guide, I heard a different story. He complained that business was worse than ever, before asking with a flourish of his hand, ‘What the hell do they know about tacos?’ The Michelin Guide validates the quality of a cuisine for an international audience, but for those left out, it can feel like a death sentence.
