Page 72 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

No. No.

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The best Mexican food I ate this year came from
the kitchen of Gabe Erales, who seems to have merged
the rampant creativity that he got from working at René
Redzepi’s Noma Mexico pop-up with a soulful rever-
ence for tradition that he absorbed from his mom. The

Look, sometimes result: dishes—like a tamal stuffed with goat barbacoa,
a great restaurant and a thin, crispy milanesa made with quail and paired
C O M E D O R ’ S
takes a while to hit its with a red mole—that taste totally new without being
D E C A D E N T
stride. We’re aware B O N E- M A R R O W vain about it. Comedor has something called “masa
that Kwame Onwua- TA C O S .
chi’s Kith/Kin opened spaetzel” that I want served to me in a bucket when I’m
about two years ago, on my deathbed, and it’s got a chocolate tamal for des-
but we’re stretching sert that I expect to encounter if I make it to heaven.
the boundaries of
“newness” here No.
because it would be a
travesty not to raise a
toast to the audacity
and originality of his
cooking down by the 11
Wharf. Nowhere else
in America are you
going to find a menu
that so confidently and
autobiographically
nods to Nigeria, New
Orleans, and the
Caribbean. Nowhere
else are you going to
find delights like
Onwuachi’s bracingly
spicy crab jollof rice or Nothing surprised
his meltingly tender me more this year
goat roti or the scal- than cruising along a
lops and brassicas dark patch of the
(below). And nowhere Pacific Coast Highway
else are you going to and finding myself in a
eat sweets like the space as sexy as some
ones created by pastry next-wave bistronomy
chef Paola Velez, who outpost in Provence.
deserves a James Gallic songbirds trilled
Beard Award nomina- from an old reel-to-
tion for trailblazing a reel machine. Wine
way to serve habanero and bread and butter
peppers as a des- and fresh seafood
sert—accompanied by arrived in gentle waves,
tres leches cake and followed by artful
elderflower snow. constructions of
vegetables and fish—
courtesy of chef
Andrew Bachelier,
whose roots are Mexi-
can and French—
that made me wonder
how some of the
finest Cali-French A TO U C H O F
P R O V E N C E I N
cooking in the U.S. can C A L I AT J E U N E
be found a few miles E T J O L I E .
north of San Diego.

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