A Chef Who Loves Puebla
Why is one of the most talented young chefs in Mexico setting his sights on this old colonial town? Writer Gisela Williams finds out.
The drive from Mexico City to Puebla takes just an hour and a half—but when you’re famished, 90 minutes is a very long time. It didn’t help that the two guys joining me on my road trip spoke incessantly about food: Rafael Micha, a partner in Grupo Habita (which owns Mexico City’s chic Habita and Condesa DF hotels), and Enrique Olvera, the 31-year-old chef-owner of Pujol, widely considered one of Mexico City’s best restaurants. The two spent most of the ride explaining their obsession with Puebla—its architecture, its history, its culinary traditions—a fascination that has led them to team up for the spring launch of La Purificadora, a boutique hotel and restaurant. Besides the city’s day-trip potential (Micha wants to offer helicopter jaunts there from Mexico City), what had inspired two of Mexico’s most ambitious entrepreneurs to take a gamble on a lesser-known destination like Puebla? I tagged along to find out.
Many Americans’ knowledge of Puebla begins and ends with mole poblano, a pungent local sauce made with some 30 ingredients including sesame seeds, almonds, cinnamon, cloves, dried chiles and chocolate. But the city’s food traditions are much richer than that: Puebla has one of Mexico’s most influential cuisines—rivaling those of Oaxaca, Veracruz and Yucatán—and is the source of famous dishes like chiles en nogada (stuffed poblano peppers with nut sauce), chalupitas (toasted tortillas filled with pork or chicken) and rompope (Mexican eggnog).
"For the last 10 years," said Micha, "the tourist buzz has been all about the Mexican Riviera and Los Cabos. But Puebla has all the right ingredients to become an important Mexican destination." Our drive from Mexico City was stunning: The city of Puebla, the capital of Puebla state, sits in a valley surrounded by several volcanoes, including the massive 14,636-foot Malinche, one of the highest peaks in North America. But as we drove into Puebla, en route to the city’s historic center, all we could see at first was a dull landscape of Volkswagen factory buildings. Then we reached the center of town, a 20-block area so well preserved it felt like we had just driven into a vintage photograph.
As we walked around the zócalo (town square), Micha pointed out the mix of architectural styles. We saw churches done in ornamental stone-faced Baroque and Churrigueresque (a sort of hyper-Baroque), as well as a number of Spanish colonial mansions, some painted in fiery reds and saffron yellows and others decorated with diamond-patterned tiles.
The first place we walked into, to my chagrin, was not a restaurant. Instead, Olvera and Micha wanted to show me a church—the iconic 17th-century Catedral de Puebla.
"The legend," Olvera explained to me, "is that a nun at one of the convents here invented mole poblano." As we looked at the elaborately painted ceilings of the cathedral and at the sculptures of saints and angels made of onyx—one of Puebla’s most coveted natural resources—Micha told me that after Mexico’s conquest by Spain around 1520 and before its independence in 1821, many of the country’s highest-ranking religious leaders lived in Puebla. "In those days the haute cuisine of Mexico was created by the nuns. The priests were our royalty, so the best food was served in the churches," Olvera said.
During our stroll around the historic city center, I could see that Puebla’s easy-to-navigate grid of intimate, mostly cobblestoned streets were mainly filled with locals or tourists coming from elsewhere in Mexico. This wasn’t always the case: Until the 19th century, Puebla was one of Mexico’s most cosmopolitan cities—second only to Mexico City in importance. Thanks to its location between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, Puebla was one of the country’s most vital trading centers. "Merchants would send one of their sons to the Far East and another to Europe, and the father would stay in Puebla and count the money," Micha explained. The city went into a period of decline, but always maintained a sense of wealth and privilege and is still home to a number of Mexico’s old-money families. When the city was awarded UNESCO World Heritage site status in 1987, investments poured in, allowing for extensive restoration of the historic center. Nowadays more money, and numerous architectural and artistic projects, are making their way to Puebla from Mexico City, pulling with them creative young talents and modern influences.
The boom is somewhat reminiscent of Puebla’s 18th-century heyday, when international trade brought in goods as well as lasting ideas from Europe and the Arab world. This is evident in the famous decorative Talavera tiles (which are named after their Spanish city of origin and found on many buildings in Puebla) and the Moorish architecture of the city’s dome-shaped church roofs and its hidden courtyards planted with pomegranate and fig trees. Some historians theorize that Islamic recipes and cooking techniques played a role in Pueblan cuisine, showing up in drinks like aguas frescas (water sweetened with fruit or other flavors) and in mole poblano ingredients like almonds, cinnamon and cloves. (Other historians trace the invention of mole back to the Aztecs.)
We turned off the main square and walked down Callejón de los Sapos, a narrow alley lined with small antiques shops, to reach the Plazuela de los Sapos, also known as the antiques market. We passed stands selling religions icons; traditional handcrafted, European-influenced wood furniture; and 19th-century floral-patterned Talavera plates and urns, painted with deep yellow, indigo blue and orange-red pigments.
I would have liked to work my way slowly through the shops, but by now it was finally time to eat—and time for Olvera to get on with his menu research. I thought we would do what many visitors to Puebla do: seek out the best mole poblano from among the myriad restaurants. But Olvera was more eager to show me the city’s other signature dishes. "The best mole in Puebla isn’t found in the restaurants; it’s in the homes," he explained. "Mole poblano is not an everyday dish. Traditionally, it’s only for special occasions, because it’s so complicated and takes so long to make." Olvera does plan to offer his own version of it at La Purificadora, however, in a deceptively simple bar snack of mole poblano-coated chicken.
One of Olvera’s favorite Pueblan foods is the cemita, the local version of a torta or Mexican sandwich. We headed straight for Puebla’s city center and the Mercado Venustiano Carranza, a market full of meat and produce sellers, food stands and a few vendors selling booze. "This is the best cemita place in town," Olvera announced as we walked up to a fluorescent-lit, yellow stand called El As de Oros. He ordered two classic cemitas, a milanesa (made with breaded veal) and a barbacoa (filled with goat meat cooked in an underground oven). The sandwiches came in sesame seed-topped buns loaded with onions, avocado, chipotle and white cheese. "You have to add some fresh papalo," Olvera said, pointing to a bowl sitting in the middle of the table filled with the green herb. The papalo—similar to cilantro and with a slightly citrusy taste—added a nice kick to the meaty, spicy sandwiches. The only gringa in sight, I was completely stuffed after just four bites of my cemita. The other customers were still silently and happily working on their gigantic barbacoas. "Poblanos have bigger appetites than the rest of us," Olvera joked.
A short drive away, across from the colorfully tiled Mercado del Alto, we found our next destination: Las Carmelitas, a small café serving faithful renditions of Pueblan staples. Olvera ordered the restaurant’s specialty, chalupitas: the small, crispy, toasted tortillas were filled with exceptionally tender shredded pork, fresh cheese, onions and green sauce. Puebla’s chalupitas are smaller than those sold elsewhere in Mexico—and justifiably famous throughout the country. We also ordered chiles en nogada, and out came large green chiles, stuffed with ground meat, dried fruit and raisins, covered with a creamy walnut sauce and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. Nuns supposedly invented this dish too, Olvera explained, to celebrate Mexico’s independence, and the green, white and red colors represent the Mexican flag. Chiles en nogada are typically served in August and September, during the walnut season and for Independence Day on September 16.
We had time before sundown to visit one of Olvera’s favorite produce markets, a 30-minute drive west in the small town of Cholula. Formerly a great Aztec center, Cholula is also the site of one of the world’s largest pyramids, which dates back more than 2,000 years. It towers above the town, an enormous triangular mound covered in earth and topped by a small 17th-century church.
"We have so many unknown, beautiful fruits and vegetables in Mexico," Olvera said as we walked into the busy Cholula market. "Why would you make a foie gras dish with apples when you can make it with black sapote?" he said, referring to a fruit related to the persimmon but with a thick black pulp. He pointed out several counters selling mole paste, but only a second later he was distracted by a pile of zucchini blossoms. "These are beautiful," he said. "You won’t find large ones like these anywhere else in Mexico. I’m definitely going to be doing something with these at the La Purifcadora restaurant." We then made our way to a stand selling what looked like bowls of brown soapsuds. This turned out to be an earthy-tasting drink called popo made from rice, chupipi (a mango-shaped fruit with white flesh) and cacao and churned vigorously with a wooden stick (called a molinillo) to keep it foamy. The drink has existed for more than a thousand years, Olvera said, jokingly adding that "Ferran Adrià didn’t invent anything."
Micha wanted to check out the hotel site before nightfall, so we hopped into the car and drove back to Puebla. Located in a 19th-century water-bottling factory, the hotel was still under construction. But it was already clear that once complete, the Ricardo Legorreta-designed building—characterized by an enormous rectangular frame—would become one of the city’s most important modern landmarks. "Legorreta is a synonym for 20th-century Mexican architecture," Micha said, known for high-profile buildings like Mexico City’s Camino Real hotel.
Inside La Purificadora, a huge black staircase seems to float up from the lobby. A chef’s table will be hidden in a room under the stairs. Olvera pointed to a big open square bar in the center of the restaurant. "That’s where we’ll be serving botanas, or what I call Mexican tapas, like zucchini flowers stuffed with Oaxaca cheese." The bar will also offer homemade sodas inspired by aguas frescas and flavored with ingredients like tamarind and dried hibiscus flowers. The sodas will be served in glass siphon containers like the ones once used at the water-bottling factory.
Unlike Pujol, where Olvera’s menu includes haute, modernized Mexican dishes like the incredible four-corn esquite (seared kernel) soup with mayo gelatin and queso fresco, the menu at La Purificadora will be simpler. "But everything will still have a twist," Olvera promised. "For an appetizer, I’m going to do a carpaccio in the style of a cemita. I’ll top tomato and onions with sliced beef and papalo leaves." The foamy popo drink we had in Cholula, he added, may inspire a dessert.
I was still curious to try mole poblano before I left, so I looked for a second opinion on the local options. Olvera’s friend Abdiel Cervantes, a director of Instituto Culinario Pizzolotto, Puebla’s top culinary school, gave me a tip: "There’s a woman who sells amazing mole poblano from a cart at Plazuela de los Sapos." Unfortunately, the stand is only open on weekends. Next time, I promised myself, I’ll make sure to come to Puebla on a Saturday. "But be careful," Micha warned me. "Se te queda de aretes"—eating mole at night sticks to you like heavy earrings.
Munich-based writer Gisela Williams is F&W’s Europe correspondent.
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