Toloache 82

Though Cinco de Mayo is a widely misunderstood holiday in the US, that doesn’t mean Mexican restaurants will correct their customers’ perceptions; for them, the day commemorating the Battle of Puebla is one of the best days of the year for business. When asked about available reservations for Cinco de Mayo, Julian Medina, chef and owner of six Mexican and Latino-themed restaurants in New York City, shook his head and said, “We’re ‘hasta las manos.’” Then the phone, which had been ringing since the early morning, rang again, with another prospective customer seeking an elusive reservation.

Meanwhile, Medina’s mixologist, Juan Vasquez, was busy getting ready for what’s likely to be the busiest night of his year. Vasquez, who has manned the bar at Toloache 82 since it opened, created two signature cocktails for Cinco de Mayo, both celebrating “only-from-Mexico” ingredients like pulque, horchata, and tequila. The pulque and horchata, he says, come from El Barrio, where Mexican bodegas and groceries sell products that are hard to find elsewhere. Vasquez supplements his bar with some commercial and artisanal tequilas, mezcals, and spirits that are difficult to find elsewhere in the US.

Mixologist Jorge Vasquez preps his bar

Mixologist Jorge Vasquez preps his bar, setting up the ingredients and tools he’ll use to make his Cinco de Mayo signature cocktails, El Pulque de Juarez and El Aguila.

Housemade rimming salts & Jarritos

Part of Vasquez’s prep work involves making sweet and savory salts to rim cocktail glasses. The Jarritos Mexican soda is the ingredient that finishes off El Aguila.

Pulque

Tequila delivery

El Pulque de Juarez

El Aguila

De la Calle

Toloache 82's well-stocked bar

El Pulque de Juarez
Mix 1.5 oz of tequila, 2 oz of horchata, 3/4 oz of simple syrup, 1.5 oz of pulque, and 3/4 oz of Cointreau. Shake well, strain into a glass rimmed with cocoa powder and cinnamon, and serve over finely crushed ice. Garnish with a cinnamon stick.

El Aguila
Mix 1.5 oz of tequila, 3/4 oz of St. Germain, 3/4 oz of simple syrup, 1 oz of lime juice. Shake well, strain into a glass rimmed with chile salt, and top off with a splash of mandarin Jarritos.

De la Calle
Mix 2 oz of tequila infused with jalapeno, 2 oz of cucumber puree, 1 oz of fresh lime juice, 1 oz of simple syrup,. Shake, strain, and serve.

Cultural group at Tianguis

Last month, Mexico hosted Tianguis Turistico, the country’s most important annual travel trade show. The show is an opportunity for Mexico’s states and the country’s hotels, tour operators, and other industry stakeholders to sell themselves to travelers; it’s also when the country’s tourism board offers an update on progress and previews plans for the coming year.

One of the most important announcements to come out of the 2012 Tianguis was the Secretary of Tourism’s affirmation that Mexico is actively pursuing strategies to increase the number of Latino visitors. “We know that approximately 65% of the [US] Hispanic market is of Mexican descent,” said Subsecretary of Tourism, Rodolfo Lopez Negrete, “so obviously that represents a tremendous opportunity for us.”

The Mexico Tourism Board has been actively reaching out to Mexicans, playing upon sentiments of national identity with the “Mexico Se Siente” campaign. Alluding to lyrics from the popular Luis Miguel song “Mexico en la piel,” the “Mexico Se Siente” video shows Mexicans of all ages having “only in Mexico” experiences, such as placing a candle on a Day of the Dead altar and attending a “danzonera.” The video, which has had nearly 18,000 views on YouTube over the past four months, is one of Mexico Tourism Board’s efforts to kickstart domestic tourism, as well as to invite Mexican Americans to come home for a visit.

Outside the country, the tourism board is actively reaching out to diverse Latino communities in key markets such as New York and Miami. What may be surprising about their strategy, though, is that they are avoiding traditional Spanish-language media in order to attract Latino tourists.

“We know that the younger generation [of Latinos] doesn’t really consult Spanish-language media,” Negrete said in an exclusive interview. “They don’t watch Univision, they don’t watch Telemundo.” Lopez explained that older Hispanics– “the ones who still watch novelas”– are inclined to return to their homeland for a visit and don’t need convincing to do so. But younger Latinos, he says, are aware that their range of choices about where to travel is vast, and the media they consult to make travel decisions are more mainstream… and are often in English. Lopez, who worked in the US as an executive for Latino music labels for more than a decade, referenced his own children as an example: “They grew up watching MTV. They watch Bravo. They don’t buy El Heraldo; they buy The Herald.”

Because they want to reach the younger Latinos who are more mobile and, often, more affluent, Lopez and his colleagues, as well as the tourism board’s marketing and public relations firms, are focused on developing advertisements and outreach strategies that will capture an audience of Latinos who are fully bicultural and typically bilingual, but who consume most of their media in English.

The strategy sounds like a smart one; just the week after Tianguis, the US-based Pew Hispanic Center released data from their 2011 National Survey of Latinos; the survey results provide a comprehensive overview about Latinos’ perceptions of themselves, their values, and the way they consume media. While 82% of Latino adults speak Spanish and 95% think it is important for future generations to speak the language, 87% contend that learning English is also important. Mexico Tourism Board’s strategy for encouraging Hispanics to visit Mexico may foreshadow general marketing trends for reaching Latinos, whose spending power represents more than $1 trillion.

In addition to the emphasis on reaching the Latino market through video, the Mexico Tourism Board aspires to provide travelers with as much travel planning support as possible through mobile platforms. Recognizing that Latinos are heavily dependent upon mobile technologies, such as smart phones, Mexico intends to dramatically increase its presence and accessibility in these areas. During Tianguis, Secretary of Tourism Gloria Guevara Manzo unveiled the Atlas Turistico de Mexico, a bilingual guide to the country’s cultural, historic, and scenic sites. Currently available online, the tourism board plans to make the atlas available in app form as well.

Videos, apps, and content and ad placement in English-language media– “We have to speak to Hispanics in a different way when it comes to Mexico. We have a great opportunity to entice them to visit, and we have to speak to them accordingly,” Lopez said. “Hispanics represent the 15th largest economy in the world. Tackling it is one of our goals.”

I’m currently organizing video for Francisco to edit into a coherent whole; in the meantime, I hope you enjoy witnessing the passion of the harpist as much as I did. I think there’s nothing quite so beautiful in the world to watch than a musician in love with his instrument and his song.

Performer at Tianguis' opening ceremony

For me, Tianguis is a great opportunity to connect with old friends and to make new contacts, editorial and otherwise. It’s also a chance to file a couple articles about the state of tourism in Mexico. Later this week, I’ll be interviewing the Secretary of Tourism of Mexico City and the country’s Secretary of Tourism, to talk about this issue. Have questions for either of them? Feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll be sure to ask them.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been invited to serve as a committee member of Real Heroes of Mexico, a group that “believes it’s vital to showcase the positive news and goodwill efforts taking place in Mexico, especially those who are making a difference.”

I was invited by The Mexico Report founder Susie Albin-Najera to serve on the committee, and am proud to serve alongside a a group of people who are as passionate about Mexico as I am.

We’ll be sharing stories of overlooked people in Mexico who are doing good. I invite you to follow along and learn about the real heroes of Mexico at The Mexico Report.

Know someone you’d like to nominate? You can do that here.

2010 in Mexico

Forward:   In August, Jimena Navarrete won the Miss Universe pageant, only the second win for Mexico in the contest’s 59 year history. And in September, despite cancellations of celebrations in a handful of cities, including beleaguered Ciudad Juarez, Mexico City’s grand bicentennial festivities went off without any serious or noticeable hitches (though not without considerable expense).

Backward:  Continued narcoviolence and the attendant media reports about it, coupled with growing doubts, both at home and abroad, about the wisdom and efficacy of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s aggressive strategy for managing the persistent problem.

These were the stories, good and bad, that dominated Mexican and international news reports in 2010.

But in a three-week period spanning the middle of November and the beginning of December, two significant good news stories went largely unnoticed, especially by international media. Mexico City’s Mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, was named the World’s Best Mayor by City Mayors Foundation, a global think tank, and UNESCO inscribed Mexico’s traditional cuisine on its List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Chef Enrique Farjeat

UNESCO, the educational, scientific, and cultural arm of the United Nations, is charged with many responsibilities, among them, declaring and inscribing physical sites and structures on its World Heritage list. Mexico is home to 27 such sites, including Chichen Itza. Among the lesser known functions of UNESCO is that of inscribing intangible elements of regional or national culture deemed so valuable that they are considered treasures of global culture at large. Forms of dance and dress, traditional musical instruments and songs, sports, rituals, and even medical procedures have been adopted by UNESCO as intangible elements of human heritage, but it wasn’t until Gironella, founder of the Conservatory of the Culture of Mexican Gastronomy, convened a group of colleagues, including Farjeat, to present a proposal that UNESCO had ever considered a country’s cuisine for inscription.

The idea was so novel, says Farjeat, that UNESCO was unable to even consider Mexico’s proposal when it first made its case for inscription five years earlier. “At the time, they didn’t have any criteria to even make a determination,” says Farjeat. “We helped them establish criteria, and they asked us to make a video, to present visual evidence to support the extensive written proposal we had submitted.”
 
Though its initial application was declined, the Mexican team was encouraged, and committed itself to fulfilling UNESCO’s request. In addition to producing the requested video, Farjeat and his colleagues had to make a challenging decision: How to narrow the proposal a bit by determining which region’s food was most representative of Mexico’s diverse culinary traditions? “Ultimately, we chose Michoacan,” Farjeat explains, adding that while UNESCO’s 2010 inscription acknowledges and honors all Mexican cuisine, it highlights the role of “the Michoacan paradigm,” characterized by the use of the clay comal for cooking tortillas.

When the video was done and the focus of their proposal more honed, Farjeat and the Mexico team submitted its revised package to UNESCO and prepared to travel to Nairobi, where proposals would be deliberated and decided upon. Farjeat’s task was to handle procurement and logistics, ensuring that the equipment, the ingredients—and even two cooks from Michoacan—made it from Mexico to Kenya intact and fresh for their performance.

And what a performance it would be.

Vegetables at a Mexican market

 
But this being Mexico, the performance seemed fated to encounter serious obstacles, challenges that might even put its inscription in jeopardy. For Farjeat, in particular, the days and hours leading up to the presentation before the panel of UNESCO judges were some of the most tense of his life. “Practically everything got held up in Customs,” he remembers, ticking off a list of ingredients that sat languishing in the corner of an airport warehouse. He imagined avocados and tomatoes softening to the point of rot, and the variety of cheeses he’d packed going rancid, the red, white, and green, Mexico’s national colors, a not-so-subtle metaphor of disaster.
 
Not only that, but the clay comales hauled across three continents broke, leaving Farjeat with a daunting dilemma: How would he replace his goods and his gear in sub-saharan Africa? “Even though Nairobi’s a capital city and it has a wonderful market, it didn’t have the ingredients we needed,” he explains, mentioning, among others, chipotles, corn husks for tamales, the corn fungus called huitlacoche, and chapulines, roasted crickets. After consulting with the host hotel’s chefs, Farjeat dispatched a team of scouts to the local market with a detailed list and the mandate to buy anything and everything they could find that would help Mexico pull its performance off.
 
“I wanted pork, chicken, shrimp,” he says, mentioning the items he thought would be easiest to replace. What the team returned with might have made a chef with less experience and less determination declare the challenge impossible and the inscription lost. Farjeat shows me a photo of an enormous fish with row upon row of teeth marching deep into its throat. “What is that?” I ask, leaning closer to the photo. “You tell me,” he replies, putting his hand over his mouth and shaking his head as if the fish had just been presented to him. He laughs. “What craziness.”
 
But what was there to do except pull it all together into something presentable? The Mexican team was fortunate to have Farjeat at its logistical helm; he excels in moments of tension. He called the cooks together and made the challenge plain. He explained the ingredients as best he could; then, they rolled up their sleeves, and got cooking.
 

 
The fish was stuffed with achiote and doused with orange juice and put on a charcoal grill. “People came by to take photos of the fish; ‘Look at the Mexican fish!’ they said,” Enrique recalls. The two cooks from Michoacan made tortillas on their new metal griddles. “They loved them so much they insisted on taking them home even though we had to pay airfare for them,” Enrique says.  
   
Somehow, in spite of all the challenges–the unfamiliar ingredients, the broken equipment, the small workspace, the sudden uptick in the number of plates they were told to prepare at the last minute–Farjeat and the Mexican team pulled it all off. When I ask him about the moment of the announcement of Mexico’s inscription on the intangibles list, he pauses for a long time and clears his throat. When he finally speaks, he is visibly emotional. His smile is big and genuine, his eyes are a bit wet, and his mind, well, it seems far away.

He remembers that the room erupted in applause. Proceedings had to stop while other delegates surrounded the Mexican team to offer their congratulations and take photos. And later that evening, Farjeat could finally sit down, put his feet up, and drink a celebratory tequila.
 
*
When the Mexican delegation returned to Mexico, it was not, as they might have expected, to national acclaim and congratulations. Several days after their return from Nairobi, a press conference was held in the Sor Juana Cloister, the hub of Mexico City’s efforts to document its gastronomic history. Eighty members of the press were there, according to Farjeat, but overall, he felt that the event was post-climactic. “The impact hasn’t been as great as we’d hoped,” he says. The story made the newspapers, of course, but the press then moved on.
 

Churros at St. Regis, Mexico City

A young man shows off his charreria skills.

It’s been a busy summer and fall, with back-to-back trips: Hawaii, Catalunya, Belize, and Mexico. After my next trip–Amsterdam and Zurich–it will be time to hibernate for a bit so we can catch up on editing photos, querying story ideas, and writing articles for which pitches have been accepted.

One of those stories will be a guide to Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city. I was there for the Pan American Games, but also managed to spend a memorable Sunday enjoying some of the city’s most beloved traditions: charreria (roping) and toreo (bullfighting). Both are alive and well and show no signs of disappearing; respect for tradition alongside the desire to embrace the contemporary is one of the many reasons why I love Mexico.

Where have you been lately, and what have you loved about it?

"Don't you want to smile?" I asked these newspaper vendors.

For “developing” countries and cities, hosting the Games is also a serious financial responsibility. Though Guadalajara, like most hosts before it, has used the Games to create some permanent sport installations that will benefit locals long after the Games end, the cost of doing so has been exorbitant. The final tally of $750 million greatly exceeded the original estimated budget of $250 million. “The Pan American Games could leave [the state of] Jalisco in a complicated economic situation,” concluded the Milenio newspaper.

Event organizers and federal, state, and municipal governments all try to convince local stakeholders that the Games will be a boon. The image of the city, maybe even the country, will improve. And so, importantly, will business.

That’s what they say, anyway.

It’s Saturday night and the restaurant of a boutique hotel in Guadalajara’s Centro Historico is empty, save for the hotel’s owner, the bartender, and myself. “It’s never this dead on Saturday night,” the owner says, the bartender nodding in agreement. “The problem is that people think the traffic is too bad, so they’re staying away from this part of town. And even though there are more than 6,000 athletes here, they’re all staying at hotels [near the PanAm venues]. There are very few tourists.” He shakes his head.

Although the PanAm Games are barely underway, the hotelier’s frustrated observations have been shared by many of the people I’ve talked to “on the ground.” Taxi drivers seem to be universally pissed about the Games. “There are 11,000 of us in Guadalajara,” one driver told me, “and only 3,000 of us got the credential that allows us near the venues.” “So what?” another driver said, when I asked about the credential. “I’ve got one and it doesn’t make a difference. The security checkpoints won’t let me in. The Games have been terrible for business.”

Whether the Games will ultimately benefit small business owners and independent operators in tourism sectors remains to be seen; the Games conclude on October 30.

Guadalajara inaugurates the 2011 Pan American Games

“Que tal Guadalajara?” I ask the taxi driver as we leave the airport en route to Del Carmen Concept Hotel, where I’ll be staying for the next three nights. I was last here in 2008, updating a guide to Guadalajara for Gayot, and I’m wondering how the city has changed since then.

“Uuf,” he replies. I wait for elaboration, but it’s slow in coming and vague when it finally arrives. “It’s changed bastante,” he says. I want him to say more, to say how it has changed and to analyze those changes from his place behind the wheel, but he refrains, which may be smart. When your city is hosting an international sporting event in a time when your country is under intense scrutiny, perhaps you can’t afford to be overly free with your opinions. Either that, or he just prefers the quiet.

The taxi driver won’t have much of that this week; today is the opening of the Pan American Games and everything is motion and buzz. Runners are sporting the flame in the traditional relay; as I approach the city, the flame is approaching it, too. The country’s biggest names in music– Vicente Fernandez and Alejandro Fernandez– are surely warming up their vocal cords in preparation for their performances tonight.

My press credential for the Pan Am Games

And I’m among them.

For the next three days, I’ll be covering the Pan Am Games for this site, as well as for Matador.

I hope you’ll follow along. I’ll also be on twitter, checking in on foursquare and Gowalla, and posting photos on instagram and flickr.

Have questions about the Games? Please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Everything I’ve read to date about the Museo Soumaya has left me dissatisfied… not the facts, which are what they are (a museum housing 66,000 or so pieces of art acquired by Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man), but the assessment of the collection (“tragic”); Slim’s style of collecting (“more of a bargain hunter than an aesthete”); the building in which the museum is housed (“like an oversize mushroom thought up by Magritte”); and even the neighborhood itself (“the slick establishments paving the way are just enough to make you forget you’re in Mexico”– as if Mexico can only be slick or poverty-ridden).

Everyone’s entitled to his/her own opinion, of course, and here’s mine: the collection may seem random (Dali, Rodin, Mexican masters), but I prefer to think of it as the reflection of diverse interests. Who but an absolute art snob cares, anyway? There are some incredible pieces in the collection and you don’t have to look hard to find them; check out this intricate piece, made entirely of rice paper (except the frame, obviously) in 1883:

There are pieces in this collection I haven’t seen the likes of anywhere else, and that’s particularly true of the religious art.

I mean, take a look at this version of Eve, literally coming out of Adam’s rib:

The curation is excellent, particularly in the gallery exhibiting 20th century Mexican painting, where thematic preoccupations are grouped together in a way that’s logical and obvious without being redundant and boring.

Bottom line: Who cares about Slim? It’s about the art.

For more photos from the Soumaya, check out this gallery.