Anthony Bourdain and the Mexican dream

Last October I mentioned on this blog that I worked as a consultant for Anthony Bourdain and the crew of his show No Reservations while they filmed part of an episode in Mexico City. Various readers wrote and asked when it would be broadcast. U.S. readers take note: It airs Monday, January 5th. It will be shown in Mexico considerably later; I'll let you know when I have more information.

The two photos below were taken at a cantina called La Mascota on the corner of Calle Mesones and Calle Bolívar in the centro histórico. It was one of my recommendations for the shoot. La Mascota is a traditional place, that has luckily not been remodeled with stucco ceilings or canteloupe-colored walls. The botanas – free food served in the afternoon, so long as you pay for your drinks – are first-rate.

The fellow on the extreme right in the green T-shirt is Carlos Llaguno, from Puebla, who made his way to New York, where he found work as a dishwasher at Bourdain’s restaurant Les Halles. Little by little, he worked his way up in the kitchen, and not long after Bourdain threw in the apron to become a full-time media personality, Carlos was promoted to chef. Nearly all the kitchens of New York restaurants employ Mexicans, but Bourdain told me that Les Halles is the only one where a Mexican has actually risen to become #1, el jefe.

So three cheers for Carlos, who is living the Mexican dream, along with his girlfriend Emily Cummings, who happens to be a Ford model. Immigration foes are cordially invited to eat their hearts out.

Chones (drawers)

Some Mexicans believe that if, at the stroke of the New Year, you are wearing red underwear, you will be lucky in love. And if you are wearing yellow, you will be lucky financially. For some reason they don't seem to sell red and yellow striped models. Some people may want to double up tonight and wear both. Happy New Year to all.

Lodo

Bar La Ópera, in the centro histórico on the corner of Cinco de Mayo and Filomeno Mata, has been written up in every guidebook about Mexico City for as long as anyone can remember. So although most of its customers are Mexican, it is also a de rigueur stop on the tourist itinerary for any foreigner who gets thirsty in that neighborhood. It was built at the end of the 19th century, a time when Mexico's strongest foreign influence was not the United States, but France. Hence, as you can perhaps tell from the wall and ceiling adornments in the photo, it is our closest answer to a Parisian restaurant from the Belle Epoque.

I wouldn't go out of my way to eat at La Ópera, but it's a lovely place to get inebriated. Furthermore, the trio romántico pictured above, which plays there every night, is about as good as musicians of this genre get. They know every bolero, ballad and torch song from the Latin American repertoire before 1965. They are in fact the only trio I have found in Mexico City that can play a heartbreaking tune which, decades ago, was a hit for Los Panchos, but today is largely forgotten. It is called Lodo, but also known as Si tu me dices ven. If you go to La Ópera, ask for that number.

Let 'em eat cake

On the enormous ground floor of the Pastelería Ideal bakery on Calle 16 de Septiembre in the centro histórico, there's an overwhelming selection of everything sweet that could possibly emerge from an oven: cakes, rolls, cookies, doughnuts, pastries and muffins. The smell of sugar is so overpowering that it alone could put a diabetic to the hospital. But if you follow your nose up a flight of stairs, you'll find a veritable museum of cake.

Six- and seven-tier wedding cakes, with green, blue or peach-colored icing. Cakes that weigh 240 pounds, can be divided into 1,100 portions and cost over a thousand dollars. Cakes that sport spurting, functioning fountains. Cakes that serve as immense platforms, atop which are staircases comprised of six progressively smaller cakes.

There's a section of white wedding cakes, in the midst of which you feel as if you were in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg after a snowstorm.

A few days after a notable earthquake in 1999 I visited the Ideal and asked if any of the cakes had fallen. "No," the woman at the cash register told me. "They just danced a little."

Signs of Christmas in Mexico City

Perhaps because I am from New York I associate Christmas with cold weather and the possibility of snow. But in temperate climates, Christmas has to make itself manifest in more subtle ways.

OK, maybe subtle isn't quite the appropriate word. Would you be embarrassed to drive around with these reindeer antlers attached to your windows? The city is crawling with them.

How about "Spider Claus?"

This is perhaps not precisely a manifestation of the holiday that is upon us. But the Christian message struck me as entirely appropriate.