Lalo García: I have been in Mexico since 2007. I feel that I belong here.
Laura Tillman: It's interesting, because the terms of his second deportation are that he cannot come back to the U.S. If he comes back to the U.S. illegally again and he's caught, he's going to go to prison for a very long time. So Lalo had to begin his career again, in Mexico.
Lalo García: When I was deported to Mexico, the first two months of being here were probably some of the worst months I've ever lived through. I had no one. Up until this day, all my family lives in the U.S. I married in 2014, and I have now my wife's family but before that, it was just me. I had no one. So I became very depressed.
At one point, I remember my mom in the U.S.. My mom didn't really quite take on the U.S. very well. She actually became very ill. She lives on antidepressants since the moment we left my sisters back in Mexico. She has always been a fighter and I remember her, every time she felt like that, she would always tell herself, she would out loud tell herself, "You can do it. You can do it. Get up. You can do it." Up until this moment, she still does that. So I remembered those days and I told myself, "Get up. You can do it." That's when I realized, I've been deported twice to the same place. Maybe life is telling me something. Maybe life is telling me that I belong here.
Laura Tillman: I think it was a really difficult moment for Lalo. There's a word called pocho, which literally means faded or wilted, that's used to refer to people who have lived in the U.S. and come back to Mexico. According to this stereotype, they don't really know their own culture or might be condescending toward Mexican culture and think the U.S. is better.
Lalo García: The first place that I went to look for a job was Los Cabos because I wanted to be around people who spoke English. From what I was told, Los Cabos was it. But I went and I didn't land a job. Coming to Mexico City wasn't really a highlight for me. Remember, I am not from Mexico City. I am from Guanajuato and I had heard horrible stories about people from Mexico City. So it wasn't really a place where I wanted to visit. I had never been to Mexico City.
Laura Tillman: It's interesting to see this landscape that he lands in. In the 1990s, there was this moment of a lot of change. In Mexico, there was a peso crisis, there was the ratification of NAFTA, there was a lot happening around culture and politics. One of the changes that was happening was around food in Mexico. Historically, Mexican food had not been considered to belong on the fine dining table, the white tablecloth, in a fine dining restaurant. Usually you would see French, Italian, Spanish food in those spaces, sometimes Japanese food, but not really Mexican food. It's something that you might expect in other parts of the world at that time but in Mexico itself, that was also the case.
There were a group of chefs in the '90s, mostly women, who were paving the way and starting to experiment with putting together Mexican and European or Asian flavors on the table. One of the chefs that I write about in detail in the book is Mónica Patiño, also a very famous Mexican chef who still has restaurants operating in Mexico City today. She grew up in this family with both Mexican and European ancestry. In her household growing up, it was very normal to have these kinds of combinations where you would have a vol-au-vent and you would have this French pastry that was stuffed with rajas, poblano peppers. You would have tacos filled with nopales but you would drink them with champagne or you would have your chicharrones as a snack in the evening with some Spanish almonds.
I think one of the things that comes through with Mónica's story is that these kind of combinations were always happening in Mexican households. They were things that someone's cook, who might be from Puebla, who might be Indigenous, might be doing for a family of European ancestry. There's a lot of mestizaje in Mexico, which is the word here for the intermarriage between indigenous and European Mexicans. There's this way that these innovations, or these experiments, were always happening.
This is also something I write about Natalia, Lalo's mother, that she had her own experiments that she was making with food, because they were migrants, because they were in these situations where they didn't have access to epazote or tomatillos. So she was trying to find those flavors in other ingredients she could find in the United States. This is kind of like the whole history of Mexican food post-conquest. It's really this collaboration between different ideas.
In the '90s, for the first time, you were starting to see this in the fine dining setting. These are really the spaces of negotiations. They're the spaces of cultural export. They're the spaces of tourism. And it's kind of sending a message, both in Mexico and to the rest of the world, about what Mexico is today, what is contemporary Mexico, and also whose voices were able to speak and be heard.
This all eventually leads to Lalo coming back to Mexico City. I think one of the things that's interesting about Lalo's return is that he found immediate success with his food, which was combining French and Mexican flavors, that even 10 years before was still very difficult. For a chef like Mónica Patiño in the late '90s, it was hard to get people on board with these ideas, at times. It was risky. Then Lalo arrives and there's already kind of this restaurant scene that's being built around that.
Lalo García: I started to Google "what is the best restaurant in Mexico," "what is the best chef." And everywhere was Enrique Olvera. Everything on the internet was Pujol and Enrique Olvera. I called Enrique Olvera and he answered the phone that day. It was my lucky day as well. I told him I was looking for a job and he's like, "I need people like you." I told him a little bit about myself and he's like, "I need people like you. Please, come to an interview tomorrow." So here I was. An uncle of mine lives in the state of Mexico. I told him, "Can you please tell me how to get here and what bus I need to take?" So he gave me all the tips on how to get to Mexico's top restaurant, Pujol.
I remember this day perfectly. I got on the bus. I was ready for the interview. I was interviewed by his secretary and then by [Enrique]. I had this amazing feeling in me. I didn't remember anything that people had said about how bad the city was, how there were delinquents everywhere. I remember, after the interview, it started to pour, like the sky was falling out from the sky. I love the rain. I love it. So I went into this restaurant that was next door to Pujol while it was raining, and I sat at the bar to have a glass of wine. There were people there and it was so nice, asking me where I was from and what I was doing there. It was just so nice and I was like, "Wow, I love this city. It's raining. People are nice. I haven't got mugged. I want to live here."
Laura Tillman: He goes to work for Enrique Olvera who is, at the time, the most important contemporary chef in Mexico. He has a restaurant called Pujol that's getting a lot of press and attention. Lalo eventually becomes a chef de cuisine for Pujol and then eventually launches his own restaurant called Máximo Bistrot.
Listen to more of the conversation with Laura Tillman and Lalo García. Part I, Part II, and Part IV.