Juan Pablo Ballesteros a 4th generation restaurateur from Mexico City has created an modern Mexican restaurant in a 3.5 century old building using entirely Mexican ingredients. He is the owner of Restaurant Limosneros. Limosneros uses traditional Mexican ingredients, and techniques, but they have created a completely modern take on the cuisine. Their fresh ingredients are sourced from around the country. Artisan products including Beef, Chicken, Pork and Mescal, plus modern additions like Mexican craft beer and wine. Many of these items are very rare and hard to find.
Every ingredient is traditional, is Mexican, but the creativity of Limosneros Chefs really speaks out. Nicholas Gilman who has been my guide to Mexico City Cuisine sat down with Juan Pablo and myself for several conversations. We also had the opportunity to sample some of the food prepared by Limosneros Chefs. Of course we tried the insects: crunchy exterior, earthy taste, but overall amazing.
More than 1/2 dozen different types of insects, grubs and eggs have made it to the menu here, but there is certainly more to the menu. Seasonal and tasting menus available with or without alcohol pairings. Everything from a modern take on Tacos to entirely new creations made with the most traditional of ingredients. You can read more from Nicholas review.
Links:
Nicholas's Book (Amazon): Good Food in Mexico City: Food Stalls, Fondas & Fine Dining (Kindle edition) / GoodFoodMexicoCity.com / The Essential Guide to Modern Mexican Dining in Mexico City
Transcript
(00:00:00.0)
Nicholas
Gilman:
We are here in what I have said is a modern Mexican restaurant. The owner, entrepreneur, designer, comes from a family that has been in the restaurant business for over a hundred years, and let me describe a dish that I ate here that was beautiful and horrifying.
(00:00:19.6)
Harry
Hawk:
This is Harry Hawk and this is talking about everything. Nicholas and I have been talking about the historical central district of Mexico City, and Nicholas, as we said just a minute ago, we kind of want to talk about food and ingredients because I understand now where I am and the transformation that’s happened only in the last couple years, so how can we do that?
(00:00:38.4)
Nicholas
Gilman:
Well, I’d like to talk a little bit about the specific place we’re in. We are here are in what I have said is a modern Mexican restaurant, but the owner, entrepreneur, designer, and brains behind this place comes from a family that has been in the restaurant business for over a hundred years. In fact, around the corner is a place called Café De Tacuba, which is an institution beloved by Mexicans. It opened in 1912, and it’s still there. It’s actually connected to this building. Juan Pablo Ballesteros, who is with us here today, is not a chef, but he is an entrepreneur and he knows about food and he knows about restaurants, and he decided to do something different and new in this new revived historic center, so I’d like to introduce Juan Pablo.
(00:01:27.2)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Harry. Thanks for having me.
(00:01:29.7)
Harry
Hawk:
Our pleasure.
(00:01:30.4)
Nicholas
Gilman:
So tell me a little bit, Juan Pablo, about what you decided to do. What brought you in to this?
(00:01:36.7)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Well actually it was partly the vein that you actually just mentioned, the restaurateur vein that my family had for four generation of Café de Tacuba. So I had this inspiration and I’ve always had a life of good Mexican eating, and we are honored to present traditional Mexican cuisine to the world in this way. I thought it was about time that downtown Mexico City had a place that was contemporary in that way. It was modern contrasting. It was…some people called it the rebellious son of Café de Tacuba.
(00:02:08.1)
Nicholas
Gilman:
I should add that Café de Tacuba is a very traditional restaurant.
(00:02:12.2)
Harry
Hawk:
Juan Pablo was the first one in.
(00:02:13.6)
Nicholas
Gilman:
And Juan Pablo was just about the first person to take advantage of that need to bring a new kind of place back to the center. I think it’s the first restaurant of this level to have opened in this area in decades. Isn’t that true?
(00:02:27.8)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Well I like to think so. Actually, just like you said, we thought it was a bit risky, but eventually the Mexico City’s downtown needed a place. This idea, which is smaller and much more focused to what’s craftily made dishes and artisanal drinks, and to really get away finally from all of the monopolies that constantly bombard us with their media, and their brands , and whatever, and then it was…
(00:02:54.6)
Harry
Hawk:
Large national brands.
(00:02:56.4)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Exactly, or just the sponsors in Mexico, they’re, you could say, a bit aggressive, so they really talk you into having a sponsorship of some kind. You could say beer, you could say drinks, you could say something else, and that leaves you with all of the limitations for your clientele, and we wanted something very authentic that we could keep on changing. We would keep evolving, and that will fulfill Mexican palates and foreign palates as well, and it would be showing some of the immense richness of Mexico, this array of flavor experience that we have.
(00:03:32.9)
Harry Hawk:
I’d like to dive into that a little bit. I don’t know that people listening fully understand when you say that everything’s from Mexico. They understand it’s a big country, but you must get this from France or you must get this from the United States, and we also talk about local. Every city has kind of a different definition of local because if you’re in Alaska you kind of almost have to bring something in, but when you’re in New York you need a three hundred mile radius and so forth, but if you can talk about how you went about finding the ingredients and the kinds of ingredients and relationships that you have or had to create to find the ingredients, and I think that would be really fascinating.
(00:04:08.4)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
It was a bit difficult. In the beginning we’d try to find all of these ingredients that we wanted to reunite in a different manner, and it was all of these things that are dusty and unused in the different towns of the country. At first it was a bit hard to find them, but then people knew that we were doing exactly what many people wanted, to show them and to offer them in a much more novelty or original way, so every ingredient is traditional and Mexican, but our dishes are the result of the creativeness of the kitchen or whatever. It’s contemporary. It’s modern. It’s different. So it was then that people came to offer them, just we were receiving all kinds of…
(00:04:53.5)
Harry
Hawk:
Can you list a few or categories of things? I mean, I’d like to get very specific if we can.
(00:04:58.0)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Oh, definitely. We actually started making, for example, mortar salsas tableside and then we got all of these different species of chilies coming from all over the country, and then you got to pick your ingredients and local market ingredients to choose from, and it was just fresh. Later, we knew how important it was of the fisherman’s market in Ensenada, and this is the fresh fish that we’re getting. The usual catch of the day that you get to see all of the time in New York, for example, it wasn’t really popular here, and so we were flying the fish over and having these occasional menus of seasonal ingredients, which in Mexico wasn’t really something very respected. Mexican people want everything all year. They don’t give time for ingredients or for animals, or for anything to be at its prime, to have a good population. We want everything all the time.
(00:05:56.5)
Nicholas
Gilman:
But let me add something, there is a history going back to the Aztec’s, going back to Montezuma, of ingredients being brought into Mexico City, right where we’re…practically where we’re sitting. Before the Spanish arrived they had a system of canals, of porters who brought game from the mountains, fish from the seas. It’s always been brought here. It’s not like a new thing. Now we have new technology, we have airplanes, but as I said before, there’s an amazing array of ingredients in this country and we’re so lucky to be able to have access to it all now.
(00:06:29.8)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Exactly, and it was about time that many chefs and people came to realize the cornucopia of ingredients that we have in the country.
(00:06:39.4)
Harry
Hawk:
I mean, one of the things you mentioned, people want everything all the time, and so I goes someplace with a friend and they may say, oh, they’re out of that, and I get very upset because I say, this is great. This is amazing. If they’re out of it, it means that they didn’t buy a thousand of them or ten thousand of them and stick them in the freezer. They bought what they thought they could sell, they ran out because it was popular, and they ran out because the quality is high. Trust me. They could make sure they never run out. Do you agree with that?
(00:07:06.1)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Nobody ever really sees that, that you see behind the, we run out of it. Yeah, we try to get these ingredients and occasional seasonal menu so that we can offer freshness, and also what I was talking about, local ingredients, so first came the chilies, then the insects. All of the insects were really, how would you put it, stigmatized, or people were looking at it in a different way. It was visual impact and people didn’t want to eat it because of some psychological thing, but they have been here with us for a lot of centuries and it was our most important, biggest contribution to the world’s gastronomy. It was insects.
(00:07:43.9)
Nicholas
Gilman:
And let me describe a dish that I ate here that was beautiful and horrifying at the same time. It was served for the first time at a big business dinner that Juan Pablo did for me here, and it was called Cocopaches _____ (00:08:01.0) Ravioli de Flor de Calabaza. Cocopaches is a kind of insect. It looks like a big kind of a black beetle. It’s about an inch and a half long, and the ravioli were really squashed _____ (00:08:14.0) flowers filled with cheese, so they were kind of normal and beautiful orange, yellow colored, and these cocopaches looked like giant cockroaches. They were huge, and shiny, and black. It was a beautiful thing, but kind of terrifying, and I was afraid to bite into one of these things and I thought the juice was going to squeeze out and it was going to be really gross, but they were deep-fried. They were kind of hollow inside. They had a wonderful very light, crispy texture. They had kind of an aroma almost of cinnamon, a little bit I think.
(00:08:47.7)
They were very earthy tasting, and after you get over yourself and you realize that food is food and there’s no reason to eat one thing or another thing, you just get over yourself and you can appreciate how wonderful these things are and it’s part of Mexican gastronomy. It’s part of a lot of gastronomies, a lot of cuisines around the world, eating insects, and perhaps it’s the future. Right now it’s something that’s kind of fashionable amongst the chefs in Mexico because they’re reaching back into their past and bringing these things into a new kind of post-modern context.
(00:09:22.8)
Harry
Hawk:
So Juan Pablo, a list. What are the insects that have made their way to your menu?
(00:09:27.9)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
It depends on the month of the year, but we’ve had the cocopaches, just as described. That time I gave you roaches. I’m not sure if you realized that. That’s the reason you didn’t like that first, just kidding. We usually carry those types of insects and we don’t get to see them in another…well I haven’t seen them in another restaurant, so it’s something that towns, they use them, but we have our own recipe for you to explore that flavor. And we’ve had escamoles, that’s something that…a popular dish. We’ve had _____ (00:09:56.9).
Nicholas
Gilman:
Which are ant eggs.
(00:09:58.7)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Ant eggs, yes, exactly. _____ (00:10:00.0), which is a type of…
(00:10:01.6)
Harry
Hawk:
A grub.
(00:10:02.5)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Exactly, and then we’ve had jumiles.
(00:10:06.7)
Nicholas
Gilman:
Which are little creepy, crawly gray bugs.
(00:10:12.6)
Nicholas
Gilman:
Yeah, but all these things come from tradition. Juan Pablo isn’t out there in the street like catching things with a net. I mean, all these insects have been eaten in Mexico for hundreds and hundreds of years and you’re just sort of bringing them back into contemporary fine dining context.
(00:10:30.4)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
They are the protagonist of the dish, but we do make the compliments, offer them in a visual, more attractive, appealing way. We’ve had _____ (00:10:40.4), which is another strange one which is the eggs of the mosquitoes, like the larvae, which sounds really not so very tasty, but once you get to try them…
(00:10:51.0)
Harry
Hawk:
Well you talk about eggs and things of course, we eat eggs. We eat these things in other contexts. The comedian, whose name I cannot remember at the moment, said once, the bravest man in the world is the guy who looked at a cow and said, I’m going to go up there and I’m going to drink what comes out of there. All of our food is strange until it’s not strange. My question is, so then knowing that you want to bring these things in and find them and people are finding you and all that, but I mean, I know again, in context, the Backstage Café that I set up on Governors Island, we had a local farm on the island and we made a relationship. Are there bug famers, bug raisers? Is there a family that’s been doing it for a hundred years or did you have to convince somebody to go into business to sell it, or what is the process of finding that supplier?
(00:11:31.7)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Just like Nick said, it’s been centuries that these people have been selling them and catching them, and you get to see the videos and there’s a lot of people that are actually know where to look for them and exactly when. There’s different techniques to grab either the larvae of a butterfly or the ant eggs, which are laid in the shadows of a big plant and then you go and filter the dust and whatever’s left on the ground and you end up with the eggs. And so you have techniques, seasons, and people that have been doing this for centuries, and they have been eating it for a lot of time due to _____ (00:12:07.8) reasons to the impact that you have on the soil, on the earth, and the difference that is to raise cattle or to catch bugs, which is very different in sustainability.
(00:12:19.7)
Nicholas
Gilman:
But the irony is that now these things are kind of expensive. They’re not really so popular anymore because there are these artisans and these specialists who raise them. I’d like to add that that’s only one aspect of your restaurant. We don’t want to scare people away here. They have chicken, they have beef, they have pork, tacos, these beautiful artisan tacos made with corn tortillas, organic corn grown in this area. There are small providers who are working with restaurants, especially in the metropolitan area now, who are providing all of these things from chickens, to beef, to game animals, and vegetables, exotic vegetables, as well as these indigenous products that are being revived and saved.
(00:13:07.4)
Harry
Hawk:
Then what I wanted to just confirm, so then most of these insects aren’t farm-raised, they’re forged wild.
(00:13:12.7)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Both. I mentioned _____ (00:13:13.3), but we also have grasshoppers which are really popular. They’re not so strange anymore. You can go to any market in Oaxaca or many other places and you’ll get to see mountains of it, just take it like a bag and eat them like chips, so that one can be grown or…
(00:13:29.2)
Harry
Hawk:
In the farm.
(00:13:29.6)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
You could say that, and then some other ones are wildly catched, like for example, chicatanas, which is my favorite one, this winged ant. They come out in rainy seasons especially in Oaxaca. They’re big. They’re black. And after the rain something happens to them, they become like clumsy and they fall to the floor. It could be in the woods. It could be on the streets. I’ve seen them grab them on the streets of any town, and they are quite expensive. What’s particular about them, they have, inside of their body, the same molecule that makes chilies spicy, which is capsaicin. What’s funny about it is that they sort of spice, they tickle your tongue, not in the same way as chilies, but that is a reason that they put it in a sauce, and the flavor’s just amazing, and they only come out June, July, for example, then that’s when we have them. Just like Nick said, I don’t want to scare people away. We have every sort of thing on the menu.
(00:14:26.0)
Harry
Hawk:
That’s what I’d really like to run down. I mean, you’re getting artisanal chicken, artisanal pigs. Are there particular breeds? Are there particular heirloom?
(00:14:34.2)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
When it comes to meat, we do have meat from organic ranches, which is the breed is called _____ (00:14:40.8). It’s a European breed. Also, a mixture of _____ (00:14:45.8). We haven’t explored the market of organic meat and how to keep all the soil without pesticides, and to keep on changing the animals and the compost in order for us not to use any chemicals and complete the cycle, and that’s what we’re distributing here. And we actually have another restaurant that focuses on just organic meat, but this is where it came from. This is where we cooked the idea. We’ve been having these types of meat, even if it’s lamb or mutton or _____ (00:15:19.6) pork, that is where we specify it on this.
(00:15:23.6)
Harry
Hawk:
You just mentioned mutton, which this is a big thing that gets me upset in New York because you’ll see it on the menu and then know it’s just lamb. I have a friend, Zak Pelaccio, has Hudson Fish and Game, and the Nouvelle Cuisine Guide read of things like hanging duck, but he’s gone back to his farmers. He moved from Brooklyn out to the country so he could be near the farmers and he’s hanging ducks for six weeks. A little bit expensive. So you mentioned mutton. Are there things that are aged, or cultured, or cured in ways that are very traditional that you could mention?
(00:15:54.5)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Definitely. All of our meat that’s aged for either 21 of the 35 days and that way it gets a lot of qualities, the softness, the punch of flavor that you have on meat when it goes through that process. When it comes to mutton, for example, we use that in even what we call tacos de canasta, which is like a sweaty taco inside of a plastic bag that people on bikes sell on the street, and they use mutton, and it’s much more strong in terms of flavor, aromatic. It’s aggressively aromatic. Yeah, but we get some mixture and then it’s an acquired taste, but once you get to like it, you love it.
(00:16:33.0)
Nicholas
Gilman:
In Mexico we eat everything. We eat the whole animal, and there isn’t really such a thing as lamb because what they call lamb, or cordero, is usually what in the United States or England you’d call mutton, it’s big and it’s stronger, and every single part of the animal is eaten and used, from the head on down to the tail and the foot.
(00:16:55.4)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
The whole beast.
(00:16:56.4)
Nicholas
Gilman:
The whole beast. So some of the dishes on your menu, for example, are tacos, but the idea of eating a taco, of serving tacos in an elegant restaurant is something really new. Twenty, thirty years ago it would have been unheard of. A taco was something you ate on the street. A taco was something a poor person would eat, and in elegant households they strove for French-style and European-style, but that’s all changed. So Juan Pablo is one of the first people, one of the first places in Mexico City to be offering a taco tasting, degustacion de tacos, which is a tasting of tacos, and these tacos are based on very traditional tacos, but are more sort of chef-created interesting post-modern ideas of what a taco is. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
(00:17:52.5)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Yeah, sure. We started with one a month, so on the seasonal menu we used to introduce one type of taco, and the idea was to have this really soul food to Mexicans. It was like not just comfort food, but something that you are really attached to. We sort of gourmetized them. So it’s like a dish, like a complex dish, structured and everything with these fresh grade ingredients, but we put a tortilla underneath and we try to make sense out of it, and you get a rib eye taco, that’s something that we all know, but we add the chicharron, which is like the scratchings of the rib eye, already crunchy, and then we add figs and a spread of pate, which is like a Mexican sweet jelly, a traditional candy combined with red chilies, and after that we add Pico de Gallo with _____ (00:18:42.1), which is a small acid cacti. And so you end up with a gourmet taco that has a base of something that you already know, but a combination of ingredients that we try to surprise people so it surprises you. And as Nick was saying, we have a whole tasting of them that goes from _____ (00:18:59.4) taco with crayfish to rabbit carnitas passing through suaderro, which is something popular on the street, but we have salsa from the peninsula of Yucatan, rib eye, pork belly, and then finally a fruit dessert taco with _____ (00:19:16.3) vanilla and mamey crème, a honey tortilla. So what we have here, it’s a food that you recognize and you don’t see as pretentious, but it’s got its complexity to them. Yeah, it’s the first tasting taco menu that I’ve seen in a restaurant this type.
(00:19:35.8)
Nicholas
Gilman:
And that really says a lot about what this place is because the building itself is sort of a rethinking. It’s a traditional colonial building, that’s also modern at the same time. So I think even before you started with your menu when you were fixing up this three hundred year old building, and you left elements of the original architecture and brought in some modern touches, modern lighting, and you really integrated it well. I think that’s a very hard thing to do.
(00:20:04.9)
Harry
Hawk:
So specific question about that I’ve been dying to ask because I’ve been in buildings of similar age, but is there a date or a date that you use to kind of when the building was…the construction started or finished historically?
(00:20:16.9)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Well unfortunately the files for most of the buildings in the first quarter of downtown, they burned, and so we lost track of exactly who made it and what sort of style is every single building or façade, but the architect that helped here, he was restoring all of these monuments and buildings, and they calculated 3.5 to four centuries for this building.
(00:20:44.0)
Harry
Hawk:
So we’re talking seventeen something, so sixteen hundreds, the time of Rembrandt and the time that maybe before the pilgrims came.
(00:20:52.1)
Nicholas
Gilman:
The time of the Renaissance in Italy is when it was starting here. This is a little bit later than that. I mean, maybe more of the time of Bach, but nevertheless, it’s old.
(00:21:01.2)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
We were being colonized and actually the street that we are sitting, and it was a street called the Canal Street, and it was water. It wasn’t a street. We know in this block the IRS of those times for the Spanish Crown, lived in this block. Later on it became like a casona, which is like a big house designed for people to get in by horse, and then we lost track of what it was.
(00:21:26.8)
Harry
Hawk:
But then the first use you’re saying was maybe a storeroom or a counting room.
(00:21:31.3)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
It should have been like a house. It should have been a big house for people that were living in this part, and then centuries later it became commerce. We know some small part of it that’s the part that we connect to Café de Tacuba, that was the first psych ward in the country, which was the Hospital of the Divine Saviour, which is the Divine Savior, and that was the first hospital to be treating patients with mind illnesses. So we know that part, but then again where we’re having this conversation we don’t really know because it was burned, but we know its old, and that is building is what tells us the age of it and it’s also the reason for the name of the restaurant, Limosneros. I got it from the walls, so the unique name _____ (00:22:21.1) walls at that time _____ (00:22:23.4) because the church used to ask people for stone materials in order to build up churches, monasteries, all these sort of Catholic…
(00:22:33.8)
Nicholas
Gilman:
Religious buildings.
(00:22:34.9)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Religious buildings, exactly, and people were to chip in with _____ (00:22:39.1) or volcanic stone, _____ (00:22:41.0). All of these stones were put together in this collage to make these strong, thick walls that have all of these textures, so we recover them. We try to make them very evident in the place, and we try to have the same language in the design for the place. So we use a lot of volcanic stones, like our lamps for example, old wood, _____ (00:23:08.1). Since the walls are very gray and heavy to the site, we try to have the most colorful art that we get in Mexico, which is for me _____ (00:23:18.9) art, and so colorful that it really stands out from the limosneros wall or _____ (00:23:25.9).
(00:23:27.2)
Harry
Hawk:
I’m going to pull this all together. We’re in an old part of town, in an old country, and we’re in an old building that has been adapted and we are now serving very, very modern food using, the word you used earlier, the patrimony of the country. We are using the most authentic ingredients to create the most modern of dishes.
(00:23:47.9)
Nicholas
Gilman:
But all based on tradition.
(00:23:49.9)
Harry
Hawk:
What I would ask you to do at this point, I think we’re had the conversation about food and ingredients that I wanted to have. I would ask both of you in a sense to plug the restaurant. If someone came here, you’ve talked about some of the dishes, but how should they think about the menu, and if they’re not coming to Mexico City and they’re just thinking about Mexican food, if you have any thoughts or wisdom as well, but I’d really like to focus on the food here.
(00:24:15.0)
Nicholas
Gilman:
This is Mexican food. I think that’s what we want people outside of Mexico to know, that Mexican food is a very, very complex thing, and I write about street food, and I also write about high-end restaurants like this, and we hope that people will come here with an open mind and want to try everything. You’re coming here to a Mexican restaurant, but you’re not going to find, other than those high-end tacos, you’re not going to find things that you would think. You’re not going to find any nachos and you’re not going to find any enchiladas or anything like that, but it’s all part of Mexican food and we’re trying to expand people’s minds, both in the country and visitors.
(00:24:57.5)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Yeah, that’s exactly what we intend to do and we’ve talked about food, but this actually, it all started too with the focus on Mexican distilled spirits and fermented drinks, and we try to have a great selection of artisanal mescals, of craft beer. We know what Mexican craft beer can achieve because we’re famous for all those brands that you have in mind right now, but there’s really a lot of enthusiasm for making much better beer, much better spirits, specialty wine right now, it’s becoming much more popular in Mexico. We’ve eradicated all of the mistakes that we had before due to our _____ (00:25:40.8) in Baja California.
(00:25:43.1)
Nicholas
Gilman:
And our political history in which during the Spanish Colonial era, wine growing, other than for clerical reasons, was banned, so we didn’t have a wine industry here to speak of until the past 20 or 30 years. In Baja California on the coast it’s really exploded. It’s amazing what they’re producing, and even in some areas of the interior of the country, and your bar features everything Mexican. Is that true?
(00:26:12.1)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Exactly. All of the labels of wine are Mexican, so everything that you pick should be a boutique wine, so no big industrialized wine either, not even if it’s Mexican.
(00:26:23.6)
Harry
Hawk:
Fantastic. I want to pause a little bit about talking about the liquor and the wine because I want to do a separate little recording about that, but it’s very important that we mentioned it now because it is part of what this restaurant is and what you offer. Again, you’ve given me a beer earlier that was absolutely fantastic. Could you mention what beer that was, by the way?
(00:26:42.6)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Oh, you had a Double IPA from Ensenada called _____ (00:26:47.4) Brewery.
(00:26:50.1)
Harry
Hawk:
All right, fantastic, highly recommended. Now putting the alcohol aside, we’ll come back to it. It was important for me to make sure we mention it because it is part of what you do here. Again, if I came in, if I’m in Mexico City, if I’m lucky enough to be here, I’m coming in to Limosneros for lunch or dinner. How should I think about your menu? What should I look at? How should I think about it?
(00:27:10.2)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Well at first you’d be confused, but that’s what we intended it to. The thing is, we don’t have a really big menu. We try to replace dishes every time that we change it year by year. There’s entries that are fresh, like fresh fish _____ (00:27:24.8) from Mexico, from Ensenada, then you can get some insects to see if you like them because I like to tell my clientele that if you don’t like them here, you don’t like them elsewhere.
(00:27:34.5)
Nicholas
Gilman:
That’s true.
(00:27:35.4)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
And then some protein. We have organic meats, we have fish, we have octopus, and then the seasonal menus, and that would be like a complete tryout for the…
(00:27:43.5)
Harry
Hawk:
Is there one thing I should not miss?
(00:27:44.6)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
If you’re adventurous enough, the cocopaches you shouldn’t miss, or the escamoles.
(00:27:48.9)
Nicholas
Gilman:
But there’s also a tasting menu for people who can’t make up their minds. You always have what you call degustacion, is that right?
(00:27:56.5)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
Yes.
(00:27:57.0)
Nicholas
Gilman:
That’s how many courses, six?
(00:27:59.1)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
The chef’s tasting menu.
(00:28:00.2)
Nicholas
Gilman:
The chef’s tasting menu.
(00:28:01.5)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
It changes every month, and it’s six course plus the petit fours can be paired, or you can have the taco tasting menu which is also six and it can also be paired with, not with wine, but with mescals and craft beer, so yeah, it’s a different…
(00:28:15.4)
Nicholas
Gilman:
But the most important thing is to come with an open mind and try new ingredients, new flavors.
(00:28:21.4)
Harry
Hawk:
We’re about to come to an end of this recording, but we’re going to be right back immediately and just talk a little bit about tequila and mescals. So if you’re listening to this now, look for the link in the show notes and we’ll have a bunch of other things, but if you could tell us where we are, the address, how to find it, all of the things that people might want to know.
(00:28:39.5)
Juan Pablo
Ballesteros:
So we are located in the heart of downtown Mexico City, the street name’s Allende, the number’s three, and we are located a few steps from Tacuba Street. We are really close to Belles Artes, fine arts palace, and an emblematic building of the city, very beautiful one too, and you can locate us in the number 55.21.55.76. The Twitter, it’s @limosnerosmx, our Facebook page is Limosneros, the webpage is limosneros.com.mx.
(00:29:12.2)
Nicholas
Gilman:
And you can read my review at goodfoofmexicocity.com, just look for Limosneros, www.goodfoodmexicocity.com.
(00:29:21.5)
Harry
Hawk:
This is Harry Hawk and this has been Talking About Everything. I hope everybody has a great day. Bye-bye.
(00:29:28.1)
Chuck
Fresh:
My name is Chuck Fresh and I’m being paid to thank you for listening to Talking About Everything with Harry Hawk. Harry wants to hear from you on Twitter @hhawk or harryhawk@gmail.com.
(00:29:43.3)
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(00:30:19.9)
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