Holy Mole!

Suresh Doss sits down with superstar chef Enrique Olvera in Mexico City to discuss his revamped restaurant and the art of making mole.

Photography: Maureen M. Evans

“MOLE IS CHAOS; it is a party in the mouth,” chef Enrique Olvera says, getting deep into a conversation about the dish that has characterized his 20-plus years of cooking in the U.S. and Mexico City.

He’s effusing his love for Mexico’s national dish, a sauce the ancient Aztecs referred to as molli; a rich concoction made with a myriad of chilies, fruit and nuts.

With most of the versions you’ll find in restaurants or food markets in Mexico City, mole is a dark sauce, which resembles something that may have been left on the stove for longer than intended. But in Mexico, it is transcendent, weaving through the county’s rich Aztec and colonial history and representing an heirloom banner throughout the country. “In Mexico, there are thousands of versions of mole, some that are vastly different from each other,” says Olvera. “It speaks to each cook’s personality. It is the sum of a lifetime, of multiple lifetimes.”

While Oaxaca and Puebla are two regions closely associated with Mexico’s national dish, Mexico City’s diverse culinary scene offers a wider lens to view mole’s current identity. Peruse menus at traditional and non-traditional restaurants and the word will pop up in variations. At one of the city’s

Enrique Olvera is the brightest star in Mexico’s culinary sky.

He's made mole the star course at the new Pujol"

His redesigned restaurant, Pujol

most popular restaurants, Maximo Bistrot, grilled sea bass is presented with seared cabbage, on a bed of coconut mole. At Contramar, a hip lunch spot, whole chargrilled octopus arrives with a thick layer of red mole sauce that sings of earthiness and chocolate. Simpler versions of mole are also common, as a sauce to accompany boiled root vegetables, or a side dip for corn tortillas at a traditional taqueria. Mole is inescapable in Mexico City restaurants.

“It is a dish that is uniquely tied to the regionality of Mexico. The ingredients change with seasons and regions,” Olvera says. He feels so close to the dish that he’s made it the star course in his redesigned flagship restaurant, Pujol, in Mexico City. The critically acclaimed restaurant relocated to the affluent Polanco neighbourhood in 2017. It took Olvera’s team two years to design the new restaurant. “I wanted the redesign to reflect my evolution as a cook,” Olvera says. When the Mexico City-born chef graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, he found himself working in French fine dining in Chicago. Olvera returned to Mexico City shortly after to open Pujol. At the time, his vision was to combine Mexican ingredients with French cooking and modern techniques.

Over the last 19 years, Pujol has received global praise and Olvera’s vision for modern interpretations of Mexican street cooking earned him a coveted spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

Since opening Pujol, Olvera has become a cookbook author and he’s starred in Netflix’s Chef’s Table. His business has grown to include spin-off restaurants in New York City, with two projects on the way in Los Angeles.

Olvera embraces his position as Mexico City’s most celebrated chef. His current focus revolves around using regional, traditional Mexican ingredients through the lens of modern cooking techniques. As you tour through Mexico City’s broader food scene, change and breakneck progress are abundant and widespread. The city is a leader in today’s culinary zeitgeist, the hot spot for foodfocused travelers eager to discover Mexico’s cooking beyond menus of Tex-Mex and hipster tacos. At every turn there are signs of innovation – from third-wave coffee shops to modern seafood bistros and cocktail bars.

Olvera’s Pujol sits at the centre of this culinary ride in Mexico City, the food that is served is one of dual identities; memories and traditions of the past are intertwined with a new sense of discovery. If Pujol’s first incarnation was traditional Mexican ingredients, seen through a haute perspective, the new Pujol is a deeper dive into Mexico’s regionality, inspired by Japanese minimalism. “I want guests to feel lighter and energized when they dine here. Similar to a Japanese omakase experience where you experience a multitude of flavours without the weight of each course.”

All tasting menus begin with a course of “street snacks.” A hollowed gourd is presented at the table and when opened, smoke billows out and clears to reveal a pair of carefully peeled baby corn prepared to represent the elote style with cotija cheese and hot mayo. Here, the smoldering husks frame a thin layer of mayo coated with chicatana (flying ants), chilies and lime juice. Chicatana are hyper seasonal, a regional delicacy that arrive in Oaxaca every spring. Traditionally they are toasted over a flat griddle known as a comal. At Pujol, Olvera creams them to make a thick sauce that coats the corn.

At the new Pujol, diners can opt for the taco tasting menu at the bar, or sit down in the dining room for a choice of two six-course menus: seafood or corn. For the majority of the half-dozen courses, you’ll be eating with your hands. “It’s part textural for me, the way the corn feels under your hand, or the pleasure of holding something we’ve created before you put it in your body,” Olvera says.

Pujol’s modern design was two years in the making

I want guests to feel lighter and energized"

Since the opening of Pujol, Mexico City has also seen a rising tortilla movement. “There is a new love for artisanal tortillas, we are moving away from pre-packaged versions,” he says.

Chef prepares the low-key star course of the tasting menu

About 80 different ingredients go into the mole nuevo every day"

A year ago, the chef dubbed as the “corn whisperer” opened Molina el Pujol, a tortilla shop in nearby Condesa. A small, seasonal menu awaits diners, but for Olvera it doubles as a production facility for his restaurant empire’s tortilla needs. And for mole.

Each week, cooks at Molina el Pujol will craft a fresh batch of mole, using over 80 ingredients and a guiding theme of “whatever is in season.” The fresh batches are then taken to the restaurant where it is added to the mother sauce or “mole madre,” intensifying its flavour with every batch.

The tasting menu experience at Pujol culminates with mole. Two pools of sauce arrive on a large plate, a thick, dark mole surrounding a bright, red mole in the plate’s centre. Of all the fine dining restaurants I’ve visited, the plating is the simplest – to the point where I’m verging on confusion and bemusement. For a moment, I stare at the concentric circles and wonder what to expect when I spoon the sauces into my mouth.

Olvera views the two circles of sauce on a plate as his own dualism, a culinary journey from past to present. As the mole dish is presented, diners are advised of the current age of the mother sauce. When I visited, the mole madre was 1,872 days old. Like tending to an heirloom sourdough starter, the mole nuevo (made up of approximately 80 ingredients) is added daily.

It is a complex sauce that hits the palate in waves, at first a flurry of dark chocolate notes and hints of mushroom and corn, followed in succession by tingles of pepper, spice and dark fruit. With each spoonful, the waves repeat in almost the exact same succession.

“Mole: its history, its physical qualities, its chemical composition, its immense complexity become a perfect analogy of our land,” says Olvera. “Each ingredient is willing to give up itself to become much more than the sum of its parts.”