New Worlder Nicholas Gill

Matthias Ingelmann is the bar manager of Kol Mezcaleria and Kol Restaurant in London England. Matthias is German born and has worked in a lot of great bars around Europe, but once he started drinking mezcal he went down the rabbit hole with agave spirits, as many of us do. He has now built one of the UK's largest mezcal collections at Kol Mezcaleria and is continually expanding that collection as Kol expands. They just announced another restaurant with a cocktail heavy menu, called Fonda, which will open later in the year.

Like at Kol the restaurant, there is a strict policy of only importing a few basic ingredients like corn, chocolate and dried chiles. So there are no limes to use in cocktails. No grapefruit juice for palomas. He talks about how he started importing verjus, unfermented grape juice, as one of the ingredients to provide the acidity in some drinks. And how he uses seasonal herbs like pineapple weed to bring tropical flavors into the bar. We also talk about Kol’s partnership with the Sin Gusano project in Mexico, which is allowing them to work directly with several small producers for their own line of 6 different agave spirits from different parts of Mexico, to be used in the bar and sold at the bar nut not commercially.

There is a lot going on with mezcal as it becomes more mainstream that you, the consumer, should be aware about. Commercial brands are coming in and locking small distillers into contracts, they are monocropping espadin all over Oaxaca and they are putting pressure to try to produce more and more mezcal in unsustainable ways. It’s not at tequila levels yet. There are no Kardashians selling mezcal. At the rate mezcal is increasing in popularity we are not that far off. That’s why it’s extremely important if you are a bartender to buy mezcal from sources that champion small producers and educate your clientele.

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Nando Chang was born in Chiclayo, Peru and is the chef of Itamae AO, a Nikkei restaurant in Miami, Florida. It is the reincarnation of Itamae, the beloved Nikkei restaurant that began as a family food hall stall and later restaurant in Miami’s Design District. Nando’s sister, Valerie Chang, who I interviewed on this podcast more than a year ago, opened Maty’s, a Peruvian restaurant in Midtown Miami in 2023, and it has gone on to be nominated for pretty much every major media award for U.S. restaurants since then. The plan from the beginning, however, was to install a more intimate version of Itamae in an adjacent space.

The new Itamae, Itamae AO, is tasting menu only. Nando talks about why he won’t call it an omakase, his thoughts about fish butchery, and how he got into fish aging, but also how he understands its limitations. We also discuss Nando’s rap career, which included an album called Ceviche, with a track titled Sushi Chef, and how it’s still very much a part of his life. He talks about how he was influenced by other chefs cooking Nikkei food, such as Llama Inn and Llama San’s Erik Ramirez in New York, and getting to know Maido’s Mitsuharu Tsumura in Lima and how it helped him confirm many of his views about Nikkei food and where it is going.

I have probably said this before but there’s often this idea of Nikkei food when it gets exported abroad that it is just ceviche and sushi on a menu together. That’s a very limited view of this style of cooking, which, to me, is much more about freedom than limitations. The Chang family, who are Chinese-Peruvian by the way, have understood this very well since they started opening restaurants in Miami. Nando talks a lot about not just doing what everyone else is doing, but doing things that make sense to him. I think it’s a good example to follow for other Peruvian chefs, or any chef trying to find their voice in the kitchen.

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Today we are speaking with Mariana Poo, the commercial director of Traspatio Maya and its counterpart Taller Maya, and Luciely Cahum Mejía, a beekeeper, vegetable producer and promoter from the Mayan community of Granada, Maxcanú, who also works with Traspatio Maya.

Traspatio Maya, which is part of the larger Haciendas del Mundo Maya Foundation, is an organization based in Mexico’s Yucatán that works with 32 rural indigenous communities and is dedicated to supporting the production of sustainable culinary products harvested in artisanal ways under fair conditions while rescuing ancestral Mayan techniques and improving global production practices. It’s an incredible group that has really changed the gastronomic conversation in the Yucatán and you can see how these women are now driving the conversation around food in the region.I first heard of Traspatio Maya while I was in Merida last year. There was a panel that Mariana was a part of during the regional food festival Sabores de Yucatan, which was partnering with the Best Chef Awards. Everyone else on the panel was a chef, fairly famous ones, that were talking about their stories of working with rural and indigenous producers. At one point, Ferran Adrià, the famous chef of El Bulli and one of the most influential culinary figures in the world without question, who happened to be in the audience, asked to speak and was given the microphone. For the next 20 minutes he rambled on about technology and the future of the global food supply, mostly dismissing the work everyone on the stage was doing. The chefs on the stage just nodded, not wanting to debate this iconic figure, but Mariana pushed back. I was moved by it. In my mind it was like the statue of the Fearless Girl standing in front of the statue of the Charging Bull on Wall Street (note: I’m just referring to this instance. I’ve met Ferran Adrià prior to this and he seems like a decent guy). She stood up for herself and the women she works with, and she did it with love and respect. It was such a perfect example how to move a conversation forward. It’s something I need to remind myself sometimes. You’ll hear Mariana’s response to what she was thinking during this, and also why what she was saying was important.

Mariana also tells us about how important working with the restaurant community has been. She explains how Noma Mexico, Noma’s 2017 pop-up in Tulum, allowed them to broaden their focus and how sending surplus produce to restaurants has been an important source of revenue.This is the first bilingual podcast we have had. Traspatio Maya always tries to include the women they work with in everything they do. I saw Luciely on stage with Jordi Roca at the Best Chef Awards, which you will hear about. In the interview you will hear some Spanish, though it is followed by an English translation so please be patient.

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Juan Luis Martínez is the chef of the restaurant Mérito in Lima, Peru. Juan Luis was born in Venezuela but has been living abroad and working in restaurants in Spain and Peru for many years. He opened Mérito in 2018 after working at Central for several years. It’s this narrow, two-level space in the Barranco neighborhood, with lots of minimalist wood and adobe walls. You see the kitchen right upon entering and there are a few seats there, plus more upstairs. The food is colorful, creative and really, really delicious. Is it Venezuelan? Is it Peruvian? It’s kind of both but also neither at the same time. It’s a restaurant cannot easily be boxed in, and I think that’s the beauty of it. More recently he opened DeMo, a café and bakery, which recently moved into a larger location a few blocks from Mérito, which has an attached pizzeria called Indio. And late last year he opened another restaurant, called Clon, which is an even more relaxed version of Mérito.  

I was recently a voter in Food & Wine’s Global Tastemakers awards and when the results were in I was a bit surprised that of all of the restaurants in the world, Mérito in Lima was the one more of these voters ate better at in the last year than any other. For these awards, Mérito was named the best restaurant in the world. I was surprised, to be honest. Not because they didn’t deserve it, but because the restaurant is so unpretentious. I think some people had the impression I had something to do with Mérito getting that ranking because I wrote an accompanying story about it for Food & Wine, but other than being a voter I really didn’t. I don’t have that kind of pull. Thanks for thinking I do though. Juan Luis, and his wife Michelle, who is a designer and whose work has left its own stamp on the restaurants as well, have managed to get a lot of attention, both locally and internationally, for these restaurants. 50 Best. Best Chef Awards. Whatever it is they are probably on it. Yet, they have done it by almost doing the total opposite of what most other restaurants that have received similar amounts of attention have done. They aren’t loud or flashy. The investments in the restaurants have never been lavish or in high profile locations. They aren’t on social media non-stop or flying around to conferences every week. They have just focused on creating good, creative food, in comfortable spaces at reasonable prices with great service. And everyone loves them. I send people there all the time and I cannot say I’ve ever heard someone disliking their experience at Mérito. They just happened to have created a really great restaurant. It’s really that straightforward.  

So, what is Mérito? Is it a prototype of Venezuelan food fusing with Peruvian food? There are a lot of overlap of ingredients in the two countries, at least overlap in kinds of ingredients if not the exact ingredients, especially in the Amazon and parts of the Andes. Plus, Lima has a history of absorbing whatever culture comes into town. There are more than a million Venezuelans that have moved to the city over the past decade, a phenomenon that’s happening throughout the region because of the instability in Venezuela. There’s no doubt that Venezuelan diaspora is having a major impact on food in the region, and that’s a story I have been watching closely for years....

Pietra Possamai is the winemaker at Bodega Murga in the Pisco Valley of Peru. Born in Brazil, she has led the winemaking operations at Bodega Murga, which also distills pisco, since the beginning, in 2019. Her 32 different labels of natural wines using only six of the eight grapes that are used in pisco production. These criolla varieties are mostly unexplored in winemaking, so the possible combinations of what they can be coerced from them is full of potential. Pietra experiments with skin contact, early harvests, co-fermentations, and aging in amphora. She makes Pét-nat, blends and single varietal wines using these grapes. The results have been pretty incredible. She is making wines that could only be made in Peru. They are appearing at all of the best restaurants in Lima and a few of her wines, like the orange Sophia L’Orange, are appearing on some wine lists in the U.S., Europe and Dubai. She is helping change the wine culture in Lima, which had been quite stale in my opinion.

I wrote a story a year ago about Peru’s wine awakening. It’s quite exciting for me to watch. Even though Peru has the deepest history of viticulture in the Americas, the wine has only become something to write about in the last five years or so. Pepe Moquillaza kind of kicked off the movement, making natural wines from Quebranta and Albilla grapes, and now all sorts of wines are coming out of the woodwork, and most are utilizing criolla grapes. I went to visit Murga’s vineyards last year and they are quite special. In the interview we talk a little about the Joyas de Murga vineyard, it’s short trek from the bodega, but it’s completely encircled by towering sand dunes. It got its nickname from the hoyas of the Canary Islands, vines circled by stone walls. If you have a chance, check Pietra’s wines from Bodega Murga, and just Peruvian wine in general. It’s entered into a new era and it can finally co-exist alongside Peruvian food, which, let’s face it, is a high bar.

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Niklas Ekstedt is the owner of the Michelin starred restaurant Ekstedt in Stockholm, Sweden. It’s a restaurant that was designed around live fire cooking, but it started doing this when it opened in late 2011, well before this was a trend. He had spent years working in modern kitchens, everything from Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago to El Bulli in Spain, and he opened a very successful restaurant focused on molecular food when he was just 21. When New Nordic cuisine started to take off and he began to think about how he could be a part of it in a way that made sense to him, he started to think about Nordic techniques. The older ones. He started to research 18th century cookbooks to understand the way Swedes used to eat. It was closer to the way he grew up in the northern part of Sweden, where foraging was a way of life and his parents would buy meat from Sami herders. I was at Ekstedt more than a decade ago and what I assumed would be something of a gimmick – a modern restaurant with just a wood stove, fire pit and wood fired oven that was without gas or electricity in the kitchen – was anything but. The food was smart and honest, the pure expression of the ingredients. It was one of the highlights of a trip that included meals at Relae and Fäviken.

Ekstedt has been open for 13 years now, so any novelty of this restaurant has worn off. Many others have followed in its path. Niklas has even opened another version of the restaurant in London too.I think there is something important in thinking about the way we used to eat, wherever we are in the world. The last couple of centuries have truly disconnected us from where our food comes from and how we eat it, and we are paying the price. Our food is less nutritious, it often lacks flavor and its pumped full of all kinds of chemicals that are tearing our bodies and environments apart. We all need to peel back those layers and see what was going on a couple of centuries ago. I don’t mean to limit that to restaurant settings, but in our homes as well.  We also talk a bit about how the restaurant industry is changing. Pre-pandemic, chefs used to take themselves very seriously. Kitchens were more like war zones than places of work. Not to say all is fine, but I think there is a sense that things are moving in a more positive direction.

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