Mexican cuisine has a lot in common with those of China and India, in that it’s really an umbrella term for various regional cuisines from a hugely diverse country with rich histories all their own, but it’s been ingrained in American popular culture for at least a century, where it’s morphed and spun off into even more.

For the last four years I’ve been teaching a course called “Food Writing for the Media,” at Boston University’s School of Gastronomy and Food Studies. I’ve always included in the required readings, for a module about dish-history stories, an essay by Patricia Escárcega, published in Bon Appétit in 2020, titled, “It’s Time We Give the Mexican Combo Platter the Credit it Deserves.” In it, the journalist and former Los Angeles Times food critic argues for the enterprising, innovative vision of Mexican restaurateurs who created this tradition, tracing its history back to the 1920s and reminiscing about ordering her own favorite platters of iceberg-lettuce-dusted chiles rellenos growing up. It was bucking prevailing notions about food culture at the time by celebrating what we might call an Americanized or less than “authentic” version of a cuisine. “It’s a mistake to discount the foodways that have gotten us to where we are today,” she wrote. I think about this all the time.

So when Matt and I were joking a bit about the “dark days” of Mexican food in NYC in the introduction of this week’s podcast with chef Fidel Caballero of the progressive Mexican restaurant Corima — when it seemed that Manhattan had mostly so-so Tex-Mex joints offering dry grilled chicken rather than the taquerias all over the West Coast serving a plethora of traditional ingredients like lengua and housemade salsa — you have to consider how we got here. And so, thank you, Benny’s Burritos, for your service in the East Village, before competition from Chipotle proved to be too much.

Just the same, it’s exciting to see how a cuisine is evolving in a certain place, where it’s going. In New York, things have stayed the same (Chipotles on every block, margaritas in big, goofy glasses) while also changing a lot (fine dining, regionally distinct Mexican restaurants). And how many Mexican restaurants around the country now serve birria ever since a bonafide craze for the Jalisco-based braised beef hit sometime around 2020? It should be noted that Mexican communities, particularly in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, have long supported restaurants, bakeries, markets and taquerias serving food connected to particular regions of Mexico. But the city's fine-dining establishment was slower to recognize Mexican cooking as a cuisine worthy of the same attention given to French, Italian, or Japanese food.

That all may have changed starting in 2014, when Cosme, a sleek upscale restaurant from chef Enrique Olvera, opened in the Flatiron District. More ambitious Mexican restaurants followed. Soon, chefs were putting their own signature on broadly familiar dishes, pushing the boundaries of the cuisine and eschewing notions of authenticity in favor of personal expression.

Which brings us to 2024, when Corima opened to wide acclaim. As we discussed on the podcast, the dishes coming out of this Michelin-starred kitchen are unexpected and undeniably delicious. Chef Caballero has cooked in restaurants in the Basque Country and Shanghai, and in restaurants of various cuisines in the U.S. before opening Corima. But the food is rooted in his northern Mexican heritage. Over the last couple decades, a lot of chefs have treated us to incredible housemade tortillas using fresh masa. At Corima, the housemade tortilla is made with flour, as is northern Mexican tradition. Not only that but it’s a sourdough. Perhaps all the prior restaurants and masa respect helped pave the way for our appreciation of these flour-based tortillas? Perhaps there’s just so much more of Mexican cuisine that we haven’t experienced too much of yet in this city. I hope we will soon.

We played another round of this on the podcast with Fidel! Here were the three random ingredients that we gave him to make a mental dish with:

Chef Fidel came up with an answer on the spot. So did our resident robot, Chat GPT. Vote for your favorite (hypothetical, merely verbal) dish below. And don’t forget: the poll is still open for the winning dish between our last podcast guest, chef Eunji Lee vs robot.

We’re still taking votes for last week’s matchup, which revolved around zucchini blossoms, uni, and tofu.