Making the dish look dishy
By Beverly Russell

Four top international chefs put on their whites, sharpened their culinary equipment and cooked up some of their favorite specialties recently in San Miguel. But not just the food was memorable. All these cuisine artists showed how to dish the dish, creating new highs in the art of food presentation.

The kick-off event, masterminded by Mexico City chef Patricia Quintana and her team, was a benefit for Feed the Hungry, at which 150 guests sat under white tents in the garden at the rambling, candlelit Hacienda Calderon.

Quintana’s menu began with a silky, chilled avocado soup Atlixco-style with a garnish of crisp tortilla strips, tomatoes, onions, chile and crème fraiche.

It was her main course, however, that caused the culinary conversation. Plates arrived with two intriguing regalos, fashioned out of plantain leaves tied up with raffia. 

Once the food parcels were unwrapped, inside the larger one was chicken in yellow mole with pepicha herb and hoja santa, sitting on a bed of chayote and finely shredded zucchini.

In the other package was a black bean tamale. It was the most inviting presentation ever, declared the foodies and suitably matched the focus of the evening—(M)food distribution to the needy. To complete the gourmet experience, dessert was a smooth, caramelized almond custard with pine nut cluster accompaniment.

Later in the week, it was New Orleans Brett Breaux’s turn to show his creativity at Sazon where he conducted a demonstration of Cajun-style cooking. He is executive chef at the Orient-Express Windsor Court Hotel. His menu started off with fried green tomatoes with a remoulade sauce. After first placing the thinly-sliced tomatoes in flour and dipping them into egg wash and panko bread crumbs, the slices were fried until golden brown on each side. A decoration of spicy sauce on each gave the presentation a festive look. Chef Breaux, who lost all his furniture in Hurricane Katrina but still loves the Big Easy, followed this with New Orleans-style BBQ shrimp cooked in Amber beer, Worcestershire sauce, Louisiana hot sauce and a clutch of herbs. For dessert he showed his audience how to make authentic Bananas Foster, four slices of bananas for each person, simmered in rum and banana liqueur, presented on two scoops of vanilla ice cream. Scrumptious!

Then it was on to the Orient-Express Movie Fever Fiesta at the Casa de Sierra Nevada Parque garden. As VIP guests for the Expresión en Corto documentary movie festival gathered to drink wine and margaritas, three executive chefs, Brett Breaux, Gonzalo Martinez (executive chef of the Casa de Sierra Nevada) and Guillermo Gomez (Maroma Resort & Spa, near Cancun) worked at food stations demonstrating the art of the cocktail canapé, or botana as it’s called in San Miguel. Martinez likes to design his own food presentation “pieces” which he then commissions local artisans to create. For example, he designed a translucent artist’s palette with perforations for holding miniature ice cream cones. Into the cones, using a piping bag, he swirls guacamole, garnished with shrimp or some other tasty morsel. Guests found these cones easier to eat than the conventional canapé base of toast. For this film festival fiesta, he placed the cones in an ingenious specially designed film reel in the front of his food station. It’s no 

surprise that Martinez graduated as an engineer before switching to a career in cooking. He clearly has a mechanical “eye” for inventive ideas that allow him to take food presentation to a new level of art. Foodies also marveled at his miniature shot glass of corn, mango salsa and shrimp, served with a tiny silver spoon.

Gomez honored Mayan cuisine at his table, with delicious savoury canapés which were partnered with gorgeous silver spoons holding a daub of chocolate mousse topped with sliced fig. He placed a dozen of these spoons on a square plate, making a very elegant sweet finale.

Beverly Russell, author of Women of Taste: Recipes and Profiles of Famous Women Chefs, and other books on the arts, came to live in San Miguel in 2006.