Savoring San Miguel—An insider tour of San Miguel restaurants
By Françoise Lemieux, March 2, 2007
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What is San Miguel’s oldest restaurant? Which local steak house is located in the owner’s childhood home? Which nearby eatery’s owner is a designer, architect, painter and a classically-trained chef? How do you make Mexico’s national dish, chiles in nogada? |
Answers to these questions are sprinkled throughout Savoring San Miguel, the latest book by local resident Kris Rudolph, owner of El Buen Café, Culinary Adventures in Mexico and La Cocina Cooking School. Part cookbook, part chronicle of San Miguel’s restaurant scene and its people, Savoring San Miguel is an entertaining and appetizing tour of the multicultural cocinas and cocineros of San Miguel.
For such a small city, San Miguel has a remarkably varied restaurant scene, ranging from traditional and innovative Mexican food to French, German, Italian, Argentinean, Vietnamese, Chinese and Thai. This culinary diversity is what inspired Rudolph to write the book. “Most big cities have a cookbook like this,” she says. “I felt it was finally time for San Miguel, with its rich array of restaurants, to have its own.”
Rudolph feels San Miguel’s myriad restaurants reflect the town’s evolution. As she writes in the introduction to her book, “We’ve grown from a small provincial town to quite an upscale little city, where you can now find almost everything you crave—from simple Mexican home cooking and complex pre-Hispanic dishes to sushi, osso buco and cheese fondue. Tamales, gorditas, and the all-powerful taco are still the mainstay of Mexican street food; however, turn a corner and step into one of our restaurants, and you can easily find a selection of delicious, well-prepared food from around the world.”
| Savoring San Miguel covers all dining bases—from appetizers, soups and salads to entrées and desserts. | |
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The 76 recipes from 36 of San Miguel’s most popular restaurants include traditional Mexican favorites, such as Cha-Cha-Cha’s enchiladas suizas, La Bugambilia’s rajas con crema, and Villa Santa Monica’s tortilla soup. They move on into innovative Mexican treats such as Azafran’s black bean cakes with mango salsa, Casa Sierra Nevada’s fresh corn soup with huitlacoche compote, La Felguera’s pears with pulque sauce, and La Puertecita’s rose petal and shrimp quesadillas. They then branch out with selections such as Nirvana’s watermelon gazpacho, China Palace’s Szechuan chicken, Berlin’s Jägerschnitzel, and Bella Italia’s vegetables in pizimonio.
Just as no great restaurant is defined only by its food, Savoring San Miguel goes beyond recipes. Each restaurant’s entry includes a description of its ambiance, a brief history of the restaurant owners and/or chefs as well as what lured them to San Miguel and/or into the restaurant business. Some of them are sanmiguelenses. Others came from France, Spain, Germany, Argentina. Some were raised in the kitchen and in the business. Others were artists, building contractors, sociologists and hoteliers. For Rudolph, the most interesting part of writing the book was finding out about her fellow restaurateurs. “I really enjoyed the interviews,” she says. “I’ve known most of these people for a long time, but I didn’t know their stories, how they got here.”
Rudolph herself first came to San Miguel in 1987 after her dreams of becoming a professional dancer were shattered in a car accident. A month’s sojourn turned into a year as an English teacher. Although she returned to Texas to earn her masters’ degree in hotel and restaurant administration, she couldn’t stay away. Frequent visits became an import-export business with local artisans and, eventually, a life-changing decision, when she moved here permanently in 1991 and opened El Buen Café.
Like her other cookbooks, Savoring is bilingual—so you might just improve your Spanish as you learn how to make Huitlacoche Fondue or Pastel de Tres Leches. The book also includes a helpful glossary of basic ingredients, a section on chiles and how to work with them, as well as metric conversion tables and an index.
Rudolph’s other books include the self-published Recipes and Secrets from El Buen Café (Don’t miss the introduction, which is full of stories of her 16 years as a local restaurant owner.) and Mexican Light, a collection of naturally healthy Mexican recipes, which was published in November by the University of North Texas Press. Mexican Light will be featured at Whole Foods Markets in Texas during the week of Cinco de Mayo along with cooking classes by the author.
[PIXREG WHATS NEWS 2] She is already working on a new book—an oral history of the older indigenous people around town. “San Miguel is changing so rapidly,” says Rudolph. “And most people are not aware of the way life was here over the last 80 years. Their histories are disappearing.”
In July, La Cocina Cooking School presents a series of cooking classes with chefs from San Miguel restaurants. A schedule will be available online in April or May at
www.mexicocooks.com.
Or, just stop by the Buen Café, ask the author about classes and get a signed copy of Savoring San Miguel.
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Books by Kris Rudolph available at El Buen Café, Jesus 23, Centro Savoring San Miguel, 2007 Recipes and Secrets from El Buen Café, 2003 Available from Amazon.com |
CULINARY TOURS BY KRIS RUDOLPH
Culinary Adventures in Mexico
www.mexicocooks.com
Françoise Lemieux is a writer and photographer living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.