 Food & Dining
Yucatecan Especial
Famous as Mexico’s most popular beach town, Cancun also is a veritable international food court. With more than 400 restaurants, the vacation capital has food to suit everyone’s taste: filet mignon, mushroom risotto, tom yum goong. In fact, the array of tantalizing choices makes it easy to forget Cancun is located on the Yucatan peninsula, home to one of Mexico’s most distinctive regional cuisines. Geographically isolated from the heart of Mexico, the Yucatan long ago developed a separate cuisine. Rooted in the traditions of the local Maya, Yucatecan food has been influenced by the Caribbean and Europe because the peninsula’s ports carried on a busy trade with foreign countries. At Pacal, a Cancun restaurant near the up-scale Caracol Mall, the fine-dining scene displays white linens, candlelit tables, and menu listings with exotic names such as cochinita pibil, grouper tikin xic, and pavo escabeche. This is authentic, Maya-style cuisine, and while it’s savory and full-flavored, it’s not burn-your-tongue hot. Focus on unique seasonings Pork, chicken, and fish are the mainstays of Yucatecan food. Essential to the cuisine are seasoning mixtures called recados. They’re often rubbed into meats as marinades before cooking or thinned with liquid and used as sauces. Achiote paste, made from the bright-red annatto seed and other spices, flavors the region’s most famous dish, cochinita pibil. Traditionally, wild boar was marinated in achiote, then wrapped in banana leaves and roasted in a pit. Today, chefs use pork (alternatively, chicken or fish) and often substitute ovens for pits, but the deep-flavored seasoning and banana leaves still leave a rich, unique taste. Two other recados are commonly used. Recado de chilmole, also called relleno negro, is made with charred chiles and fragrant allspice berries. Black and pungent, it’s added to meatballs and is the base for the sauce in turkey chilmole. Recado para bistec, a green blend of chiles, cinnamon, cloves, and other spices, jazzes up seafood, soups, and pollo escabeche oriental, a Christmas favorite found year-round in many restaurants. (The "oriental" refers to eastern Yucatan, not Asia.) For this dish, the recado is added to vinegared, cooked chicken, which is briefly grilled and served with broth. All three recados can taste spicy to the gringo tongue, but they aren’t especially hot. Many dishes, including the pibil specialties, taste distinctive because they include bitter orange juice as an ingredient. The Seville orange grown in the region provides a citrus-grapefruit flavor with only hints of orange. Poc chuc, often found on menus, is charcoal-broiled pork slices with a tangy orange accent. Seafood: king of the menu With 1,000 miles of water surrounding the Yucatan peninsula, it’s not surprising to find restaurants serving the treasures of the sea. Ceviche, raw fish chopped up and marinated in fresh lime juice, generally is excellent because the fish is so fresh. Shrimp, crab, and oyster cocktails also can be heavenly, especially when served diablo-style in a hot sauce. Entrees feature jumbo shrimp, octopus, and grilled fish. At Pacal, a big hit is the grilled grouper, prepared in the traditional tikin xic style-brushed with achiote and charbroiled. The Yucatan has many foods that will seem familiar if you’ve traveled in Mexico. The region’s most popular soup is the tasty sopa de lima, chicken broth with finely shredded chicken and strips of fried tortilla. Here, the difference is the strong flavor of lime. Yucatecos also have a version of huevos rancheros called huevos motulenos. A full breakfast, the mile-high pile of fried eggs, beans, ham, peas, cheese, tortillas, and sauce fills the plate. A thousand calories later, you’re ready to hit the beach! Another Yucatecan specialty? Scrumptious fried snacks—"finger food" treats—called panuchos and salbutes. These variations of slitted tortillas are stuffed with beans and sometimes chicken or turkey, then fried to a crisp. Blending Mayan, Caribbean, and European flavors Clearly, the Maya tradition runs strong in these Yucatecan foods and is responsible for other unique dishes such as papadzules—enchiladas stuffed with hard-boiled eggs and topped with a sauce made of pumpkin seed. But the Caribbean influence is here, too. Black beans and fried plantains may be served on the side. Fish dishes can be doused in tropical-fruit sauces.
Finally, you’ll want to savor a few of the local drinks. For a cool, refreshing drink, try an agua fresca, a lemonade-like drink made with wonderful local fruit. Agua de horchata, a sweet, rice-based version, originated from this region. The locally brewed beers here are very good, too. If you enjoy light beer, order a Montejo; for a dark one, choose Negra Modelo, one of Mexico’s best. And you shouldn’t leave a Yucatecan restaurant without a taste of xtabentún, a Maya liqueur flavored with honey and anise. The nectar of the ancient Maya god-kings, it’s reputed to be an aphrodisiac. Nick Gallo, winner of Mexico’s 2003 Pluma de Plata travel-writing prize, worships at the fiery-hot altar of the habanero chile. Three to Try In Cancun, the following Yucatecan-style restaurants present authentic cuisine: Some Like It Hot Yucatecan dishes are spiced fairly mild, but cuidado! Be careful of the salsas. The region is home to Mexico’s hottest chile—the small, incendiary habanero, a rumpled, lantern-shaped pepper that comes in shades of red, orange, yellow, and light green. Typically, restaurants don’t incorporate the habanero (the Maya word for it means "crying tongue") into dishes, instead serving it on the side as salsa. The sauces come in green or red, the latter using fully ripened peppers. Both blaze heat. Habaneros are not child’s play—some reports say they’re 50 times hotter than jalapenos. But if you like it hot, look for xnipec, or "dog-snout salsa," so named because it will make your nose run.
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by Nick Gallo
Just as intriguing, the Yucatecos took inspiration from Europe and incorporated some of its
foods into their cooking. For queso relleno, chefs take a round of hollowed-out Edam cheese
and stuff it with spicy ground meat topped by a cheese sauce. Looks messy, tastes great.