A Tale of Two Kitchens

The first time I saw the sea, I must have been about five years old.

Touching the sand was very pleasant.

A totally new experience.

We come from a remote village.

El Palmar is quite far, we are up in the mountains.

It takes about eight to ten hours to get to the beach.

All I knew about fish was what was in our village,

in the municipality of Veracruz.

I got here and saw large fish, like tuna, marlin.

They seemed enormous to me. I thought, "That's a shark!"

"That fish looks like a whale!"

The idea of Contramar, from the beginning,

was to bring a palapa or a beach cafe,

from Zihuatanejo, from Troncones, that part of the Pacific, to the city.

It was basically about being on the beach eating fresh fish

that was caught that morning.

We opened Contramar in August 1998.

I remember this long weekend perfectly.

Contramar had been open for about three or four months.

Lots of people came to Contramar

because they couldn't get away for the weekend. And I said,

"That's just perfect, it's exactly what I want."

Before coming to Mexico City,

when I was younger, from about the age of 15 to 20,

I worked in the fields. My family didn't have much.

I wanted to do more with my life.

When I turned 20, I decided to leave my village

and come to Mexico City to look for a job which would pay more.

Working the land is really hard, physically, really hard work.

But it's stress-free.

The air is clean.

You don't have enough to eat as you do in the city,

where you have meat, ham, and all those kinds of food,

but you eat beans that are completely natural.

You wear really simple clothes,

but that will withstand wear and tear.

Working in a restaurant is the complete opposite.

You're indoors.

You're not in the sun, you don't get wet.

They expect us to look presentable, wear shoes.

But the huge difference is the wages.

Opening a Mexican restaurant in the USA is a paradox, no matter how you look at it.

On one hand, the Americans have Mexico as their nearest country

in terms of interesting gastronomy.

There's a fascination with Mexico

and its thousand-year-old gastronomic traditions they yearn for.

On the other hand, we have a culture that deeply despises Mexicans.

And at the same time,

Mexican food is almost a staple food for Americans, specifically in California

and the states that used to be part of Mexico.

There's a long-standing tradition, very deep-rooted,

of loving the gastronomic culture

that they consider Mexican.

My grandpa loved to fish. So did my dad.

And then...

cook dinner.

You're tired from the sun,

the water, the salt...

I guess it soon became almost more exciting than fishing.

Like, "What are we going to do with this fish?"

And depending on the catch of the day, we'd imagine what we could do with it.

Once clams are out of the sea,

within 15 minutes, they're packed.

Immediately, someone drives to the airport

and they get here to the city at 11:00 in the morning.

It's the same with the fish.

This product has been out of the sea less than 24 hours.

I work directly with him and we communicate like this every day.

He sends me pictures so I know what's coming in the plane.

We cast the line and in less than a minute