Chef's Table: Enrique Olvera

Finally, we started watching the last 3 episodes of the Netflix series "Chef's Table." The first one we watched is about Enrique Olvera, a Mexican chef using many traditional ingredients and recipes in a high-level restaurant. As do most episodes of Chef's Table, this one includes very pretentious comments by restaurant reviewers, interviews with the chef himself, kitchen scenes, artsy pictures of the restaurant's featured dishes, lots of loud classical music, and many beautiful scenes from the surrounding territory. Also, it highlights the most exotic of the ingredients and methods, such as the dish above made with seasonal ants, which only creep out and offer delicious flavor for a few days each year.

Olvera is shown on visits to several sites in and near Oxaca, including corn fields like the one above. He uses corn in many dishes, including desserts, as obviously it's central to Mexican foodways.

One featured dish at his restaurant is a very complex version of mole, the sauce made from a combination of ingredients from Mexico and the entire world -- New-World chocolate, nuts, Old-World spices, etc. He serves it with tortillas that are made by hand in the restaurant.

Unlike several of the featured chefs in this series, Olvera seemed to me to cook really appealing dishes, which I think I would love to taste. Although I loved the recent parody of the series (which I posted here) I still enjoyed watching.