By Jack Danylchuk.
A blues band tuned up as the winter sun spilled its last golden rays over Todos Santos. The man with a name like a law firm set out tables and chairs for Flite Night at La Bodega, one of two that McCandless Knuteson Sutton offers every week for those who want to taste what the recent buzz from Mexican wine producers is all about.
Known to all as Mac, Sutton is one of the latest additions — only the tequila distillery that just opened next door is newer — to an eclectic culinary scene that got its start 20 years ago when Enzio Colombo and his wife Paula opened their landmark Café Santa Fe in the oasis* town an hour north of Cabo San Lucas.
Sutton cracked a rosé and two reds from the Guadalupe Valley outside of Ensenada, and Suki Knoke dropped in with a tray of snacks: sushi with asparagus and shrimp from the restaurant she and her partner Matt run from a kitchen and dining room surrounded by a lush tropical garden.
One bite of Suki’s sushi revealed what is special about food in Todos Santos: it shouts fresh — vegetables, greens and herbs harvested that day from fields that surround the oasis; meat and poultry raised on ranches in the mountains that rise from the desert just east of town; seafood from the Pacific that thunders onto sandy beaches a mile to the west.
The bounty has gathered a small army of culinary artists. Expat Americans, Italians, Canadians, and migrants from mainland Mexico have refashioned Todos Santos as the cultural and culinary centre of Baja California’s cape region.
“There was nothing here,” the burly Enzio said, recalling his early days in Todos Santos. “We drove to Los Angeles for cheese and olive oil. It was hard to find even a head of lettuce. They had never seen Italian basil. It grows incredibly well here — like magic. And the flavour, you can taste the soil that is not tired from years of growing.”
The basil idea caught on with commercial growers and food exporters. Todos Santos and the south cape are a major source of winter produce consumed in Western Canada. When the harvest is on, the night air is fragrant with thyme, rosemary, sage and basil. That freshness is the key to Colombo’s “simple, always simple, clean food.”
Todos Santos has changed greatly since Café Santa Fe opened, but the food, waiters and cooks are familiar to anyone who has dined there in the last 20 years. The staff, trained by Colombo, has been there from the beginning. They are as familiar as the lead menu items: lobster ravioli, marlin carpacio, grilled sierra, ensalata capressi.
If Café Santa Fe has the familiarity of an old friend, Tre Galline changes daily. Every meal opens with some small surprise, a perfect cube of eggplant sliced paper thin and caught in a glaze of tomato coulis; what looks like a tamale, tied with a wisp of corn husk, is whipped potato in an envelope of hand-rolled pasta.
Italian restaurateurs Angelo Dal Bon and Magda Valpian came to Todos Santos in 2006. Both come from families with generations in the restaurant business, and Angelo was one of the signatories to the Slow Food manifesto signed in Paris in 1985.
“We wanted to offer a true Italian cuisine, without any compromise,” said Angelo, “so we try to do everything at home, as my grandmother did 50 years ago: pasta, bread, salumi, ham, bresaola, ricotta, mascarpone. The only products that are irreplaceable are the pillars of Italian cuisine, olive oil and Parmigiano. Those we import.”
There are no Mexican wines on the lists at Tre Galline and Café Santa Fe. Colombo says simply that he can offer diners Italian, French and Spanish wines of better quality for less money. Dal Bon goes further.
“I believe that only Italy and France make true wine. The rest of the world makes excellent products, but far from real wine. I call them Hollywood wines, that show great fruit, power, and alcohol, but are without finesse, and above all, without the characteristics given by terroir.”
Sutton is undaunted. From less than a handful of producers a decade ago, and wine with a reputation for the flavour of sun-baked prune juice, the Baja wine industry has grown to 50 small producers who turn out anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand cases a year.
“Harvest by harvest, quality improves as the industry expands,” he says.
Perhaps more appropriately, the wines have found homes in Vin Santo, a bistro tucked into a corner of the Hotel California, and Rancho Pescadero, a beachfront hotel that recalls Baja’s earliest days as a tourist destination, when private planes brought Hollywood names to small, exclusive resorts.
Chef Danny Lamot moved from Calgary, where he ran the Latin-fusion restaurant Mescalero, to Todos Santos to manage the kitchen at Hotel California a decade ago. Two years ago he opened Vin Santo, a bistro that pairs tartare of Sonora beef with a robust syrah from Santo Thomas.
“Here we have fresh, tree-ripened star fruit, mangos and lichees. There simply is no equivalent in Canada,” says Lamot.
The traditional flavours of Mexico — chile, beans, corn, tomato aren’t easily paired with wine, but at Rancho Pescadero, chef Rodrigo Bueno orchestrates subtle compromises while avoiding the standards of tourist fare: fajitas, quesadillas and burritos slathered with bland melted cheese.
The objective is to experience the real flavours of Mexico, and some of the unusual, said Bueno: toasted grasshoppers and gusano worms, with their nutty flavour and crunchy texture, huitlacoche, the subtle mushroom that grows on corn; favourites from Baja ranches — empanadas filled with stewed beef, tamales wrapped in banana leaf with a spicy chocolate filling and always, fresh produce from the hotel garden.
“Every night we go around the world with one dinner special, curries, tacos al pastor, couscous, foie gras, paella, Bajamian peas and rice, and we try to never make the same again,” said Bueno, “but we always make Mexican food to be at least 70 per cent of our menu.”
Jack Danylchuk first saw Baja’s south cape in 1972, the year the paved highway from Tijuana to San Jose was completed, setting off 40 years of rampant development. He has visited Todos Santos once a year for the last 20, and watched the evolution of a food culture defined by freshness.
*It is an actual oasis. It’s an old sugar plantation town that went into decline when the price of sugar fell; almost coincidentally, the aquifer that irrigated the town dried up. It reappeared, just as mysteriously, in the early 80s when some canny Americans (women!) found it and put some $$$ down. In 2006, it was given “pueblo magico” status by the federal government, along with many other communities scattered across the country, which put it in line for infrastructure grants to make new sidewalks, bury power lines and build sewer and water lines to unserviced barrios. That brought in lots of investment dollars which produced a couple of new hotels — Guyacura, Casa Tota — and hectarios of unused retail space. Yes, it is magical and it is a true oasis in the middle of a desert that is greened by water from the aquifer.