Mole Madre

Twenty-Five Years of Pujol.

A few weeks ago, I tasted Pujol’s mole madre. It wasn’t the first time, though it was the first time I tasted it in New York, where the restaurant had popped up at a building in the Financial District for 10-days to celebrate their 25^th anniversary. The dish, a combination of an older mole that has been continuously fed like a sourdough starter for more than a decade, and a freshly made mole, served with a basket of tortillas, has become the restaurant’s signature course. As time passes, the story it tells keeps changing.

I tasted this mole a handful of times over the years. Before this, there were a few times in Mexico City, spread out over the years, in both the original restaurant location and the space they moved into in 2017, as well as a few other pop ups. This time the course was paired with a 2000 D’Oliveira Malvasia Madeira, a very nice wine, and it came with tortillas inlaid with hoja santa leaves. At almost 4,000 days old, the older mole tasted different than the other times I tasted it. More complex, as it is expected to be after all these years, but maybe a touch sweeter too.

When the restaurant opened in 2000, that mole wasn’t there. It took more than a decade just to get to that. It’s a story that has been told around Latin America restaurant by restaurant over the past twenty-five years, from Peru to Brazil to Paraguay. At the time Mexican cooking was expected to be inexpensive, though Mexican chefs like Ricardo Muñoz, Monica Patiño and others were trying to change that perception. At Pujol, Enrique Olvera, following their lead, started incorporating Mexican ingredients into preparations with European techniques he learned studying at the Culinary Institute of America.

As time went on, the restaurant started shifting the menu towards Mexican recipes, not just ingredients. This was also strange to the public. Mexican cooking wasn’t considered craft, like French or Japanese cooking, but humble family traditions passed down from one generation to the next. Charging fine dining prices for tacos and tamales was a point of contention for some.