Three times this week we’ve eaten in a nice restaurant and in every case we spotted a disturbing trend. Every main dish arrived garnished with cherry tomatoes. The same, plastic-looking cherry tomatoes.
As it’s not tomato season in the Yucatan, we can safely assume that none of these products was grown locally, let alone regionally. So where did these things come from? Costco of course – encased in plastic for 27 pesos.
The trend was particularly jarring last night at Local 3, a fancy-pants restaurant on Montejo. Given their name, we expected better. With items on their menu that included sea bass from Chile (a species of fish edging close to extinction), fresh asparagus (in the tropics, in July?), and the requisite beef imported from the USA, we had to ask ourselves, isn’t their name a little misleading?
This feeling is not new. A few weeks back we ate at an upscale Italian restaurant in Playa del Carmen. As the seafood pasta arrived, we got chatting with the owner about the origins of his seafood. Turns out, not one of the six species of sea creatures on our plates was from the waters we were dining alongside.
While we appreciate that Costco and Pacsadeli (a mini-Costco that’s Mexican owned) provide a service that is attractive to restaurants, must we eat from these food factories every time we dine out? The fact these restaurants opt for the same tasteless products, grown and shipped from abroad seems sad. Not wanting to pick on cherry tomatoes, but it’s also a bit uninspired to drop a few of these on a plate in a transparent attempt to add “cachet”? This is especially true when they add nothing to the rest of the dish.
Mexico has a fantastic bounty of produce and flavor. To name a few, think ibes, caimito, prickly pear, jicama, huitlacoche and escamoles (perhaps listed in order of the capacity to challenge). If you’ve never heard of some of these items, it’s because they seldom make it to a restaurant table. Why can’t we eat more of these things and less imported asparagus?
I do prefer the taste of my own organic tomatoes from my own garden, so I’m agreeing that local tastes best! I’m assuming that local restaurants are ether lazy, cheap, or forced to buy outsourced produce due to quantity required.
I heard through the tomato vine that Local3 has shut its doors in the last few days. Maybe locals were not buying it either?
That’s one of the reasons why we come to the Remixto brunch!
I agree with most of what you say. But in all fairness to “Local 3,” when I first saw that name (I’m not a big north of the Hyatt eater, so I wasn’t familiar with it) I imagined they meant, and they probably do, “local” not in the sense of “from this area,” but from the sense of “one booth or defined space within a structure or area of similar spaces.” Sort of like Pier One or Muele 8.
As a matter of fact, I’m so accustomed to this term being used this way, having lived here for over 20 years, that it took me a few moments to figure out what your article was talking about
Is the price of your remix brunch stated somewhere? I see you ask for cash only, so we need to know how much to bring.
Thanks…hope to be there soon.
Hi Anny,
You are probably quite right about the name of Local 3. This concept of “local” never occurred to us.
As for brunch prices, check out the draft menu for Sunday, July 25. We post it on our site about a week before each event. As each menu is new and fresh, prices do vary a little. Overall however, we try to keep things roughly the same so you know what to expect each time.
Yes, the Local 3 is the name of the commercial space it occupied. The first ‘local’ was ’1′, the second ’2′ and so on. In the Yucatan and perhaps in other parts of the country, a “local comercial” is just a space in which to set up a business.
Am checking into whether the place is closed as I write this.
Cheers and looking forward to a delicious brunch!
Just got confirmation that Local 3 is NOT closed. They are on summer hours:
Monday thru Thursday 13:00 to 18:00 (lunch)
Friday and Saturday only dinner
Closed Sundays
Cheers!
In all fairness, it should be said that Local 3 is run by COVI, the wine and spirits enterprise here in Merida, and its staff is made up of students from Culinaria, the cooking school and they are trying to train future chefs and/or cooks. While using local ingredients (try their chaya appetizer) are part of teaching future hospitality professionals, they must also learn how to cook with other ingredients besides what is available in the Yucatan as they probably aspire to work in other venues beyond this state.