The line that struck me the most from Chef’s Table was when Enrique recalled the best advice he had gotten as “you have a responsibility as a Mexican cook to do Mexican food.” Along the same lines, it was fascinating to see how Enrique transforms Mexican cuisine into fine dining, which generally carries a Eurocentric bias, and portrays staple ingredients in such refined and dignified fashion.
I loved the juxtaposition between the scenes showing the traditional cooking process and the “mechanized” production at Pujol. It shows really well that all of Enrique’s lavish creations carry at heart the ancestral Mexican teachings that unite families and generations continuously. This relationship also applies to other Latin American cultures, as we’ve seen with the Garifuna Ereba making process. In particular I found the scene where Enrique is teaching his kids to make tortillas from scratch really special, as it reminded me of the times I’d make arepas for breakfast with my mom, or when I’d sneak out to my neighbor’s apartment and help her make arepas for her daughters to take to work.
Another thing I found really interesting was how Enrique described the creative process behind concocting a new dish, and the sudden feeling of growing tired of his own creations. I think it can be paralleled to Benson and Fischer’s article in the sense that Enrique is always seeking that “algo más” through cuisine. As consumers, we too expect chefs at his level to innovate regularly and provide new exquisite experiences for our palates. In this sense, the article and the movie can be analyzed together to notice the chains of production and consumption and the roles we play within the system, from simple grocery choices to the logistics behind fine dining.