Restaurant Highlight | Alfonsina

28 May

Words by Darcie Imbert
Photography by Davidlo

Arriving in Oaxaca after a painful stopover at Cancun Airport felt like arriving in Mexico, far from the billowing cabanas and artfully-tousled-luxury of Tulum, Oaxaca was unfiltered and unfettered by the demands of tourism. Oaxaca is widely hailed as Mexico’s food capital, home to the famed Mercado 20 de Noviembre and its asthma-inducing ‘El Pasillo de las Carnes Asadas’; a corridor of barbecued meats. The passageway resembles an all-you-can-eat; but the buffet comes to you, traders rotate around tables selling warm corn tortillas, small batch mezcal, ground grasshoppers, and natural clay pottery.

Existing in symbiosis with the smoke filled enclaves serving tacos on plastic covered plates are the more refined institutions that reinterpret tradition. The brilliant Casa Oaxaca flirts with innovation, deconstructing traditional dishes to optimise the flavour profiles of each core ingredient, before reconstructing as an elevated version of a classic.

Our time in Oaxaca City was epitomised by our visit to Alfonisina, Chef Jorge Leon’s restaurant thirty minutes from the centre. Awareness of Alfonsina is solely via word of mouth; covert utterings of a family run eatery in a small village, where the paved road meets dusty dirt tracks. We pulled up to a traditional Oaxacan house without signage, and were ushered to sit in a patioed area that embodied the same humility as a relative’s back garden; deterred only by the curated edit of well adored cookery books piled on the coffee table.

Jorge Leon started his food career nearly a decade ago in the kitchens of Casa Oaxaca, and continued to train with some of the world’s most renowned chefs before returning to his hometown to set up Alfonsina with the help of his family back in November 2018. Leon cooked in kitchens across the world; which in turn, infused his culinary approach with cultural diversity and global technique. The restaurant was set up in a bid to promote growth and development in Santo Domingo Nundo, a small town in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca where Leon’s family hail from. The town is a four hour drive from San Juan Bautista, La Raya, where Alfonisina is located, and Jorge sources a large portion of produce from the local producers to share his success and encourage economic stability. Alfonsina is a family affair in the truest sense, Jorge’s father nixtamalizes and grinds maiz, his mother runs the breakfast kitchen and service, and his brothers and cousins assist with service and preparation.

Alfonsina is premised on preserving traditional practises that make up the core of Mexican cooking - using fresh, seasonal ingredients that are reared, foraged and gathered locally. Aside from the maiz and livestock which are sourced from Santo Domingo Nundo, Leon sources most produce from Central de Abastos in Oaxaca, the central marketplace attracting small scale producers from the nearby coast and surrounding mountains. Jorge describes mercados as preserving age-old tradition, the most all-encompassing expression of Mexican life, bountiful amounts of fresh, regional produce; an artful community-led exchange. Markets are the great democratizer that save societies from mass produced, genetically modified goods that put money into the pockets of the few, they serve as cohesive social structures that enable redistribution of both produce and wealth. Despite the growing popularity of Alfonsina as a critically acclaimed culinary secret he remains true to his founding principles that preserve tradition and empower local communities.

Amidst a family-home-like setting with a few ambling hens, the pared back dining room has large sharing tables lined with uniformed, slatted wooden chairs that cast geometric shadows across the polished concrete floor. The space exudes the same confident simplicity as the food; natural, locally sourced goodness that Leon’s family want to eat, where they want to eat it. Seated in the middle of two couples, hailing from Oaxaca City and Portland, it seemed the restaurant was filled with both regular locals there for the comida corrida cooked by Jorge’s mother, and those who had embarked on a ‘culinary pilgrimage’ from afar for the tasting menu. Consisting of five dishes, the tasting menu congruously rolled between land and sea; the perfect marriage of flavour, texture and technique. The supple and delicious tortillas are instantly set apart from their machine-made counterparts that are creeping into Mexican cooking. Jorge’s father maintains tradition through his practise of nixtamalization, whereby corn is soaked in an alkaline solution ahead of grinding, to loosen the husks and increase nutritional profile. The menu is a true reflection of the mercado, the ingredients not too dissimilar from other local eateries on initial glance, but Leon’s reinterpretation of classic dishes shed light on his creative ingenuity.