Zapote, London: a modern Mexican restaurant that needs some work

A decade or so ago, it was Japan. Food writers, chefs and TV celebrities flew to Tokyo for a week and came back neurasthenic with pleasure. There was talk of raw, wriggling things, unimaginably fresh or recherché ingredients and the perversely orientalist and ultimately unfulfilling conclusion that their powers of description were inadequate. You had to experience it to understand.

I think my generation is going the same way, possibly about Korea and its unbelievably eclectic cuisine — but certainly about Mexico. I haven’t been enough, but I’ve been enough to know that it’s going to take us many interesting years to get our heads around the variety, the creativity and the history of the food. Is Zapote, the latest in a string of “modern” Mexican restaurants, going to help us? It’s complicated.

Yellowfin tuna and spicy crab tostada is an easy early win. The seasoning is piquant, and the tostada is testament to the excellent work they’re doing in the kitchen, knocking them out fresh every day. I wish, though, I could report the same for the beef tartare taco with roasted bone marrow. It promises so much on the menu, but falls flat on arrival. The raw beef is under-seasoned, such that there’s not a lot to cut back against the marrow. The fattiness, combined with a fashionable aged funk, means that the overpowering taste is of tallow.

The whole point of ox tongue is that the flavour is beefy and the texture so tight as to be without grain or fibre. That’s why it cures, presses, slices so beautifully. It’s a valued ingredient in Mexican cuisine, but here I think it’s undergone some serious work — either an incredibly careful low and slow poaching or sous vide. The resulting texture is unnerving; close to stiff tofu. Cashews and chile de árbol give it warmth, fragrance and crunch, but you could smear it on to the tortillas like cream cheese. I love long cooking. It coaxes so much out of the meat. Here, though, it feels like someone is concentrating so hard on the technique that they’ve lost focus on the final destination.

A grilled chicken thigh was cooked with consummate skill: the skin dry, crisp, golden and bubbling, the flesh cooked slowly enough to feel almost confitted. An ideal balance and not easy to achieve. What threw it was too much salt “strewn” to finish and a peanut mole that tasted of almost nothing. This may well be a failure on my part to understand the use of the nut in Mexican cooking, but a British diner, seeing “peanut” on a menu, thinks of roasted peanuts and peanut butter. A raw peanut as one of the sometimes dozens of ingredients, ground and worked into the complex flavouring paste of a traditional mole, isn’t like that. It’s closer in flavour, in fact, to a seed or bean. The result, even when otherwise subtly spiced, can disappoint.

Recado rojo is an achiote-based paste that here adds a unique dimension to a big muscle of monkfish. It worked brilliantly alongside grilled corn, but was served with a hefty dollop of smoked cod roe. I don’t know if there’s an ancient tradition of cod roe smoking in some part of the gigantic and diverse nation of Mexico — it’s perfectly possible — but I do know it’s so much a fashionable ingredient in London at the moment that it’s approaching cliché. I would have applauded the mash-up if it worked. It didn’t.

One of the many confusing beliefs that chefs hold canonical is that people don’t like brown crabmeat. Honestly, we need to get past this. Fresh white crabmeat, steamed within sight of the sea it came out of, has a vanishingly subtle taste that rarely survives commercial picking, packing and transport. Brown crabmeat is the repository of crab flavour. You either like clean white flavourless protein shreds or you like crab in toto; any imagined colour choice is a distraction. Combining bland, handpicked white crabmeat with a mucilaginous corn pozole was, for me, a misjudgment.

Pozole is one of the great porridges of world cuisine; a freshly made corn tortilla with ox tongue is something set so deep in the culture and foodways of a nation that it defies the notion of written history. Serving only the white meat from a crab or low-temperature poaching of the tongue into a gelatinous cube are contemporary ideas. More importantly, they are brought to table through elective decision. This is a completely subjective judgment, but I believe these decisions are wrong.

Probably in common with everyone in the restaurant, I desperately want people to experience all the wide wonder of Mexican food, the novelty of flavours and combinations, the diversity and depth of historical influences — but it also cries out for context. Please, O God, please, break with the convention of terse, monosyllabic menu descriptions and give the poor punters a chance. Go to a keyboard and tell people why you love pozole and why they might too. That way, they don’t find themselves diving, blind, into a bowl of snotty gruel.

Zapote is a terrific room with some of the best and most attentive service I’ve experienced in years. I respect — no, love — what it’s trying to achieve. But, at the moment, it fails because of a few ill-judged cheffy flourishes and a communication problem.

At one point, I overheard somebody at the next table say, “God, I didn’t think you could screw up Mexican food.” I don’t think Zapote has done that, but most people eating there are experiencing a radically different cuisine for the first time. In order to love it, they need it explained.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward, on Instagram @timhayward and email him at [email protected]

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