Say Which Mexico: What Rick Martínez Keeps Getting Right
Rick Martínez’s work is a reminder that a national cuisine is not one flavor profile. Specific regions, ingredients, histories, and techniques make the story more accurate—and much more interesting.
One of the quickest ways to make food less interesting is to describe an entire country as though it has one kitchen.
Rick Martínez’s Mi Cocina pushes hard in the opposite direction. His research and travel across Mexico foreground what changes from one place to the next — how ingredients move, how family memory intersects with geography, why the specifics matter more than the mood.
I keep returning to regional food because it turns vague admiration into something you can actually learn from. “Mexican food” is too large a phrase to explain any single dish. Northern flour-tortilla traditions, coastal seafood, Yucatán techniques, Oaxacan moles, Sonoran cooking, the food of central Mexico — none of it becomes more respectful for being flattened into a mood board of chiles and lime.
Martínez traveled thousands of miles while developing the book, and he used the project to understand place and his own Mexican American identity at once. Condé Nast Traveler documented the road research. That combination of rigor and personal connection is worth far more to me than treating tradition as a fixed museum object.
It is also the model for one of my long-term interests: regional culinary mapping. Not ranking the “best” food in a state or region, but asking what agriculture, migration, Indigenous foodways, climate, family tradition, and restaurant culture actually produced there. Martínez’s work supplies the attitude, not a template to copy. Go closer and name the region. Learn who made the food, notice what changes when the landscape changes, and let the story get more complicated instead of sanding it into a neat national stereotype.
The food usually gets better when the language gets more precise.
Mi Cocina is at Penguin Random House, and his press archive rounds out the picture. For the fuller profile, read Rick Martínez Went to Mexico to Meet His Own Cooking; for the technique, Rick Martínez Treats Chiles as a Vocabulary, Not a Heat Setting.
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