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By Root 758 0

cooking, it appears to be Tlapanala, a sleepy little village surrounded by sugarcane fields and mango trees, about three miles outside of Izúcar. That’s where my sous-chef, Edilberto Perez, was born. It’s where Isidoro, my veteran grill man, hails from, and Antonio, my roundsman, and other cooks, runners, prep cooks, and dishwashers, past, present, and future. Their families still live there and they visit whenever possible. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot about the town, about Eddie’s house, his ranch, about his uncle, the heladero, who makes ice cream the old-fashioned way, about Antonio’s family, who live next door, about my prep cook Bautista’s former street gang, the terrifying Vatos Locos, whose distinctive tag I often find scrawled on locker room walls, and whose hand signs (a ‘V’ and an ‘L’, signified by turning the right hand and making a sort of open-thumbed peace sign) I recognize. I heard about my prep guy Miguel’s family’s pulquería, Isidoro’s family’s candy store. I heard a lot about the joys of barbacoa (Mexican-style barbecue), mole, pulque: I wanted to go. I wanted to go very badly. I told my cooks how I’d visit their parents and tell them all what desgraciados their sons have become, now that they’re living that vida loca in New York. So, when I first started putting together my ‘Borrachón Abroad’ pitch for my publisher, I knew one of the places I absolutely had to go. I huddled with my sous-chef and said, ‘Eddie, I want to visit your town. I want you to go with me, to show me your town. I want to meet everybody’s families. I want your mom to cook for me, if she’s willing. I want to drink pulque and mezcal and eat menudo and pozole and real mole poblano – like from Puebla – and barbacoa like you been tellin’ me about all these years. I want to wear a cool-looking cowboy hat, ride a horse, find out where that serial killer Bautista really comes from. I want to go down there with you and have a really good time. We’ll get the TV people to pay for it.’

‘Let me call to my wife,’ said Eddie, inspired. ‘I send her down first to making the preparations.’

Which is how it happened that I found myself sitting by the mercado in the small central square of Tlapanala on a languid late afternoon, the sun slowly setting, watching as the women and children of the village lined up at the telephone kiosk, waiting to receive prearranged calls from kitchens in New York and apartments in Queens.

The streets were quiet and dusty, kids kicking around old soccer balls, shooting hoops in the court by the mercado, where old women sold chilis, squashes, chayote, yucca, and vegetables. Occasionally, an old man passed by, driving a few head of cattle, a herd of goats, a few donkeys down Tlapanala’s tidy streets. A stray dog wandered over to see if I had any food. Young mothers sat with their babies. Children, still in their school uniforms, played on the back steps of the kiosk, the afternoon’s silence broken now and again by the singsong music from a propane truck, playing along to the unforgettable chant of ‘Gaaazzz! GaaaaAAAaazz!’ and announcements over a loudspeaker describing the products on sale at the mercado. At four o’ clock, the peal of the bread alarm informed residents that fresh bread, hot out of the oven, was now available at the bakery.

A few yards behind me were the railway tracks. The train to Tijuana and beyond. Nueva York. The road out, the starting point, where generations of Tlapanala’s young men began their long, hard climb out of poverty to become cooks in faraway America.

There were few young men left in the village. I saw only women, children, and much older men. In Tlapanala, you can tell the homes of families with a son or a father standing behind a stove in New York: They’re the houses with the satellite dishes on the roofs and metal rebars still protruding from the top of new additions and annexes (instead of capping or removing the extra lengths, they keep them sticking up out of the concrete; should money come, they can more easily add a second floor). I sat on my bench, contentedly watching and