The Border, Bill Greene, and the Real Mexican Food

by Joseph Harris

This chapter begins, as so many chapters of my life do, with my stepfather Bill Greene. Bill is the subject of his own document and his own deepening list of stories — he was my mother's second husband, married into our family in 1962, and was the most interesting man I have ever known. He gets a full chapter of his own. For Cinco de Mayo what matters is this: Bill brought Mexican food into a North Carolina kitchen at a moment when no one else in our part of the country was cooking it. He had spent years in El Paso working at White Sands on the Vanguard missile program, and he had eaten at the right places on both sides of the border. In 1965 he took us to Juarez. I was twelve. I went to my first bullfight. I ate at my first real Mexican restaurant — not the American approximation, but the food in the country where it was invented. I have been chasing that standard ever since. The El Paso flat-stacked enchilada I learned on that trip has been on every menu I have ever written. It is on this one.

But the real story of this chapter is Francisco.

Francisco Ku Cavich — he sometimes goes by Francisco Ku — is from Cancún, in Quintana Roo, the Yucatán peninsula. He trained as a cook in the hotels of Cancún and Playa del Carmen before he came to the United States. I first met him at Cafe Noir, a restaurant I had before this one, located at the Caspar Inn just down the coast between Fort Bragg and Mendocino. We had an overwhelming response on opening day and I was the only cook in the kitchen. I was not keeping up. It was not working. And then a hand reached in and grabbed the pan.

I looked at him. I said, boy, I could sure use some help. He said he knew what to do, and he jumped in, and we worked together for the rest of the shift. He had been coming in looking for work. That shift turned out to be his audition. He started working for me shortly after that and has been working for me ever since.

Francisco is our kitchen manager and head cook. His whole family has worked here — that is how Mexican families work. They have networks. They work together. His stepson Kevin learned to cook in this kitchen, became an accomplished sous chef, and is now working at a restaurant in Sonoma County, coming back to pitch in on his days off when we need him. His other stepson is at the dishwasher station right now and I am teaching him how to cook. Various

members of his family have moved through this kitchen over the years. There is no way to diminish or understate the value of Francisco to this operation. This

restaurant would not be what it is without him. On this menu, Francisco is doing what he knows better than anyone in this kitchen.

He is making the cochinita pibil — the Yucatecan slow-roasted achiote pork — the

way it is made in Quintana Roo, authentically, the way his family made it. He is

making the enchilada sauce in the Yucatecan style, which will go on the El Paso flat-stacked enchilada Bill taught me in 1965. Two cooks, two generations, two parts of Mexico, one dish. The menu is also offering a fruit ceviche pasta salad — a nod to the broader Mexican coastal tradition, adding mango to the fish and lime in the way they do it farther north along the Gulf, in Veracruz, while keeping the base clean and Yucatecan. In Quintana Roo, where Francisco is from, the ceviche is simpler — fish, lime, cilantro, onion. The fruit comes from the north. We are borrowing it because it is delicious, and Francisco approves.

The sopa de lima is pure Yucatán — the citrus-and-chile broth that is the signature of the peninsula, the dish that tells you immediately and unmistakably where you are. Francisco is making it tonight the way his grandmother made it. The tres leches closes the meal the way it has closed Mexican meals for a century — sweet, drenched, cold, generous.

This is not the Cinco de Mayo of green sombreros and bottomless margaritas. This is the Cinco de Mayo of a stepfather who opened the door and a cook from Cancún who walked through it and has never left. It is the Cinco de Mayo of a kitchen that remembers where it came from.

¡Salud! To Bill, who showed me the food. To the cooks of Juarez, who served it to a twelve-year-old as if it mattered. To the chefs of the Yucatán, who are bringing the next chapter.

Reservations: (707) 964-6844 or click here

124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California