Baldío in Mexico City is part of a new wave of restaurants embracing a regenerative ethos – with delicious results
H
unched over the pass in the open restaurant kitchen, a team of chefs are dusting ceviche with a powder made from lime skins that would, in most cases, have been thrown away. The Mexico City restaurant where they work looks like most restaurant kitchens but it lacks one key element: there is no bin.
Baldío was co-founded by brothers Lucio and Pablo Usobiaga and chef Doug McMaster, best known for his groundbreaking zero-waste spot Silo London. “In my eyes, bins are coffins for things that have been badly designed,” says McMaster. “If there was a trophy for negligence, it would be bin-shaped.”
The food, which recently earned a Michelin green star, is creative but still quintessentially Mexican: squash tostada with guaca-broccoli, maguey flower, maguey worm, chinampa flower, or grassfed pork from Veracruz with tamarind mole, served with chinampa greens and house-made kimchi. Significant planning is needed from sourcing to preparation, and the founders are also behind Arca Tierra, a regenerative agriculture project that includes a network of 50 farmers in central Mexico as well as the organisation’s own farm in the pre-Aztec canal system at Xochimilco, an ancient neighbourhood in the south of Mexico City.
