Ku'uk. Eating Modernist in Merida

A number of our friends said that we had to eat at Ku'uk, a restaurant in Merida with a "Modernist" take on Yucateco food. So we did. Here is what we had:

Chicxulub: Ginko, Pollen, Nopal, Smelt, Seaweed Fossil on a meteorite. The meteorite is, of course, meant to represent the Chicxulub impact that hit the Yucatan 66 million years ago - some say causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. 

 Here is another view. You can see the fish as well as the grain of the polished meteorite.

K'uum To'obil Chay: Pumpkin seed tamale, chaya leaf, tomato sauce, avocado, fennel

"Cloudy" Mayan Jungle: Green salad with butter, sour orange, chili ashes, cashews. It is a little hard to see, but there is smoke inside the bell jar.

 A view without the glass. All the food was very good looking!

 Tomato: In a veil and distilled pibinal corn potato

 Mayan Octopus: Black chili ashes, "skin", olives and freeze dried tomato, burnt habanero, grilled onion foam. The octopus was so black it was hard to photograph.

 Sacred Natural Well: White fish in "natural well" clarified chlorophyll juice, white cucumber, citrics, clovers, and offering to the Mayan gods (gilded pea). Before the broth

 Sacred Natural Well: White fish in "natural well" clarified chlorophyll juice, white cucumber, citrics, clovers, and offering to the Mayan gods (gilded pea). After the broth.

 Turkey "Marquesita": Yucatan Street Snack with anatto. Free range turkey and suckling pig chorizo, corn, fava bean mousse, charred leek, green salt

 Pib Bread: Underground Mayan style cooked with cochinita oils and anatto, orange leaf, sour orange butter and chaya.

 Castakan: Creole suckling pig with avocado, salipcon salad, beans, wormseed.

 Palate cleanser. Cold snack of seasonal fruits.

 Sweet Nopal: Freeze dried nopal leaf, peppermint and sourmilk ice cream, lemon and habanero flowers with nopal "soil"

 Honeycomb. Meliponin stingless bean honey biscuit, passion fruit and pollen cream, dehydrated mushroom impregnated with Dzidzilche honey, fiber, and soft rice with Balchee (mayan fermented honey)

 Cocoa Chip. Burnt tortilla ice cream and freeze dried Papantla'ss vanilla "flan" custard

Treats. Chocolates, Alfajores, Cookies, Empanadas with dulce de Leche. It was a good meal. The wines we had were all Mexican with the exception of one from Argentina. Go there if you get to Merida.

Saturday in Merida

We started the day with a nice walk to the Momoto Cafe. A "momoto" is a type of bird, what we call a Motmot in English, and the logo:

is an abstraction of the bird. They also had floor tiles made with the logo. Nice place to start the day.

 The part of Merida where we were staying had plenty of these nice, big mansions. We are hoping that Gaye buys the one above and renovates it for a nice vacation home.

As with many large, old Latin American cities, Merida has a nice selection of churches and cathedrals. They are all still in use, well in use. Many of them had masses in process as we were wandering about the city.

Many nice plazas are in the neighborhood as well. This one was taken while we had lunch outside.

 The green building is the Governor's Mansion. I have more photos of that I will post by and by.

The above is the Cathedral.

And this is a pretty typical gallery of one of the buildings on the Plaza Grade.

It is a nice city.

Mani and Mayapan

After Uxmal, we headed to Mani:

This was another adventure, as we didn't really know where we were going. Luckily, the roads were mostly well marked.

We stopped in Mani not because Mani means "peanuts" in most of Latin American (in Mexico they are called cacauates) but because of the Parroquia y Exconvento de San Miguel Arcangel. That is where Friar Diego de Landa ordered the destruction of over 5,000 Mayan documents. A horrible loss to history. It happened here:

Sadly for us, the church was closed. So we headed off  to Mayapan:

where there are more ruins:

There were even fewer people here. But we saw some great ruins:

The scale of most of the buildings was much more human:

 Though there was one pretty big pyramid. You can see Gaye and Doreen in this photo for scale. More on that pyramid later. There was a strange round building with a double wall construction:

 since we didn't have a guide, we don't know what it was used for. At some point, I suppose I will look it up. There was also a building where prisoners were decapitated. These reliefs are supposed to be original, but don't you think that one is the middle (where a prisoner would stick his head in to get cut off) looks like Mickey Mouse?

Here are some ruins that have not yet been curated:

This is the big pyramid:

and here I am scrambling up that big pyramid. I went alone - neither Gaye nor Doreen would come with me!

you can see them in awe of my climbing abilities down below.

I had to take some SPs while on top:

 Here is the odd round building I posted above.

 This site was crazy about snakes. You can see this one here:

which begged me to do this:

It was a good trip, a good day. We went home and wandered down to a restaurant called Apoala where we shared about a half dozen Yucateco specialties, as well as a couple of beers.

A short trip to Mérida, Mexico

I imagine that when United came up with upgrade coupons the theory was that by putting expiration dates on them, people would take  trips that they otherwise would not. That is certainly the case in our experience. I had two upgrades that were expiring at the end of January, so we scanned the globe to see where we could go for a long weekend. (Doreen gets Martin Luther King day off). Luckily for us, our friend Gaye from Denver was able to come down and join us. It made for a festive mood. We settled on Mérida, Mexico. We have some good friends with deep ties to Mérida, so we knew we would get good advice as to what to see and where to eat. As always, Doreen does all the leg work, I reap all the benefits and button up the suitcases, and don't complain. Well, don't complain much.  Doreen found a lovely VRBO on Calle 60 (a main northbound street in Mérida) between Calle 43 and Calle 45. You may have noticed that these street intersect. Mérida has an interesting grid system. Even numbers go north and south, off numbers go east and west. It makes it easy to find your way around. 

The street, as in most streets in Mexico, doesn't really look like much:

But there was an excellent little church right next door (Santa Ana):

The first night we were there, (Thursday) we were celebrating the final day of the Mérida days celebration. Streets we blocked off, bands were playing, restaurants were packed well into the night. But we found an excellent little place that sold typical Yucatan specialities. I had Cochinita Pibil:

which was hard to beat. You can get it here in Houston, but like most food, it is better at the source. We then ambled back to prepare for a long day looking at Mayan ruins on Friday.  The house was a very welcoming picture:

Then off to bed!