When you travel to another city or another country, one of the questions you have to ask is where to eat, and why. It is always a difficult question to answer honestly.
To answer it here, we have to give you some context first.
The last fifteen years
Los Cabos has grown for fifteen years and it has not stopped — sometimes for the better, sometimes not. In cooking, that growth carries a great deal with it.
To build a destination you need infrastructure. To build infrastructure you need hands. Those hands arrive on full flights: construction workers, and with them entire families, many from states where work has been harder to come by — Oaxaca, Guerrero, Estado de México, Chiapas.
Those states carry older and deeper culinary traditions than Baja California Sur, whose own is young by comparison. The people who moved here brought theirs with them, and they have been building the food of this city ever since. It is a cuisine that still has an uncertain personality — uncertain in its flavours, in its combinations, in whether it has an identity of its own yet.
“Local”, in quotation marks
Where a multicultural mix this young is doing the cooking, what counts as the local offer is young too. We put local in quotation marks on purpose: the share of restaurants aimed squarely at tourism keeps growing, and the word gets used loosely.
Not long ago Michelin turned its attention to Mexico and the stars began to rain down. The general perception among people who live here is that they fell where they should not have fallen. But that is how these things go.
The list everyone gives you
With a strong Sinaloan, Oaxacan and Guerrerense presence in the kitchens, what is offered here is changing.
If we had to name today’s classics, they would be Flora Farms, Acre, Árbol and Tamarindos in San José; Edith’s, Farallón and Sunset Da Mona Lisa in San Lucas. Those are for a first visit. If it is not your first time in our small city, we think once is enough.
Some of what is on offer is aimed more at the show than at the food — the restaurants of Grupo Rosa Negra belong in that group. Among hotel restaurants, the representative names are Manta, Comal and Cocina de Autor.
We want to be clear about every name above: not one of them is where local people eat. They were designed and thought through for tourism — to be liked, to impress the eye, and to charge on the strength of it.
What we would rather eat
That is how this destination was born. We do not believe it is the gastronomic future of Los Cabos.
We would like to see more honest proposals. More authentic ones. More heart and less design — you do not eat the walls, and you do not eat the plates. A little more like it used to be, maybe, when whoever was cooking was still cooking three seasons later, or four, or more.
Those places exist. They are smaller and more affordable, the kind where paying the bill does not require selling an organ. Seafood counters. Taquerías where you eat properly. To name two, both with branches in San Lucas and in San José:
- Mariscos Toro Güero
- Tacos El Paisa
Tell us where you eat
We are going to put the question to our readers: the five best local places in San José, and the five in San Lucas. Local. We insist on the word, because it is the only filter that has ever worked.
If you live here, send us yours — the name, the branch, and what to order when you get there. If you are visiting and something you ate deserves to be on that list, send that too. Write to send it to the editors, and we will publish what the count says rather than what we would have chosen.
Because with luck, if a place is good enough for the people who live here, it will be good enough for you.
