Chef Chat: Austin’s Alma Alcocer and Jeff Martinez Share Mexican Food Memories

Chefs Alma Alcocer and Jeff Martinez have worked together for years at various Austin restaurants and currently own Alcomar in Austin, Texas, a Mexican food restaurant with a focus on seafood. Alcocer, a native of Mexico City, was classically trained but returned to Mexico after 15 years of cooking professionally to explore the ingredients and aromas she remembered from her youth. Martinez, meanwhile, grew up in San Antonio but never fully explored his Mexican heritage until he began cooking Mexican food and incorporating flavors he remembered from his grandmother’s cooking.

We spoke with these two chefs about the role of memory in cooking, how their upbringings influence their styles and approaches, and how inventive chefs can be when trying to recreate familiar foods. [pagebreak]

The Latin Kitchen: When did you fall in love with Mexican food?

Alma Alcocer: I’ve always been in love with Mexican food since I’m Mexican, but I think I had to go through a career as a chef in order to cook Mexican food at a professional level.

Jeff Martinez: For me, I grew up in San Antonio, so I never really knew traditional Mexican food, like authentic Mexican food. It was just like Tex-Mex, a bastardization of it, so that’s what I grew up with, and it wasn’t until I started working with El Chile and then after that Fonda San Miguel that I started to discover real authentic Mexican food.

TLK: It sounds like you two had very different upbringings. How have those upbringings influenced your styles and approaches to Mexican cuisine?

AA: [laughing] I think the biggest difference is Jeff grew up with flour tortillas. I grew up with corn tortillas. But I also think our upbringings, as far away as it may seem, we’re very similar.

JM: Yeah, because we’ve worked together for about 15, 20 years, something like that. We worked together at Jeffrey’s for 10 years and a lot of stuff that I learned was through Alma and from that restaurant, and working together for 10 years I think there’s a lot of similarities in the way that we cook things. Some people that know each other well enough can finish each other’s sentences; I think we could maybe finish each other’s dishes. It all just kind of fits. [pagebreak]

TLK: When chefs recreate familiar foods, how inventive can they be? Is your goal to evoke memories or to create something new?

JM: I try to give it the respect that it deserves from where it comes from, but not going too far away and adding my own touch to it, or my vision to it. I always try to keep it as authentic or as close to the authentic recipe as I can because I think that gives tribute to where it came from rather than trying to just take a certain little piece of it and turning it into my own thing and kind of just put my own little play on it.

AA: And I think for me it’s the exact same thing. I think it all starts with the ingredients and it all ends with the emotion that you provoke in the diner.

TLK: Chefs work notoriously long hours and stressful jobs. How do you decompress when you’re off work?

JM: I take road trips with my dogs and my wife and we’ll go to different rivers or different small towns here around Austin, just something to kind of get my mind away from the restaurant for the day or two days that I’m off. I think that helps me to have a fresher vision of what we’re doing here rather than just constantly thinking about what’s going on here. It can be tiresome.

AA: Me too. I have two dogs that take a lot of my free time, and also my husband and my friends play a big role in what I do when I’m off. Even when I’m not off, like occasionally somebody will show up and we’ll have lunch together, and that to me is the most decompressing moment of my day. [pagebreak]

TLK: Growing up with Mexican food, obviously there are certain flavors and certain scents that are very evocative. What is the role of memory in creating new dishes?

AA: Do you have an hour or two? This is the perfect example to that question: I got a case of hatch peppers from one of the servers that she brought from New Mexico, her own peppers, and we were burning them over the open fire, and to me that is — and I told the cooks that — that is my first memory. Of walking into a kitchen and smelling the poblanos bursting over an open flame. With nothing, just the gas from the stove. It just really triggered all of these ideas, like I want to make stuffed peppers with the hatch, and a million things.

JM: Growing up in San Antonio, there’s Mexican food but there’s 10 times more Tex-Mex, and as I started to discover authentic Mexican food, it kind of made me realize where these Tex-Mex things came from. Like when I was in the Yucatan I had a salbute. It made me realize, okay, this is where puffy tacos originated. Things like that. So for me it made me understand my memories of childhood food — where they originated from – which kind of put me in touch with that side of my culture, that Mexican side of San Antonio culture.