‘Mexican food is cheap and fast’? Not always – this chef is promoting the country’s culinary traditions and indigenous ingredients

Chef Colibri Jimenez is coming to Hong Kong to share her love of Mexico and its food in a four-day pop-up at the private members’ club Carlyle & Co

‘Someone once tried to hire me to cook nachos for US$10,000,’ recalls the chef, who wants to show to the world ‘real Mexican food’ using indigenous ingredients

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Colibri Jimenez is a Mexican chef on a mission to preserve the country’s ingredients and culinary traditions. She will be in Hong Kong in November to share her love of Mexican food in a four-day pop-up at Carlyle & Co in Tsim Sha Tsui in Kowloon. Photo: Colibri Jimenez

Published: 12:45pm, 19 Oct 2023

There are few chefs who will go as far and deep into research as Colibri Jimenez – and even before the Mexican government named her one of its culinary ambassadors, she had been preserving and promoting the country’s indigenous ingredients and ancient culinary traditions.

At 23, Jimenez set up the platform Aventura Gastronomica as a way to improve culinary tourism in Mexico and to learn the culinary and agricultural traditions of indigenous communities.

For seven years, Jimenez, who herself has indigenous roots in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, travelled to all corners of Mexico – to places that produce the main ingredients of Mexican cuisine such as cacao, vanilla, beans, chillies, and of course, maize.

She recently put everything she learned into opening her first restaurant, Maria Raiz Y Tierra, in Merida in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Jimenez’s tetela – yellow maize with cactus stuffed with beans and chicharron (fried pig skin). Photo: Colibri Jimenez

It was not always this way – in fact, Jimenez set off on this path exactly because she did not learn any of this at culinary school, despite completing her studies at home in Mexico.