From the daily menuants’ eggs, brown or white worms ...

Press, 16 May 1985, Page 15

From the daily menuants’ eggs, brown or white worms ...

By

SOLL SUSSMAN,

NZPA-AP

•On a narrow, downtown street of ageing buildings where the chic rarely go, a restaurant serving ants’ eggs, grasshoppers, and other “exotic foods” is pulling in diners from throughout Mexico City. "Did you know that even today there are still places in Mexico that serve armadillo, venison, snake, wild boar, iguana, and tepetzcuintle?” a local newspaper’s society page columnist asks. It’s the Fonda Don Chon, remarkable in its menu, but otherwise a modest spot with light green walls, plastic kitchen chairs, metal tables covered with simple cloths, and an occasional landscape painting hanging crookedly for added decor.

Like many “Fondas,” or traditional restaurants, the kitchen is in the entrance. Sixteen cauldrons and casseroles boil with the dishes of the day — among them armadillo in almond sauce; “tepetzcuintle,” a small mammal found in southern Mexico’s jungles, cooked in a pine nut sauce; iguana in a green “pipian” sauce, made from a base of ground

pumpkin seeds; venison in huitlacoche, a fungus that grows on corn and is a favoured ingredient in Mexican cooking. The menu changes daily. A grill at the entrance way keeps tortillas — both corn and blue corn varieties — warm, and cooks chili peppers, “chapulines,” or grasshoppers, “jumiles,” an insect found in trees, and the brown or white worms from the maguey cactus. Plastic bags full of ants’ eggs fresh from the countryside sit waiting to be cooked, in butter or in a green sauce laced with “nopalitos,” or cactus leaves. “Don Chon” was Encarnacion Reyes, who founded the restaurant about 30 years ago. Ten years ago, as cook Emilia Rojas recalls it, he changed the menu from traditional dishes to feature the exotic foods that since have earned a city-wide reputation.

“He liked to go out and find good ingredients and invent,” manager Isabel Velazquez says. “He died (four years ago) and we’re keeping on here the same as always,” the cook said, taking a steaming pot of sauteed tomatoes and

onions to pour over a tray of roasted quails.

The owner now is Don Chon’s son, Alonso Reyes Jimenez.

Many of the ingredients such as ants’ eggs or maguey worms are commonly eaten in the Mexican countryside from a tradition dating back to pre-Hispanic times, but they are rarely found in this sprawling capital of 17 million people. The sauces also are typical of Mexican cuisine.

Mrs Velazquez said the restaurant used to get most of its clientele from La Merced market just a few blocks away.

The market once was the city’s wholesale food centre, but that portion of it was moved about two years ago to a newer market farther from downtown in a government effort to relieve traffic congestion.

Asked who comes to eat in the fonda, Mrs Velazquez replies: “All kinds.” She explains to a firsttime diner that the insects can be munched as snacks or placed into tortillas to form a taco, topped with the avocado dip called guacamole. She suggests the grasshoppers are better with a touch of lime.