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Dabiz Muñoz is in Mexico, where he has retained the title of best chef in the world for the third consecutive year. Accompanied by his wife, Cristina Pedroche, and his daughter, the family has also taken advantage of the trip to make a gastronomic route of those that the chef from Madrid likes. One of Dabiz Muñoz’s obligatory stops was at his favorite restaurant in Mérida, the capital of the state of Yucatán, in Mexico. It is Pancho Maíz, a Mexican restaurant where Muñoz enjoys so much that “enjoying strongly becomes an Epiphany of extreme flavor,” he explains in the Instagram post.
As a token of his love for this restaurant, Dabiz has shared his experience enjoying some enmoladas, one of the most characteristic dishes of the restaurant. It is a very common dish in the area that is prepared with stewed and meticulously thickened mole. They are flute-like tortillas -as Muñoz explains in his video-, which are filled with chicken and string cheese -or Oaxaca-, topped with a free-range egg and accompanied by a sour cream from Sucilá, a Mexican town in the north of Yucatán.
This is probably one of the dishes that fascinates Dabiz Muñoz the most, as he says he could eat only mole and sour cream. Judging by his words and his enjoyment, it is one of his favorite snacks, “it has everything: sweet, spicy, sour, milky, fatty…”.
This is Pancho Maíz
Pancho Maíz is a humble and simple restaurant that has become a reference in Mexican gastronomy. Located inside a large house in downtown Mérida, all the products they use come from small producers in the area. Their main mission is to embrace the gastronomic traditions of different regions of Mexico through their cuisine and also to recover and preserve the sowing of native corn seeds that were forgotten. “We want to give back to native corn its value and leading place in the history of our cuisines,” explain Xóchitl Valdés and Selena Cárdenas, owners and cooks of Pancho Maíz, on the Visit Mérida website.
In the menu of Pancho Maíz, besides the hit of enmoladas that Dabiz Muñoz likes so much, you can taste other delicacies such as the Huarache de chorizo verde de Toluca, the enfrijoladas with tender egg and pork sausage, or the tamale with table chocolate, spiced English, cinnamon crumble and Tabasco cocoa ice cream, among others.