Forget the Wall: Pati Jinich Wants to Build a Culinary Bridge to Mexico.
The cookbook author and PBS chef, who started out in the diplomatic world, aspires to help Americans appreciate her native cuisine.
TAKOMA PARK, Md. — When you walk into a Taco Bell with Pati Jinich, the brainy and buoyant Mexican cooking authority, shame walks in with you. It feels like buying a pack of cigarettes in front of a friend who thought you had quit, or getting caught watching cat videos.
Ms. Jinich, who was born and grew up in Mexico City, has never made a drunken, late-night run for the border or explored the odd pleasures inside a Crunchwrap Supreme, the most successful product the 56-year-old company has ever spawned.
“It just never occurred to me to enter a Taco Bell,” she said. “That’s just how Mexicans think. It has zero appeal. Why would I do that?”
Yet here she was, prodded on by her social-media fans to eat there after a Harris Poll survey in September named Taco Bell the most popular Mexican restaurant brand in America.
Many of them wanted her to support their view that the fast-food chain represents the worst of America’s exploitative, consumptive culture and is as far from real Mexican food as a Trump Tower taco salad. Others professed a nostalgic fondness for the place, and sent precise instructions on what to order. Immigrants told her they were once so poor that all they could afford was a couple of Taco Bell tacos that reminded them, at least a little bit, of home.
So Ms. Jinich, a former public-policy analyst who came late to food media stardom, decided this was a perfect opportunity for a little taco diplomacy. After all, Taco Bell serves more than two billion customers each year at 7,000 locations.
“Maybe if they eat Taco Bell all the time, they’ll want to eat a real taco,” she said as we prepared for our field trip. “To me, it’s an entryway. Maybe I need to say, ‘Thank you, Taco Bell, for letting people know about tacos.’”
Ms. Jinich (HEEN-itch), 46, lives in a large, lovely home decorated with Mexican art and surrounded by hydrangeas in a historic part of Chevy Chase, Md.
Viewers of her PBS show, “Pati’s Mexican Table,” which won her the James Beard Foundation broadcast award for outstanding personality or host this year and has a combined audience of 65.5 million in the United States and abroad, would recognize it in a minute. When she’s not filming in Mexico, she’s shooting in her kitchen.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/dining/pati-jinich-mexican-food.html?
