Chef Rosalía Chay
Rosalía Chay Chuc cooks cochinita in the píib behind her house in Yaxunah, out of achiote she grows herself. There is no restaurant. You book, and you eat at her family's table.
Why go
She learned to cook from her mother and grandparents, in the village she has lived in her whole life, and she is self-taught after that.1 Her own account starts earlier still, with making tortillas and burying food in the underground oven.3 The part a cook should sit up for is the supply: every ingredient in the pot comes out of the solar behind the house, which she plants and harvests herself, and the achiote is the one she is proudest of.1 The flavor of that cochinita has not changed in decades.1 Chefs from outside found her. They ate the cochinita, drove to Yaxunah to watch her make it, and took her to Netflix's Chef's Table: BBQ
.1 She was clear at the time about why she agreed: "Para mi es una gran emoción el mostrarle al mundo la cultura tradicional de mi familia." (It's a great thrill for me to show the world my family's traditional culture.
Our translation.)1
Order this / avoid
- Order: the cochinita and the relleno negro. Those are the two she names herself.3
- Avoid: driving out on spec. There is no restaurant and no sign; you book ahead through her site and eat at her family's table.2
What locals & experts say
- La Jornada Maya, on where the cooking comes from: the paper reports that every ingredient she uses comes from the plot she tends behind the house, and that the achiote, which the cochinita cannot be made without, is her greatest pride. The paper writes reporting rather than criticism, so nobody quoted here has judged the food.1
Good to know
- Netflix's "Chef's Table: BBQ" gave her an episode. That is a documentary credit and not an award, and it is what made a village kitchen bookable at all.1
- Yaxunah is a comisaría of Yaxcabá, inland Yucatán, and the pin sits in the village rather than on a street address.1
- The record here is old. The reporting dates from the week the episode aired, so I can tell you who she is and how she cooks, and not what a visit is like this year.1
Verdict
should-visit — The evidence is narrow and it is unusually solid where it exists. La Jornada Maya, a Yucatán daily, establishes that she is self-taught, that she learned from her mother and grandparents, and that the ingredients come out of the plot behind her house, achiote included. That last fact is the whole argument: a cochinita whose recado is grown by the person cooking it is a different object from one built out of a paste. What is missing is anybody eating there recently and writing it down, and the independent reporting dates from the week her Netflix episode aired. Book it a long way ahead, because it is her house and not a restaurant.