History

A few years ago, I was finishing a winter season in Courchevel in a luxury hotel, when suddenly we had to close it early, because of a small virus that threatened the whole world.

Lyon being the closest city, my wife and I decided to stay there while waiting for things to get back to normal and for the hotel in the south of France to confirm whether they were going to open or not. I'm not going to lie to you, like everyone else, the first lockdown was like a second honeymoon with my wife. I love cooking, so every day I prepared amazing things and we drank a lot of wine to make the time pass faster.

However, after a few months, where things were not moving, I knew that I had to take advantage of this time to try something new. We started to make videos on YouTube with the different recipes that I cooked and small reports on the places that we visited in Lyon. Until one day I decided to prepare Cochinita pibil.

Before I continue this story I need to give you a little more context about this dish. My wife and I are originally from Mexico, and every weekend we would go to a restaurant in Mexico City to eat this dish perfectly.

In the past, I had already tried to cook this dish, and unlike other dishes where I just had to read the recipe to succeed, I never managed to make a good one. It is a very complicated dish to make because you have to find the perfect point of acidity and bitterness when preparing the marinade. So even if you have the recipe you always have to adapt it. In addition, it is a dish that you have to cook for hours, so to make it easier, we went to restaurants instead. But even in Mexico it was difficult to find a good cochinita, Normally you have to go to restaurants that prepare almost only this dish.

Of course in Lyon we had tried different Mexican restaurants but either they didn't make the dish or the taste wasn't up to par. There was just one solution, to prepare it myself.

Coming back to my story, that day, I was under pressure not to miss dinner. So I looked at a lot of recipes, tried different marinades, picked up tips here and there. I marinated the meat and put it in the oven and all I had to do was wait for the result.

After long hours, it was time to taste and I don't know if all this work was done in advance, or if it was maybe the spirit of my grandmother Magdalena who visited me that day, but the cochinita was more than perfect. My wife was not disappointed.

The next day, in a group of Mexicans in Lyon on Facebook they had organized a picnic on the edge of the quays, the picnic continued into the evening, and the last survivors ended up at an after party at my place. Lucky for me, I still had some cochinita left, so I made them taste it, everyone was stunned it was so good. And everyone started saying: "wow! Even in Mexico I have never tasted such good cochinita, it's amazing!"

The next day I created an account on insta and I looked for people to taste, the feedback was the same. After the rest is history, in a very short time the entire Mexican community started to order, so I created a site, I opened accounts on delivery platforms. The feedback was so good that everyone started to order, all the gastronomic influencers of Lyon tasted it and they loved it. And I started to receive requests to send to other cities...

After a year and a half, finally the hotels decided to reopen their doors and knowing that I had a little girl on the way and that my wife was going to lose her job soon, I decided to put this project on hold, return to work and resume this project once I was settled in the South of France.

Today I took a break from my work to restart this project, so if you are interested in tasting this magnificent dish, you can order on this site or send me a message.