Six years into running a fourteen-seat restaurant on the second floor of a building in Colonia Roma that has no sign, Carmen Vela is now one of the more difficult reservations in Mexico City. She would prefer it the other way. She would like, she says, to be a little harder to find. We meet on a Tuesday, the slowest day of her week, in a kitchen that smells of pork stock and bay leaves.
No sign on the building. Is that on purpose?
Yes. People who find us tend to be the people we want to feed. People who walk past us are not necessarily wrong, they are just not hungry for what we are cooking. We do not need to convince them.
The menu changes every nine days. Why nine?
Because nine is the wrong amount of time. It is too long for a single thought and too short for a season. But it is the rhythm we have. The kitchen runs on it. I tried to fix it once. I stopped trying.
You refuse to put your grandmother's chicken on the menu. Tell me about that.
Some dishes belong to a room. Hers belongs to her kitchen, which I am still allowed to use when I visit, on the condition that I do not write anything down. I cook it for the staff sometimes. I do not sell it. There are things that stop being themselves in print.
What is the most underrated ingredient in your pantry?
Time. People think the most important thing in a kitchen is heat. The thing they are usually missing is the minute. An onion has six different lives, depending on when you put it in the pan. I am still learning the minute.
How do you handle the bad nights?
I write the bad night down. Not what went wrong — that I can fix the next morning. I write down what it felt like. The feeling is the part you forget. The feeling is the part that teaches you.
You serve a meal. Then you do it again the next day. What does that teach you?
That nobody remembers the meal in the shape you served it. They remember a feeling. You spend twelve hours making a feeling. Then you wake up at four and make another one. It is the cheapest, longest education in the world.