Mesa Invitada starts from a simple idea: someone else cooks in our house.
They do not bring their pantry. They bring their craft.
Chef Luis Ronzón was our guest, and cooked with produce from our garden.
Luis cooks at Ixi'im, in Yucatán. Between that peninsula and Valle de Guadalupe there is more than distance: there are two pantries that barely overlap. What is ordinary there — the heat, the humidity, the limestone ground — does not exist here. And the other way round.
Here he cooked a six-course tasting menu.
That is the only rule of the series, and it is what makes it worth doing. A cook arrives with their memory, their technique, their way of seasoning. The garden adjusts to none of it: it goes on giving what it was already giving.
So the menu is not written in advance. It is written walking the beds, seeing what is ready this week and what is not.
Six courses, then, are not six ideas carried from Yucatán. They are six answers to a garden that is not his own.
What reaches the plate is the meeting of two things that had not met: a craft formed somewhere else, and land that does not negotiate.
