Part 3. ¿Qué Necesitamos?

What does a person really need in life? Food, drink and a decent haircut.

When we arrived back in Mexico City, I needed a haircut. Badly. The last one I’d had, I’d done myself during lockdown, with a pair of borrowed clippers. Really it was a collaborative effort. I did one side, Annemarie did the other and the dog did the back. Honestly, I looked like James Dean. Just after the accident.

Finding a barber is always dread for me as I don’t really have ‘hair’. If you were being kind, you’d describe it as ‘down’, like you’d find on a baby bird. A vulture chick, or grey albatross. If you were being honest, you’d say it was a brown mist, gently rising from my head, as if from a fetid pond. Because of this, finding a competent hairdresser is near impossible. I’ve known about six in my life. Out of necessity, I’ve been known to travel an hour across London just to get it done. I’ve paid eye watering sums. And whenever a barber moves on or permanently closes their doors, tears have welled in my eyes.

Annemarie and I went clothes shopping as soon as we arrived in Mexico. One of the first stores we went into, a skateboarding/fashion market in the heart of Roma Norte, had a barber’s chair set up. It piqued my interest and we were told to check out the guy’s Instagram page. It looked promising but with my hair, that’s meaningless. Still, I had to do something. James Dean’s corpse was starting to rot.

Nervously, I sat in his chair and tried my best to explain the situation.

“When did you last have your hair cut?!” he asked in cool disgust. He was a cool guy. So cool, in fact, I wondered if the saltshaker of white power on his counter had been a downer (turns out it was just talc).

“My hair is very difficult,” I spluttered, “It’s very fine, it’s wavy, I have two cowlicks, two partings and I’m going bald.” He laughed, as most barbers do when I tell them this, before he really looked at my head.

“Oh shit!” This too is quite common amongst barbers. I told him about the time a guy had given up, mid-cut. This is true. A new salon had opened around the corner from our house in Finsbury Park and I thought, Why not? It looked cool, the barber was bald and this is always a good sign. If you’re bald and still cutting hair, you’re only in it for the love. Baldy shaved the sides of my head, stood there with his scissors looking at the top and said, “Nope. I can’t do this. I don’t know what to do with your hair at all.” He whipped off my gown, brushed my shoulders and charged me half.

My barbero chuckled at this and started snipping.

There are two constants in this world, the need to make small talk with the person cutting your hair and the topic of that conversation.

“It’s so spooky, man! Normally this part of town in thronging. Tourists, locals, students, artists. Just people, you know? … Yeah, I lost loads of business, it was tough but I got to do this Vidal Sassoon course online that would normally have cost a fortune but, you know, “community”, they knocked the price right now. I hope that kind of thing continues after this. … Yeah, a couple of tourists in a town outside the city were arrested a fined for not wearing one. And that’s right, you’re like a social pariah if you don’t wear a mask in Mexico” he said, while skilfully cutting around mine.  

An hour later, I couldn’t believe what I had on my head. A good cut. Annemarie reckons I’ve had ten decent cuts in as many years and this one was top of the pile. She booked in with him for the following day and was similarly delighted with the results.

This is just luck, of course. There are twenty-two million people in CDMX and, judging from the streets, there’s a barber for every ten of those. So dumb luck for sure but I was elated. For me, it’s like food and drink.

Speaking of which.

You cannot overstate just how bad the food is in the UK. It’s getting better, don’t get me wrong, London and the other major cities now offer a few decent restaurants for those who can afford them but the vast majority of food in Britain is terrible. I’ve never understood this. France is just there! We know about Italy. We’ve been to Spain. Yet our food doesn’t come close. I guess you could blame the climate, the lack of sunshine denying us the kind of produce that leads to the cuisine in those countries, but have you ever eaten in Sweden? Or Denmark? Even Iceland has better fare. Their food is all fantastic! I don’t know where we went wrong.

In England, and I say this without modesty, I’m a good cook. I’d say my food is better than forty percent of the restaurants you go to. Higher, once you get out of London. In Mexico, my best dish wouldn’t be fit for the street dogs. The fifty-pence, hole-in-the-wall tacos here could be six pounds a piece on Charlotte Street and you’d be lucky to get it. Our local, for example, is Taqueria El Turix. It offers one thing, pork pibil and that’s it. It’s a kind of wet, pulled pork in a vivid orange sauce. Spicy, fruity, citrusy, we eat there so often we’ve starting to sweat the stuff, mopping our brows with tortillas to get a second hit. Go up a rung on the ladder and you’re in a gastronomic world beyond the UK’s stratosphere. One of the best we’ve found is, Expendio de Maiz, or ‘corn dealer’. The food was at such heights, I thought I was going to get a nosebleed. No menu, no kitchen, just a hot plate where they bring you dish after delicious dish of whatever they are cooking that day. You eat until you ask them to stop, which I never did ask. Annemarie had to pull me away from the table, kicking, screaming, cursing her family name. We’d had five courses a piece (and change from twenty quid), each one more delicious and interesting than the last. I begged her, just five or six more courses. You tried the one with the pork rib?! How can you ask me to leave?   

There is a scene in the movie, ‘Once Upon a Time in Mexico’, where Johnny Depp’s character has a dish so good, he is compelled to shoot the cook. This is the level we are at once we hit the “good” restaurants. In our first week, we went to a place near us named Pujol and ordered a nine course, taco tasting menu. The poor chef had no idea how close he came. This guy has the audacity to pull out a grilled octopus taco with salsa verde and shiso at course five and thinks he can just carry on with the tamales like nothing’s happened? Guns are illegal in Mexico but if they weren’t, the judge would have thrown out the case before he got the rollers out of his wig.

On our anniversary, we went to Quintonil, consistently ranked as one of the top fifty restaurants in the world. It was the greatest gastronomic experience of our lives. And we’ve had some gastronomic experiences, by the way… the best seafood restaurant in Genoa, New York’s highest rated tasting menus, Reykjavik’s finest, Copenhagen’s, Miami’s, Panama’s… nothing compares to this. I had a smoked testicle taco that blew my bollocks off. We had a sherry and mushroom broth, served with my favourite new ingredient, huitlacoche (or ‘Corn Smut’), a mould that grows on maize ears, that made us both start speaking in tongues. We had a spotted Santa Barbara prawn with seaweed, “salsa macha” and wild mushrooms actually had me questioning reality. Was I really eating this? There was a chemical spill near our apartment earlier in the week, was this is all an elaborate hallucination brought on by breathing hydrocarbons? Am I in a coma right now? Is this heaven?
Shoot the cook? Worse. I fan girled. I became a stage-door Johnny. I bought the recipe book and had the head chef sign it. I’ve stuck his picture inside my school locker with love hearts around it. When I think of his testicles, a pair of bluebirds fly from behind my back carrying a banner with the restaurant’s name on it. Harps play. It’s pure corn smut.

And to drink? A friend here told me that Mexican wine never became more widely known because when the Spanish colonialists discovered it was better than their own, they destroyed the vine and vineyards. Another act of ‘Once Upon a Time in Mexico’ vandalism? Possibly. Rioja aside, you rarely find yourself asking the sommelier, “what have you got from the Spanish cellar?” but I’m not so sure. Don’t get me wrong, Mexican wine is fantastic but it has a palate quite alien to those of Europe. Unless, that is, you’ve spent the last twenty years living in North London. In that case you, like me, will have been subjected to numerous raw, organic and natural wines over the last few years. “Yes Sir, this musty, orange number was clay-pot matured in the hills of Castelnou by a minute collective of oboe playing Huguenots. It will partner with absolutely nothing on the menu but will go well with any acid reflux you may have.” Mexican wine is better than that. Much better. I’d take it over Argentina, USA, or all UK supermarket stuff but its does sport some pretty bold flavours. I guess what I’m saying is, if I get deported for causing bodily harm to a chef, I’ll bring back a few crates from Baja California, set up a hipster off-licence in Dalston, and do okay!

To enjoy these things, of course, you need money. With the thinking of, ‘better the devil you know’, we decided to open an account with HSBC. Evidently, the devil you know is still the devil. Though we qualified for something called the ‘premier account’, it turned out to be a premiership of incompetence. We sat for three hours while the banker typed out an epic novel on the history of banking, reaching as far back as HSBC’s neanderthal ancestors who lent rocks to the adjoining cave and went on from there. As Christmas came and went, we transferred some money and just two short weeks later, we still didn’t have an account. Every day we were told, mañana, dos horas, as soon as my colleague comes back from lunch... at four o’clock. It never happened and we could figure it? Technical minutia aside, why were we being told ‘yes’ when the answer was, ‘no’?
“Oh, well no one in Mexico says ‘no’” we were later told over dinner, “We want to say ‘yes’ to everything” As illustration, our friend told us how her husband, having just moved to the country, was at a party discussing Formula One racing. “There’s race on tomorrow, you guys should come over and watch”
“Sure, absolutely, we’ll be there, fantastic” they all replied.

The next morning he got busy buying beer and snacks, cooking food and generally preparing for the fiesta.
“What are you doing?” She asked him. He explained. “No one is coming.” She informed.
“Of course they are! They said they are”
“They said ‘yes’. ‘Yes’ doesn’t mean ‘yes’. Have any of them confirmed?”
“Well, no but they said they would come. They were enthusiastic”
“No one is coming.”
The last screech of tires echoed around an empty apartment as he ate his fourth pizza alone.

It takes a local to point these things out to you but once they do, you start noticing them everywhere. When trying on clothes, “Do you have this in a medium?”
“Yes, in another store the other side of town.”
When house hunting, “Can we see the apartment tomorrow at noon?”

“Of course, but Thursday at half one”

In a restaurant, “Can we try a glass of this Mexican Tempranillo?”
“Great choice! How about this Grenache from Argentina?”

All countries have their little verbal tics like this, of course. In the UK, it’s ‘sorry’,
“Sorry, Thursday at half one”

“Sorry, try the other store”

“Sorry, how about the Grenache?”

We don’t mean ‘sorry’ but we say it anyway. Mexico’s need to please is a fun-house mirror reflection of our need for contrition.
One day I’ll ask friends, do you like my new haircut?
“Yes.”
“Sorry.”