The Bridge and the Torch: Rick Bayless on Baja California's Enduring Influence — and Who Inherits the Kitchen Next
For nearly five decades, Rick Bayless has treated México as a subject of study — a country he walked, market by market, before opening Frontera Grill in Chicago in 1987. In this conversation, the chef traces that origin to Oklahoma, turns to Baja California, the only region ever given a full season of his own television series, and looks ahead to the cooks now inheriting his kitchen. Bayless talks lineage, translation, and what still surprises him after a lifetime of looking.
by Mayté Rodríguez Cedillo and Fernando Favela · Chef Interviews · BajaTraveler.com
You were most of the way through a doctorate in anthropological linguistics at Michigan when you left academia for a restaurant kitchen. What was the actual moment — not the general pull toward México, but the specific moment — when you knew the dissertation wasn’t going to get finished?
That’s a complicated question because I was always cooking while I was studying for my Ph.D. When my advisor abruptly retired—it was when I’d finished my coursework and was about to launch into my dissertation—and I didn’t have a close relationship with any other professors in the department. I decided to take some time off from the department and sort things out. That’s when I went more fully into food, mostly teaching cooking and catering. I got the itch to go back into academics and started back at the Masters level in pure Anthropology. That only lasted a semester and I was offered a chef’s job. I decided to take it and that’s when I knew that my dissertation (in either Linguistics or Anthropology) probably wouldn’t happen.
You grew up in your family’s barbecue restaurant, the Hickory House, in Oklahoma City — the same city where your brother Skip built a career in sports broadcasting built on loud, public certainty. What did that restaurant teach you about hospitality that his world of sports commentary never could?
First, aside from writing for our school newspaper and a summer internship at the Daily Oklahoman during college, my brother had no sports broadcasting career in Oklahoma City. And that “loud, public certainty” wasn’t part of any world I grew up in. But if you conflate periods, I guess you could say that hospitality is other-oriented and sports broadcasting always has a personal, defensive stance. I prefer to live in a world that’s oriented toward others and sharing beauty with them.
I almost always worked with people who were professional cooks, making food to serve in markets, street stalls or family restaurants. The first thing you have to do—when doing the kind of research I’ve always been involved with—is to eat their food and complement them on it. Then come back and eat it again and start a conversation, revealing that you know a lot about how the dish is made. You ask simple, probing questions about whether the cook likes to make it this way or that. That reveals you as an insider, not an outsider. That’s when you start getting into details. In the places I was doing my research, people were cooking right in front of me. So the conversations unfolded quite easily once you’d shown appreciation for their craft, then revealed that you already knew a lot about how to make the dish. The background work I had to do in books before those conversations was enormous.
In Baja, we did the north, then flew to the south and did more. Everything was within an easy drive to get really good material.
In 2012, at the invitation of Baja California’s state tourism office, you brought 35 people from your Chicago kitchens — cooks, not executives — to tour Tecate, Ensenada, Rosarito, and the Valle de Guadalupe. You’ve repeated versions of that trip since. Why Baja specifically, as a training ground, rather than Oaxaca or Yucatán, regions you know just as deeply?
First, we did seasons on other parts of Mexico beside Baja—Oaxaca, Yucatan, CDMX. Our staff trip was planned before we got any support from the tourism office. It was only after we were there that they reached out and offered to help with a few things.
Every region of México is complex, but often things are so spread out that we didn’t have the budget to invest the time in getting to them. Oaxaca, Yucatan and Mexico City were exceptions, which is why we did them.
You’ve spent 45 years studying México’s regional cuisines. Where does Baja California — its wine country, its coastal seafood culture, its Baja-Med restaurant scene in Ensenada — actually rank in that landscape? Is it still underestimated by American diners, or has it caught up?
Baja’s cuisine is an emerging cuisine, not yet fully formed or easy to describe. Yes, it focuses on live-fire cooking with lots of seafood and local products, and, yes, the climate is more like a mediterranean one, rather than a subtropical or tropical one like the rest of México, which produces more Mediterrean ingredients to work with. But as to iconic dishes, those aren’t yet fully formed. Still, because of the beautiful, award-winning wines and the tourism that’s attracted to the Valle de Guadalupe area, really good restaurants have emerged, mostly cooking in a similar style. Still, most Americans (even people in Southern California) know nothing about it (the wines, the emerging cuisine), which we are trying to change.
Frontera Grill turns 40 in 2027. You recently promoted Javauneeka Jacobs to co-chef alongside Richard James, who has been in your kitchen longer than she has been alive. What does a young cook have to prove to you before you’ll hand them real authority in a kitchen you’ve run personally since 1987?
First, they have to be a good cook, showing that they can prepare dishes consistently and master balanced flavors that we are known for.
Secondly, they have to be able to see the big picture, knowing what each person on their team needs to be doing so that the restaurant thrives.
Third, they have to be able to challenge and encourage their team members so that they are always growing and feeling good about their contributions to the team.
Fourth, they have to be deeply acquainted with the traditional regional dishes of Mexico.
Fifth, they have to have a positive attitude, constantly saying “yes,” creating a positive work environment, and always asking, “is there any way to make this dish better?”
And sixth, they have to be consistently educating themselves and bringing their education to creative ways to reinterpret dishes in the Mexican canon of classics.
Your career began as an act of translation — bringing regional México to American diners who had never encountered it. Nearly five decades later, what do you want the next generation of cooks in your kitchens to be translating? Is it still México, or has the job changed?
It’s still Mexico, because México is still not very well understood in the United States.
We are still translating the regional Mexican classics, though food trends change all the time and new translation tactics need to be employed. For instance, when we opened, American diners were enamored with fajitas, so we translated tacos al carbon as a sister to fajitas.
Today, everyone is in love with steak tacos, so those are a point of reference.
After nearly fifty years of cooking, traveling, and studying México — including Baja California specifically — what is the one thing about the region’s food that still genuinely surprises you? Something you haven’t fully figured out.
As I said above, what we are calling Baja cuisine these days has only been on the radar screen for a decade or two. So there’s nothing yet to figure out.
Once the cuisine has settled in for several generations, we’ll know what its heart truly is. Then we can step back and analyze it more thoroughly.
Right now, all we can do is report on what different chefs are doing, though I have to say little of the chef food has made its way into home cooking. Tacos culture is different and Tijuana, especially, has generations of experience with that. Still, it’s focused on carne asada, birria, shrimp and a few other items, with a slightly different flavor and presentation than other places, but still similar.