This restaurant with the ridiculous name is 45 minutes outside of Cancun in a faux hip hotel. As I entered, my expectations could not be lower. And then – BOOM! Chef Jonatan Luna lit up my senses with a three-hour master class in molecular cooking that hasn’t been seen since the glory days of Heston Blumenthal, Marc Veyrat, Grant Achatz and Ferran Adrià. Every dish was a combination, such as mushrooms with mole and pork belly; spider crab with corn and burnt habanero; and pozole with sea urchin.

Superb ingredients are then transformed into every manner of tower, foam and smoke you were sure had gone out of fashion. While these techniques are rarely seen these days, Le Chique reminds us why we enjoyed that theatre when it first came out. Stunning!

jeffrey_merrihue

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