Maizal

Maizal was the first stroke. Eight years — 2017 to 2024 — at La Casona de los Sapos, in the center of Puebla: a kitchen raised around corn the way a house is raised around fire.

There I learned what no school lends: to hold a team through the bad nights, to listen to a product until it confesses, to be wrong by night and corrected by morning. In those years, Food & Wine en Español counted me among Mexico's 19 best new chefs.

I closed it in 2024 — complete, not broken. A full notebook is not a failed notebook. What I learned there still cooks what I do; the first teacher is not forgotten: it is carried, the way seed is carried.