Por qué cerré Maizal

Maizal closed in 2024. Eight years at La Casona de los Sapos: we opened in 2017 with more faith than money and closed with the dining room full. It needs saying slowly, so it lands — it didn't close out of emptiness. It closed the way a well-written sentence ends: because it was complete.

A restaurant is a body. It grows, learns, tires, sheds its skin. I was already cooking toward the garden more than toward memory, and that house had given me everything a house can give. Staying out of fear felt like the only true way to fail.

Nothing learned stayed behind in Puebla. It travels with me: it is in how I listen to a vegetable at Olivea, in how we treat corn at Fritanguita, in the discipline of being wrong by night and corrected by morning. The first teacher is not forgotten; it is carried.

To everyone who sat at those tables for eight years: thank you. The table is still set. Only the address changed.