Ms. Baja Spills the Beans

Dish

THE HOOK WAS BAITED with chapulines salteados, and Deborah Schneider eyed it with unconcealed interest. The sautéed grasshoppers evidently lend crunch to an otherwise demure salad of assorted lettuces, avocado and slivered Parmesan served by Asao, a new restaurant of rare beauty in the dusty, hilly border city of Tecate.

The chapulines wiggled invitingly (so to speak), but Schneider declined to bite. The nationally regarded San Diego chef and author, who has commenced work on a third book of Mexican recipes——and is chef/partner in a soon-to-open Newport Beach restaurant she hopes will spawn an upscale chain——usually detours when a road never traveled comes along. On the other hand, the woman who is probably the American expert on Baja California cuisine has encountered regional specialties that would make a salad garnished with crispy critters seem tame.

Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1955 and a resident of San Diego for the past 25 years, Schneider is among a spare handful of prominent women chefs in the area. Her résumé includes Dobson’s, Grant Grill, the Hilton Torrey Pines and, most recently, the Turf Club at the Del Mar track, where she supervised a considerable staff. Proud of her status as certified executive chef, a distinction granted by the American Culinary Federation, Schneider came to cooking by a most peculiar circumstance. Nearly 30 years ago, she tumbled off the back of a motorcycle while touring a boat basin in Athens, Greece, landed in the back of a charter yacht and, because she needed the money, got a job as cook. She had no formal training, having had a successful career as a writer and editor in Toronto, but she proved a quick learner.

One bright Saturday, Highway 94 swiftly bore her and a companion to Tecate and a midafternoon comida in a dining room filled with exquisite Mexican artwork. Built a few yards from the international border, Asao is a restaurant of considerable elegance, with prices that reserve it for the local elite but would be quite attractive to Americans, were there currently less reluctance to visit Baja. Intriguing views flank the vast, high-ceilinged room, with the glass-fronted, almost-theatrical kitchen opposite a riveting panorama of mountains that fills a wall of windows.

Asao bills itself as specializing in “Cocina de la Tierra Mexicana,” which might be characterized as refined interpretations of regional fare, and thus the perfect setting for a conversation with Schneider. Then again, a taco shop would have done just as well. At such places, she eagerly devours specialties that would alarm many compatriots, such as long-simmered, hotly spiced goat and fried pork rinds doused with a fiery sauce.

“I’m probably the only American expert on Baja cuisine,” conceded Schneider when asked if such a description sounded fair. “My expertise certainly is not Mexico as a whole, simply because the food is so regional and distinct. I have applied myself assiduously to Baja, one taco stand at a time.”

For lunch at Asao, she suggested sharing shrimp-topped sopes (the crisp corn patties “are what Mexican moms make for lunch,” noted the mother of two). That was followed by a chile-tinged sopa mestiza, skewered shrimp in an unusual mole sauce based on hibiscus flowers and flan de elote, a corn custard with a sauce of the sharply flavored sugar called piloncillo. The flan proved unlikely to make it into Schneider’s book-in-progress, a coy take on Baja street food and cocktails titled Amor y Tacos.

Of the dessert, Schneider observed, “It’s not unpleasant, but it’s an example of a creation from mismatched techniques and ingredients.” The meal had been sizable, and when the chef took a second bite of flan, she grimaced and said, “I’m approaching critical mass.”

Food & Wine magazine praised Schneider’s first cookbook, Baja! Cooking on the Edge, as one of the best of 2006. The collection of recipes and anecdotes ranges from close encounters with tacos of the most challenging kind to lavish dinners in the Guadalupe Valley wine country. In a tribute to Schneider’s dual talents, the book provided the concept for Sol, an ambitious, 160-seat restaurant slated to open later this spring in Balboa Marina at Newport Beach. With kitchen and menu design in her hands (and an equity stake in the business), Sol is very much Schneider’s baby.

“To open, we’ll have a menu of 38 dishes, including appetizers and desserts,” she said. “We’re cooking something more like real Mexican food, which is very fresh, very immediate and very simple. The idea is to capture the way we really eat in Northern Baja and Southern California. We grill, we love seafood, and we like our ‘fresh tastes’ of fruits and vegetables.”

Pushing aside the dubious dessert, Schneider excitedly described the kitchen planned for Sol. “It’s what I call a ‘proscenium kitchen.’ It will jut into the restaurant like a proscenium stage, and as an island that will surround cooks preparing cold and grilled items with a counter for guests who like being at the scene of the action.”

Asked how she feels when visiting Baja, Schneider responded intriguingly, “I feel like myself.” But she’s equally comfortable in the company of flashing knives and steaming pots, and when she described her new restaurant’s kitchen, Schneider conjured the most delicious image of herself: a maestro conducting a culinary orchestra to wild applause.

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