KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL | The 37-year-old chef and owner in his Mexico City restaurant, Pujol. Photography by Trujillo Paumier

WHEN CHEF ENRIQUE OLVERA OPENED his restaurant, Pujol, 13 years ago, his only goal was to serve "solid, tasty food" and be "the best restaurant in the neighborhood," he says. But that neighborhood was Mexico City's Polanco, the dining epicenter for a city of 8.5 million, and Olvera's budget was so small that his wife had to paint the walls. Since then, Pujol has far surpassed its initial aims: It's now widely thought of as Mexico's finest restaurant—and the 36th best in the world, according to the much-scrutinized S. Pellegrino rankings; and Olvera, who trained at New York's Culinary Institute of America before returning home, is the country's most well-known chef. He reached his position by making his cuisine "fancier and fancier, and more complex" over time. Pujol now serves a tasting menu of innovative, sophisticated food that wouldn't look out of place at England's Fat Duck or New York's Momofuku Ko. Olvera is also one of the leading exponents of Mexico's new gastronomy, which combines elaborate, cutting-edge technique with a strong emphasis on local ingredients to create a cosmopolitan cuisine that's at once international yet unmistakably Mexican—paralleling the direction of Mexico City itself.

Photos: Kitchen Confidential

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A visit to the 48-seat Pujol reveals a space-age kitchen containing 27 cooks, including a number of stagiaires who have flown thousands of miles to work for free—one spends hours picking cilantro flowers with tweezers; another is making his fifth attempt to perfect an apparently simple dish. As Pujol has become a place that attracts free labor ("if you want to stage here now, you have to wait until 2014," says Olvera), the chef has begun to think more about bringing Mexican cooks home from the U.S. He'd like them to move past the glass ceiling that exists in America (despite the number of Mexicans working in U.S. restaurants, "you rarely see a Mexican head chef in a New York kitchen," Olvera points out) and advance their careers on their home turf. As Olvera guides his cooks through lunchtime service—"Hey, make that blob of sauce more the size of a walnut"; "You: pull your hat down"—he talks about coming home, tradition and innovation, and how a Disney movie changed one of the world's best restaurants.

ENRIQUE OLVERA: "Mexico City is changing quickly, and restaurants are in a really good spot. There's more attention from the rest of the world on Mexican food. Fifteen years ago, I wouldn't have thought it would be considered a high-level cuisine and valued the same as Italian or Spanish food—especially in Mexico. Foreigners have always liked our food, but they thought of it as very causal, almost like street food. Now they're realizing there's sophistication to it, and there's potential to make not just tasty food but also food of a very high quality.

This is a cosmopolitan city with influences from Europe, the local culture and the U.S. It's a very nice mix of the three components, and Mexicans are starting to fall in love with that mix. If you look at Pujol, with the decoration and the food, it's Mexican—you feel like you are in Polanco; you don't feel like you're in New York—but it's not all pink with mariachis and crap like that, because that's not Mexico City.

At the restaurant we used to do a lot of reinterpretations of traditional Mexican dishes, but then we got tired of it and started trying to create new dishes with a very strong Mexican base. Until two or three years ago, all the ingredients had to be Mexican and they also had to be authentic, so, for example, we wouldn't use parsnip. But you know that movie Ratatouille? In the beginning, the head chef, Gusteau, is on TV and he says, 'You cannot limit your creativity because of the place that you were born,' and I remembered that later and figured it was true. So we started incorporating ingredients that are originally from other parts of the world. We said, 'If it grows in Mexico, fine, we use it.' For example, now a lot of Mexicans eat broccoli. It's the second-largest crop in the center of the country, so why shouldn't we do broccoli? We brought in a little more of our own vision. That was the first year we got on the list of 'The World's 50 Best Restaurants.'

Most people think they have to choose between tradition and doing modern food. We do both—they can coexist nicely in a dish and definitely on a menu. You always cherish where you come from, but I also have the need for new sensations, and to improve on those old traditions. It's not just about innovation for its own sake—it's to get to a better dish. For example, when you nixtamalize corn to make tortillas, the traditional recipe is to boil the corn with limestone, let it sit overnight outside, then grind it at the mill. But perhaps you can get to a better masa if you sous-vide the corn at 65 degrees, without the huge temperature shock. You might, so why not do it? You try it, and if it's better, you change it; if it's not, you keep doing the traditional style. If you were an architect, it would be really stupid to be building houses like you were 50 years ago. The kitchen's the same thing. If you want tradition to be alive, you have to keep doing things with it. Time will tell who's doing good stuff.

The Mexican cooks in the U.S. didn't go there to cook; it's just poor people that have no opportunities, that don't see a future in Mexico, so they go to the U.S. Once they arrive, they have very few options for work. My dream—and I think it's the dream of a lot of people here—is that they don't need to go there and feel unwanted. If they go, it's fine, but they should be hired. People should call you and say, 'I want you to come and work at my restaurant,' like they do with other nationalities. It's the nature of how it works and I understand that. But if we can change that a little it'd be nice.

I don't think cooks abroad realize Mexico has changed cuisinewise. And when they come back they see there's this huge potential. I think we should spread the word that there are good restaurants here in Mexico. If you compare the amount of money you make and the quality of life, it's almost the same. Yes, in New York you might earn $60,000 as a pastry chef, and here you might earn $3,000, but the rent is much cheaper, you don't have to be sending money home and you're with your own people. Most of the cooks here have worked in Europe or the States, and when they come back they appreciate the ingredients more and they see the possibilities of working with Mexican products. I also like the idea of Mexicans leaving Mexico and coming back because I did it myself. You realize what you like about your own country when you're outside it."

—Edited from Hamish Anderson's interview with Enrique Olvera.