By Kat Sparks
Chef Juan Carlos Hernandez recently turned Moxi, the restaurant inside Hotel Matilda, into a stage for one of Mexico’s oldest and most personal foods, the taco. Moxi Omakase: The Taco Edition, a curated dining event from ExperienceSMA, sold out within days. It was a chef’s-table tasting in which each course arrived one at a time. Every plate carried the kind of intention usually reserved for fine dining, built entirely around masa, salsa, and fire. It was a small, intimate evening—and a good excuse to explore why San Miguel de Allende takes its corn so seriously.
Why Hotel Matilda Is the Perfect Stage
Hotel Matilda has always stood a little apart from the rest of San Miguel. Most of the city leans into its 500-year-old colonial bones, but Matilda opened in 2010 with sleek white Cubist lines and a gallery’s worth of contemporary Mexican art tucked into every courtyard. The hotel takes its name from a 1940s Diego Rivera portrait of Matilda Stream, the owner’s mother, which still hangs in the collection today. Sculptures by Javier Marín greet guests near the entrance, and pieces by artists like Bosco Sodi and Aldo Chaparro fill the interiors, a place built on the idea that Mexican tradition and Mexican innovation belong in the same room, a fitting home for a menu that does exactly that with corn.
Moxi, the hotel’s restaurant, has built its own reputation around globally minded Mexican cuisine that respects tradition without being trapped by it. An omakase-style taco tasting was a natural next step. Omakase, borrowed from Japanese dining, means leaving the choices to the chef and trusting them to walk you through a story course by course. Chef Hernandez used that format to tell a very old story indeed.
Nine Thousand Years in a Tortilla
The story behind the taco begins roughly 9,000 years ago in the Balsas River Valley, where early farmers began domesticating a wild grass called teosinte. Over countless generations of careful selection, that tough, barely edible grass became maize, the crop that would go on to define an entire culinary civilization. Over time, Mesoamerican cultures combined corn with beans, creating a nutritionally complementary pairing that remains central to Mexican cooking.
By the time the Aztecs were building their empire, tortillas already had a name, tlaxcalli. They filled them with beans, chile stews, moles, and proteins ranging from turkey to deer, creating an early form of what we now recognize as the taco. A crucial technique called nixtamalization unlocked nutrients the grain had been hiding all along. Dried corn is soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution, and the process gives masa its distinctive flavor and pliability, still exactly how tortillas are made today, by hand in small kitchens and by machine in tortillerías alike.
The taco kept evolving after the Spanish arrived, absorbing new ingredients like pork, beef, and dairy. Centuries later, Lebanese immigrants brought the vertical rotisserie to Mexico, and that collision of cultures produced tacos al pastor, now one of the country’s most beloved styles. The taco has never stopped adapting, from Aztec markets to food trucks worldwide, exactly the spirit Chef Hernandez channeled at Moxi.
The Many Faces of Mexican Corn
What makes Mexican corn so extraordinary is not just its age, but its diversity. More than 60 recognized criollo, or native, varieties of maize grow across the country, each shaped by centuries of local farming and suited to a different dish. A few of them explain why a taco in Oaxaca can taste worlds apart from a taco in Mexico City, even when both start with nothing more than corn, water, and fire.
Cacahuazintle is a large, hard-kerneled white corn grown around Puebla, Tlaxcala, and Mexico City, prized above all for pozole, where its chewy texture is the whole point. Chapalote, believed to be one of the oldest cultivated corns in the Americas, produces small conical ears and connects modern kitchens to Mexico’s earliest farmers. Olotillo, a delicate white corn from Oaxaca, shows up in tlayudas and tostadas, while Chalqueño, a robust yellow variety from the State of Mexico region, leans into soups and stews. Oaxaca’s iconic blue corn gives tlayudas and many tortillas their striking color and earthier flavor, and chefs across Mexico have been rediscovering it as part of a broader movement back toward heirloom grains.
Broadly speaking, Mexican corn falls into two big families. Dent corn is usually yellow or white and high in starch, the workhorse behind hominy and masa harina, the foundation of tortillas and tamales. Sweet corn, by contrast, is what shows up grilled on a stick as elote, sold by street vendors slathered in crema, cheese, and chile. Every taco is a decision about which corn to use, and chefs like Hernandez are increasingly making that decision purposefully rather than by default.
A Story Told Course by Course
Chef Hernandez leaned into that history rather than around it. An omakase format built entirely on tacos gave him room to move through different corn varieties, salsas, and techniques course by course, the way a sushi chef might move through cuts of fish. Guests were not just eating a meal. They were tasting nine millennia of agricultural history, reinterpreted inside one of San Miguel’s most design-forward spaces.
What stayed with me after the last plate was cleared was not any single dish, but the sense of eating a timeline. A tortilla is never just a tortilla. It is a choice, made by a farmer, a chef, or a grandmother, about which corn tells the story best. If you have ever wanted to understand why Mexicans take their corn so seriously, an evening like Moxi Omakase: The Taco Edition explains it, one exquisite bite at a time.
Kat Sparks is the founder and curator of University of Expats and ExperienceSMA.
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