Zioux and Air France-KLM kicked off their Roots of Flavour series with Chef Alberto Preciado's five-course ode to Mexican street food and fine dining - grasshopper seasoning, aguachile and all.
Black bean and roasted chicken soup. Picture: Kaunda Selisho
Sandton’s Zioux played host this September to the opening chapter of Roots of Flavour, a three-part culinary collaboration between Marble Hospitality and Air France-KLM designed to fly celebrated Latin American chefs into South African kitchens.
First up: Chef Alberto Preciado, who arrived, by his own host’s account, with little more than a suitcase full of ingredients and a mission to prove that Mexican food is not, in fact, Tex-Mex.
That distinction mattered enough to the room that it became something of a running theme for the night. As the evening’s host, Chef David Higgs put it, “You must understand, it’s not Tex-Mex. We have a great tendency to bastardise stuff – we’ll leave that to the Spring.” This cheeky line from the straightforward chef set the tone for a menu that leaned hard into specificity and provenance rather than familiar shorthand.
Street food dressed for fine dining
The five-course menu opened with roasted esquites; wood-fired corn finished with herb butter, citrus aioli, aged cheese and a toasted chapulín (grasshopper) seasoning that gave the amuse-bouche its edge of theatre. From there, a citrus-cured salmon aguachile with cucumber, fresh chilli and avocado crema, followed by what the chef described as a light, natural-corn tortilla soup, plated on the printed menu as a black bean and roasted chicken broth with grilled chicken, fresh cheese, crispy chilli and avocado.
The main event was a beef tenderloin (South African beef, notably) paired with a green pipián mole, black bean and herb salad.
Dessert brought a Mexican corn cake soaked in cajeta (a goat’s-milk caramel), with the chef noting an additional vegetarian option built around guava and Jamaica flower, lightened with a thin, sugared pancake ice.
Preciado, working alongside Zioux’s own kitchen team, was candid about what he sees as the throughline of Mexican fine dining: no preservatives, full stop.
“We don’t use any preservatives, and everything changed,” the host recalled the chef telling him on arrival. A philosophy the host argued “filters down through the whole of Mexico”, preservative-free eating as culinary culture.
More than a dinner
There was real emotional weight behind the evening for Zioux’s team. Higgs spoke candidly about how an earlier attempt to bring a Mexican tapas concept to the restaurant had been scrapped in favour of an Asian menu. This was a decision he described, without much exaggeration, as heartbreaking.
Having tasted the different iterations of Zioux’s menu throughout the years, I wondered if Roots of Flavour was a course correction, an unfinished conversation with a cuisine that Higgs admits he holds very near and dear.
For Air France-KLM’s part, the airline framed its involvement as an extension of its actual business: connecting people and, by extension, cultures. A representative for the airline thanked the Mexican Embassy and its collaboration with XL Nexus, noting: “It takes a village to make these things happen.”
Roots of Flavour’s opening instalment suggests the series has set itself a genuinely exploratory brief. Panama and Peru have a fairly high bar to clear next.
