Rosio Sanchez gets a lot of questions as she cranks out tortillas by hand here in the heart of the Torvehallerne market. Danes, it seems, aren’t exactly up to speed on the whole concept of tacos.
“They’ll ask, ‘What kind of pancake is that?'” Sanchez, 30, said as a late-morning drizzle fell, and she readied salsas for another day of business at her Hija de Sanchez stand. “I’m not kidding you. At least three times a week.”
She and her comrades patiently explain everything: that lengua signifies tongue, that habanero is a spicy chili, that jamaica is a sweet hibiscus drink rather than a Caribbean island, that it’s customary to eat a taco with your hands. “A lot of people will ask for cutlery,” she said with a wince. “It’s painful.”
A visitor may be forgiven for asking a more personal question, too: Why is it that Sanchez, who spent six years as the pastry chef at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant credited with changing the course of global gastronomy, can now be found slinging Mexican street food for eight hours a day in a space approximately the size of a minivan?
Like Brooks Headley, the New York City pastry chef who traded in his plum job at Del Posto for a golden opportunity to sell veggie burgers in the East Village, Sanchez is energized by a sense of mission.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I miss Noma sometimes, for sure. But how long can you do that for?”
If Scandinavians are not yet familiar with the subtleties and delights of authentic Mexican fare, well, that’s precisely what drives her. “Smell this,” she said, holding up a freshly pressed tortilla to a customer’s nose. “That’s fresh masa. That makes me happy. I’m very proud that I’m doing this.”
And instead of safely easing Denmark toward taco consciousness with ground beef and melted cheddar, Sanchez, who grew up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago, offers the unaltered flavors and textures of her heritage. She imports corn and chilies from Oaxaca. Her salsas can sting. Sometimes she’ll amp up the crunch with a few fried grasshoppers.
“It’s crazy that they are importing the corn and chilies from Mexico — crazy in the sense that it’s expensive to do that in order to reproduce such a humble food,” said Fabian von Hauske, a Mexican-born chef who works at Contra and Wildair on the Lower East Side.
He recently traveled to Copenhagen to make tacos alongside Sanchez for a day. “It’s honestly one of the best tortillas I’ve had in a long, long time,” he said. “And her quesadillas brought me back to a Sunday morning when my mom used to cook breakfast for us.”
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