Farm to Table, by Way of Mexico

There is a chef in St. Louis named Gerard Craft.

If you’ve eaten in this city with any degree of seriousness over the last twenty years, chances are you’ve eaten his food—or eaten food influenced by him.

I have.

I’ve been eating at Craft’s restaurants since Niche, the little Benton Park restaurant he opened in 2005 when he was only 25. I followed his cooking through its many incarnations—Taste, Brasserie, Pastaria, Porano, Sardella, Cinder House, Bowood and beyond. I watched restaurants open, close, transform and sometimes disappear altogether.

And in the process, I watched a young chef become one of the people who fundamentally changed the way St. Louis thought about food.

Through all of it, there is one thing I have always loved about Gerard Craft’s cooking:

He lets food taste like food.

That sounds ridiculously simple.

It isn’t.

There can be tremendous technique behind one of his plates—fermentation, preservation, handmade pasta, live fire, impeccable sourcing and a dozen decisions made before an ingredient ever reaches the diner.

But the technique isn’t the point.

The ingredient is.

A tomato gets to taste like a tomato. A vegetable doesn’t require twelve components and a pair of tweezers to justify its existence on a plate. Craft can do extraordinarily complicated things with food. What I’ve always admired is that he doesn’t seem compelled to prove it with every bite.

The chef does the work.

Then he gets out of the food’s way.

Craft won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest in 2015 for Niche, becoming the first Missouri chef to receive the honor. And then, remarkably, he closed the restaurant that had made his name.

Not because Niche had failed.

Because it hadn’t.

After nearly eleven years, Craft closed Niche while it was still successful and critically acclaimed. There is something I have always respected about that decision. Sometimes evolution means having enough confidence to stop doing something extraordinarily well and ask yourself what comes next.

Then came COVID.

Restaurants changed. Chefs changed.

We changed.

Craft’s restaurants were hit along with the rest of an industry suddenly facing circumstances none of us had ever experienced. Restaurants closed temporarily, concepts changed, and the definition of what it meant to feed people had to be reconsidered almost overnight.

And still, as St. Louis dining emerged into something different, I kept eating at Craft’s restaurants.

Because underneath all those incarnations, I kept finding the same philosophy that had drawn me to his cooking in the first place:

Start with something good. Respect it. Understand exactly what you’re doing to it.

And don’t screw with it just to prove that you can.

Which brings me to El Molino del Sureste.

Oh. My. God.

Chef Alex Henry Montes De Oca was born in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and spent part of his childhood there. His path as a chef eventually brought him through Gerard Craft’s kitchens before he developed a culinary language entirely his own. In 2026, Henry was named a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: Midwest.

I knew about the acclaim when we went to dinner.

What I hadn’t put together was the Gerard Craft connection.

But something about the food felt familiar almost immediately.

Not the flavors.

Not the cuisine.

Not the plating.

The philosophy.

We sat at the bar at El Molino, which looks directly into the kitchen. For a chef like me, there may be no better seat in a restaurant.

Watching another chef work at their craft is like being handed a backstage pass at a concert. You get to see the rhythm, the timing, the concentration, the economy of movement. You watch the hundred tiny decisions that disappear by the time the finished plate reaches the dining room.

And then I saw what Alex Henry was working with.

A 36-inch flat-top griddle and a two-burner induction cooktop.

That’s essentially the stage.

I sat just a few feet away and watched extraordinary food come out of a workspace simpler than some home kitchens.

No enormous exhibition kitchen. No culinary theater. No flames shooting toward the ceiling for Instagram.

Just a chef, heat, ingredients and an extraordinary amount of intention.

Alex himself was kind, appreciative and almost shy when I complimented his food. There was no swagger coming from behind that bar. No sense that we were supposed to be impressed by how difficult any of it was.

The confidence was on the plate.

And nowhere was that clearer to me than in the Pescado al Papadzul.

The pescado of the day was red snapper, served with pipián de papadzul, a rich, earthy sauce made from ground pumpkin seeds; salsa frita, a deeply flavored cooked tomato and chile sauce; pescarrones, crispy fish similar in spirit to chicharrón; briny trout roe; and fresh herbs. My husband paired it with a Spanish Albariño, whose bright acidity, citrus and minerality cut beautifully through the richness of the fish and pumpkin-seed sauce.

What fascinated me was the thought given not simply to flavor, but to texture.

The trout roe provided those tiny bursts of briny salinity. The pescarrones did something completely different: they brought a crisp, savory bite against the tender snapper and silky sauces.

It would have been easy for all those flavors to simply blend into one another. Instead, Henry gave your palate something to move through: tender fish, creamy pipián, bursting roe, crisp pescarrones, fresh herbs.

Every component had a job.

That is the kind of detail that tells me how a chef thinks.

The crunch wasn’t there because the plate needed another garnish. The roe wasn’t there because roe looks impressive on a menu. One provided texture. The other provided salinity. The sauces brought richness, earthiness, acidity and depth. The herbs brought freshness.

Every element contributed something specific to the bite.

And that is a very different thing from making food fussy.

In fact, I think it’s the opposite.

Fussy food asks you to notice the chef. Intentional food asks you to notice the food.

El Molino itself begins with perhaps the most elemental ingredient imaginable:

Corn.

The restaurant’s namesake is an actual molino—a mill. Locally grown corn is nixtamalized and ground in-house into fresh masa for tortillas, tostadas, tamales, sopes and other preparations grounded in centuries of Mexican culinary tradition.

Think about that.

Missouri-grown corn. Ancient Mexican technique.

Farm to table, by way of Mexico.

And that, to me, is what makes Henry’s cooking so interesting.

This isn’t Mexican food transported wholesale to Missouri, nor is it Missouri food dressed up as Mexican.

It is a chef understanding both where he comes from and where he is.

There were beautiful sauces. Acid. Chiles. Herbs. Smoke. Fresh masa. Seafood. Vegetables that were still allowed to taste like vegetables.

There was plenty happening on those plates.

It simply never felt fussy.

Restraint should never be confused with simplicity. In fact, restraint may require considerably more confidence.

You have to understand technique thoroughly enough that you no longer need to demonstrate it. You have to trust an ingredient enough to let it remain recognizable. And you have to know exactly when you’ve done enough.

A locally grown ear of corn doesn’t have to become unrecognizable to become extraordinary.

A beautiful piece of snapper doesn’t need to disappear beneath the chef’s ego.

Sometimes the most sophisticated thing a chef can do is know when to leave the damn thing alone.

And then I learned that Alex Henry had worked under Gerard Craft.

I laughed.

Of course he did.

Because I hadn’t recognized Gerard Craft’s food in Alex Henry’s cooking.

I had recognized something far more interesting.

I recognized the lesson.

Do the work.

Know your ingredients.

Master your technique.

Respect where the food came from.

Think about what every element contributes to the bite.

And then have enough confidence to get the hell out of its way.

That may be one of the most beautiful things about mentorship in a kitchen.

A great chef doesn’t teach the next generation to reproduce his food.

He teaches them how to see food.

Eventually, the student decides what he wants to say with it.

Alex Henry clearly has.

Make no mistake: this food is his. It comes from his family, his memories, the Yucatán, the ingredients available to him in Missouri and the culinary voice he has developed for himself.

But sitting at that bar, watching him create it all on thirty-six inches of griddle and two burners, I could see the lineage.

Not imitation.

Inheritance.

Gerard Craft found his language in Missouri.

Alex Henry is speaking Yucatán with a Missouri accent.

And perhaps the highest compliment I can give him is this:

With all the thought, technique and painstaking detail that went into that dinner, I never once felt as though Alex Henry was trying to show me how talented he is.

He was too busy showing me what the food could do.

And holy shit.

It did.