Café des Artistes : Best established restaurant in Mexico

The 2023 Food and Travel Reader Awards were presented at an event held at Antara Polanco's Total Play Forum in Mexico City, in a New Orleans-style Mardi Gras atmosphere. Among the 28 categories awarded, Thierry Blouet's Café des Artistes took first place in the Best Consolidated Restaurant in Mexico category, "which is perfect for us, because after thirty-three years in the market, I think we're super consolidated," said Thierry in an interview with Spotlight Montréal.

This charismatic, multicultural and talented chef has found Mexico the best ground in which to flourish as chef-owner of his restaurant, which is already an international benchmark. "I chose to become a Mexican citizen about ten years ago. I'm Puerto Rican by birth, French by my parents and Mexican by conviction", says Thierry, proud of his two cultures, French and Mexican.

 

I understand you've been nominated in previous editions?

Yes, in fact we've been nominated several times, but this is the first time we've won. There are a lot of restaurants in the country, and I think at first they were more concentrated on Mexico City and the big cities like Guadalajara and Monterrey, and now the rest are the provinces... and to be recognized in the provinces is hard work, not just in this field, but in all fields.

 

Do you think it's a question of distribution? 

Yes, it's a question of distribution. The state also has to do its own promotion, and this time Jalisco was named the best destination in Mexico, in competition with Los Cabos and Rivera Maya, among others.

 

Thierry, what have you been up to at Café des Artistes? 

Two years ago, we embarked on a major renovation project at Café des Artistes Puerto Vallarta. The entire restaurant has been built around the garden, with a brand-new indoor garden, as well as a new terrace, La Troje. Our customers always line up at the bar waiting for a table in the garden, because we don't reserve a table, we reserve the space, but the tables are occupied as people arrive. 

We also created an extraordinary kitchen, for which four houses were demolished, two occupied by the old kitchen and two others forming part of the old restaurant, as it had begun thirty-three years ago. We ended up with a kitchen twice the size, some 350 m2, all black and stainless steel... a dream kitchen!

Are you in the kitchen all the time?

I can't be there all the time, because I have other restaurants and other things to do. As president of the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs association, I'm constantly on the road for events. We're in ten cities with this global gastronomy association, which is the largest in the world with 25,000 members. Incidentally, our friend Jorge Careaga is the national treasurer. I was national president for eight consecutive years and have been part of the association for twenty-three years.

Another of my hobbies is the gastronomic festival, the biggest in Mexico, now in its 28th year. It runs from November 7 to 17. Thirty chefs from all over the world come here to Vallarta and cook in thirty different venues over nine days. This festival has become the oldest and most important in the country. It has become a tradition. It's a festival that was created to promote Vallarta as a whole and to create a fraternity between all the restaurants and hotels to promote the chefs. 

On top of that, I'm in charge of three other restaurants, the Café des Artistes, and soon a fourth, which we'll start building next month, in Bucerías. We already have a presence in Punta Mita, in Los Cabos, inside the JW Marriot, in Puerto Vallarta, where we were born thirty-three years ago, in December 1974, and in Bucerías, where we intend to open the new restaurant at the end of October this year.

 

Did you imagine all this 33 years ago?

I didn't imagine all this, but I did imagine, ever since I was a child, doing something fantastic in the place I'd most like to be in the world - which I hadn't imagined yet - and as I travelled a lot with my parents who changed jobs - my father was a hotelier, a hotel manager all his life - we lived in Venezuela, Spain, France, New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Australia; then back to France. Then we came here, to Puerto Vallarta, forty-five years ago. I loved Mexico and I said "I want to stay in Mexico", and I said "one day I want to be a businessman, I want to be a chef" and it started to happen, I was dreaming of fantastic things I wanted to become and that's how things aligned and happened. I never imagined that they would be so fantastic and that these new businesses would develop, but with desire, with passion, with the passion of your team, with the formation of teams in each restaurant, with you passing on your passion to them and them becoming passionate themselves, everything permeates and everything develops.

 

What qualities do you look for in people when choosing your teams?

I choose my team on the basis of their qualifications, so it's not necessary to have any particular training. It depends on the job, but for some positions you need to have a good background, such as having worked in companies with high standards. For example, in the kitchen, everyone was trained here, most of the cooks were dishwashers. My chefs all started at the bottom, just like me; Ramón, who works at Tuna Blanca, was my dishwasher when I worked at Camino Real, he was eighteen, I was twenty-two; the chef who works today at Los Cabos came to work here when he was twenty and trained with us. The chef who now works at Café des Artistes came here as a trainee at the UT school - the Bahía de Banderas technology school - to do an internship, then she finished school and came as a pastry assistant, she didn't know anything about cooking and here she learned everything and worked her way up to become the executive chef of this restaurant. 

So, the same chefs we have today, many of them started at the bottom and worked their way up, and many, many of those who passed through here are now chefs or have their own businesses; others are executive chefs in big hotels. We could talk for hours about more than thirty people who already have a good job and have passed through the Café des Artistes school, which is already making a name for itself in Mexico. They wear the T-shirt and when they leave, they remember Café des Artistes and recognize that it was their school that catapulted them to where they are today.

How many people make up your team?

In high season, ninety people work here. That's a lot, if you take into account that it's just one team, because we don't do lunch or dinner. In the off-season, there are around sixty-five of us.

 

Would you define your cuisine as "fusion"?

I don't like the word "fusion". Café des Artistes is Mexican cuisine, with French bases and techniques, using many local and Mexican ingredients and flavors. We have taco dishes and we make the tortillas ourselves, we have Mexican flavors, all the ingredients are mainly Mexican, as much as possible local. The working technique is French cuisine, but there are lots of Mexican flavors, because they're my two cultures, French and Mexican. The design of all this and of the place - I love all things design - is therefore a representation of my two cultures. 

 

I understand you have your own vegetable garden?

The garden is above the kitchen, in the kitchen garden, and is essentially a leaf and herb garden. We grow purslane, melon leaves, coriander leaves, different types of albaca, clover, aniseed and we also have edible flowers.

From there, for example, we have a quinoa salad with beet hummus, with herbs and leaves from the garden, a salad made one hundred percent from what's in the garden. 

An agricultural student comes several days a week to look after the project. To combat pests, they use only organic products, the main one having a very high concentration of garlic, which eliminates a large proportion of insects. No insecticides or fertilizers are used; the soil is modified as its properties are depleted. 

 

Who are the regulars at Café des Artistes? 

For the last two years, we've won the prize for best restaurant in Mexico at the LGBT Travel Awards, ahead of Pujol in Mexico City, which has been in the running for several years. It's the international community that votes, and Café des Artistes came out on top by far. Almost half my clientele is from the LGBT community. 

Eighty percent of the hundred percent of customers are foreigners in high season. Some weeks, like February, which is the busiest month of the year, ninety percent are foreigners. Of this ninety percent of foreigners, seventy-five percent are Americans and twenty-five percent are Canadians. Most of the Canadians who come to Vallarta are middle-income or better, and they come on a budget. This is not the case for Americans or high-income nationals, who spend a lot. However, over the past few years, I've noticed that Canadian customers have a higher economic profile and are already spending as much as Americans.

It's important for me to say that everything we do is for the customers: the guest is the most important person, as is the whole Café des Artistes team, I hold them all on the same level; the guest is not more important than the dishwasher, the waiter is not more important than the guest, the manager is not more important than the guest. Both are equally important in the balance. It takes a very high-level team with a very high level of commitment to be able to serve its colleagues as well as the customer. 

 

In terms of sustainable development and social responsibility, have you received any accolades?

Yes, we're very pleased with all the awards we've received. For example, we were very recently awarded the prize for the best restaurant for the LGBT+ community in Mexico. And a few weeks ago, we went to receive the award for the two hundred and fifty best restaurants in Mexico #Los250Mx that Culinaria Mexicana publishes. They have about eighty judges who go around the country and choose the best restaurants in the country. We've been in this guide for ten years and we work hard on everything to do with inclusion, sustainability and local consumption. 

We're very involved in all this and very committed to the environment and how we can make things better. For example, in the restaurant we no longer use plastic, only glass bottles. In Vallarta, all glass is thrown in the garbage can. The city council doesn't collect the glass and it goes to landfill. Some cities in the country have already set up separate collection systems for plastic and glass, but in Vallarta this is not yet the case. 

We already sort cardboard, paper, glass and organic waste, and we already pay a company to come and collect our glass and recycle it. But we have to pay for them to come and collect it, not even a "I'll give it to you in exchange". I give the cardboard to a company that doesn't charge me, but I give them tons of cardboard, we pack it in a warehouse and they come every month. We try to use as little plastic as possible; you don't even see plastic bottles on the tables anymore. The water in our house is filtered with super filters that we have, with a bottle in my name and a bottle of sparkling water that we inject ourselves, and I also have branded water that people look for, but all the branded water is in glass.

These are examples of what we do. The burnt oil from the fryers - which we don't use very much - instead of throwing it down the drain, we keep it in drums and a company collects it, and then the oil is also recycled. We look for anything that can be recycled. We're on the right track, we still have a long way to go... but we're on the right track.