TULUM, MEXICO — This is not an article about Mexican food.
It is about food made in Mexico, using the stupendous ingredients found in Mexican waters, forests and fields.
But Hartwood, a restaurant opened here by New York expatriates in 2010, is an experiment in inventing food that is avant-garde and ancient, global and local — and, fortunately, delicious.
“I didn’t even consider cooking Mexican food,” said Eric Werner, the restaurant’s chef, co-owner, forager, general contractor, waste management expert and agricultural apprentice. “I would never try to do what the cooks do here. They have local food in their bones.”
Instead, Mr. Werner is guided by his own obsessions: the unmatchable flavor of food cooked over a wood fire; the fruits, vegetables, herbs, flowers and spices of the Caribbean; and the need to protect this still-wild part of the world, its farmers and fishermen and its culinary traditions. Mr. Werner and his wife, Mya Henry, both 35, moved here from Brooklyn in 2009, having vowed to open a restaurant away from the city. He would cook; she would be the manager; together they could start a family.
But this new life has its own complications.
Tulum is the endpoint of the Riviera Maya, an international beach destination just south of Cancún that is being leveled and developed into hotels, resorts and golf courses at breathtaking speed. But Tulum itself is perched on crumbly limestone, at the tip of a vast underground lagoon that opens into a coral reef and coastline so rich in biodiversity (monkeys, orchids, manatees and more) that it is protected by Unesco. Construction here is tightly regulated, and standard restaurant amenities — including, say, a power grid and flush toilets — are unavailable or restricted.
At Hartwood there are no stoves, no convection ovens, no deep fryers: only wood fire to cook with. The kitchen is open to the elements, an expanse of poured concrete with work tables, picnic coolers full of ice and whole fish, and baskets of fruit. All the kitchen prep is done with knives and a single appliance (a blender, powered by the restaurant’s small generator), mostly by Jamie Klotz, the sous-chef, and a team of locals who did not come with knife skills learned at culinary school.
And yet there are 14 different fresh juices at the bar, unforgettable slow-braised short ribs and a lime tart so soft and smooth you want to sleep on it, dusted with fragrant dried flowers of the chamomile plants that grow on the roadsides. Jicama for salad is cut in smooth white squares, dotted with sweet purple cactus preserves and set on a pale-green mint cream. Plantains are roasted whole in their skins until smoky and succulent, then dusted with fresh-grated canela, soft Mexican cinnamon.
The welcome is gracious, the drinks are strong and the “room” elegant in its way. At night, with kerosene lamps burning and fires roaring, the entire restaurant feels timeless.
Mr. Werner’s cooking tools are primitive, but his cooking style is decidedly modern, in tune with the hive mind of today’s culinary elite. These chefs are rewriting the menu of fine dining (foie gras is out, sea vegetables and heirloom rice are in), aiming for food that is natural, minimal and egalitarian. They are dabbling in agriculture, animal husbandry and oceanography, and reviving culinary skills like pickling, salt-curing and smoking. In this movement, sometimes called “New Nordic” even in the tropics, geographic labels like Mexican are losing their weight, and food that is regionally “authentic” is no longer the quest. All this is why the world has begun to beat a path to Hartwood’s (rusty) gate.
It is also why Mr. Werner appears to be the most stressed-out person in Tulum, where the biggest problem generally seems to be finding a vegan smoothie or getting to yoga class on time.
It’s not hard for a chef to buy ingredients here. Refrigerated trucks from Sam’s Club ply the restaurants and hotels on Tulum’s ever-expanding strip.
But Mr. Werner has no interest in Granny Smith apples and chicken breasts, so he spends hours on the road each week, buying produce at places like Oxkutzcab and Tizimín in the monte, the highlands.
The soil along the coast is poor, so agriculture here, from ancient to modern times, happens in the thick forests of the interior. He quizzes farmers, vendors and grandmothers (in a combination of Spanish, Maya and kitchen pantomime) about local flora like red avocados, purple zapotes and ciruelas, native plums. He bumps up rocky tracks to reach farms where the system of agriculture used by the Maya people 6,000 years ago is still practiced, and operates both a 900-degree wood oven and a 600-degree grill, cooking for 120 people a night (with even more turned away at the gate).
Oh, and the mangrove trees in the swamp behind the kitchen are sending branches over the wall that he is legally forbidden to cut, the construction of the pibil (a traditional Yucatecan pit oven) is way behind schedule, and he recently had to detour around a thick snake that happened to be crossing the road while he was driving to work with his daughter.
His spirits are undimmed.
“How could you not want to preserve this?” Mr. Werner asked, striding up an unmarked path through the rain forest to the milpa, or farm, belonging to his employee and friend Antonio May Balan. An hour’s drive and a half-hour walk through what looks like unmitigated green jungle suddenly opens out into a clearing that appears to have been hit by a bomb. “It looks like a really bad farm, doesn’t it?” Mr. Werner said affectionately, looking out at dry red earth, unevenly covered with vines trailing from pumpkins, desiccated corn stalks, forbiddingly spiky plants and smoldering piles of ash.
In fact, it is a productive (and incidentally organic) farm, little changed from the self-sustaining system developed here by the Maya in about 4,000 B.C. Corn is the staple, but beans and squash are also necessary to complete the nutrition and nitrogen cycle. All three, planted together, feed the farmers and replenish the soil, in an unending cycle of nourishment.
It is a system that was widely practiced here until the 18th century, when Spaniards in the Yucatán enslaved the Maya people on their own ranches, speeding the decline of Maya culture and agriculture. Starting in the 1930s, government policy finally returned the land to the people, via farming collectives called ejidos, so Mr. Balan and his children have the right to farm here, though they don’t own the land.
Almost anything can grow in this part of the world: potatoes, chiles, avocados, peanuts, turkeys, pineapples, papaya and guava were all first domesticated here, and mangoes, coconuts, bananas and pork have all flourished as imports.
According to David Sterling, an American chef who has lived in Mérida, the Yucatecan capital, for more than a decade and has just published an exhaustive guide to the peninsula’s botany and cookery, “Yucatán: Recipes From a Culinary Expedition,” the ancestors of our tomatoes still grow wild here. Their descendants, cultivated as tomates indios, are wonderfully intense in sugar and acid. They are served at Hartwood in an eye-opening salad, with sweet sunflower petals.
At Mr. Balan’s milpa, much is growing that cannot be seen or tasted. The head-high green spikes are cradles for bright-red baby pineapples, and the bald trees will bear tangerines. His flint corn has already been harvested and then dried on the cob; Mr. Werner uses it to make dough for empanadas, the one recognizably Mexican dish on Hartwood’s menu. (Do not ask for chips and salsa.)
“In a way he is doing Yucatecan cuisine, because of the local ingredients he finds,” said Roberto Solis, the born-and-raised-here chef at Nectar in Mérida, where the cuisine is modern and the dining room relatively formal. “But he cooks those ingredients as an American. Doing everything over wood gives a very distinctive taste, and also with the setting, he has a special combination that not everybody can get.”
For Mr. Werner, raised in rural upstate New York, it has been liberating to uproot his work from his terroir. The experiment of Hartwood has proved that a chef can carry ideas, skills and tastes anywhere. And the feather-light footprint of Hartwood — not much more than a wooden roof, some dried corncobs and an oven fashioned from earth and stone — means that the restaurant itself is rootless, too.
“Really, this place could be anywhere,” he said on a recent warm and moonlit night, contemplating the unexplored realms of the Caribbean and beyond. “But I’m glad it’s here.”
Recipes: Spiced Skirt Steak With Whole Roasted Plantains | Jicama Salad With Lime Vinaigrette and Mint Cream | Lime Squares With Raw Sugar Shortbread