100 APRIL 2020
CHEF CLAUDETTE ZEPEDA passes a bill to the vendor at her driver-
side window and fishes out a churro, releasing a tiny, ambrosial
mushroom cloud of powdered canela. “Border churros are the
best,” she says. “Something about the texture.”
We’re in Tijuana, Mexico, a few hundred yards from the San
Ysidro Land Port of Entry, one of the busiest border crossings in
the world. For hundreds of thousands of the 4.9 million people
who live in the San Diego–Tijuana region in both countries,
traversing the U.S.-Mexico border—for work, to visit family, to
run an errand—is part of the daily rhythm of life. But it is July
2019, and the atmosphere is tense with the knowledge that, after
being apprehended, at least six children died in custody of U.S.
Customs and Border Protection over the previous 10 months.
Ratcheting nerves even higher, just a day earlier, an 18-year-old
American citizen had been released from a U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement detention center in Texas after 23
days of wrongful detention. He’d lost 26 pounds and hadn’t
bathed in over three weeks.
The fear in the air is as tangible a presence as the street ven-
dors weaving through the long lanes of traffic. But for Zepeda,
the crossing is also deeply familiar, a quotidian reality of life for
as long as she can remember. “In high school, we’d ditch class
and come to TJ. It was a speed bump, not a border,” says the chef.
Zepeda was born in San Diego—her mother crossed the bor-
der from Mexico two weeks before she was due to ensure her
daughter would have American citizenship. Days after her birth,
the two traveled back to Tijuana, where Zepeda spent her child-
hood, learning English from Sesame Street and reruns of Julia
Child’s The French Chef. The family moved to San Diego in the
1990s, and Zepeda still lives there today, but her relationship
with the two cities remains fluid. She makes weekly trips to
Tijuana to shop—for Mexican cheeses that are impossible to
find in the U.S., squeeze bottles of tart hibiscus chamoy syrup
to whisk into vinaigrettes, and crates of callo de hacha, the
sweet, firm half-moon scallops native to the Sea of Cortez that
plump so much in aguachile they seem as though they might
pop, spilling heady rivulets of tomatillo and lime.
I’m joining her for one of these trips, barreling south onInterstate 5 until we alight at Mercado Hidalgo, the beating
heart, says Zepeda, of Tijuana. Before we can shop, we have
to visit Tacos Fitos, a legendary birria stand at the edge of the
market where we watch a taquero dunk tortillas in crimson,
chile-spiked fat, sizzle them on a griddle, and fold them around
shredded meat. We eat the birria tacos between sips of broth
while Zepeda dips in and out of her own personal epic, the fits
and starts of her journey to the kitchen. She came up working
in San Diego, notably for Javier Plascencia at Bracero and Gavin
Kaysen at El Bizcocho. She competed on Top Chef Mexico,
which she describes as one of the most meaningful experi-
ences of her life; she has the opposite feeling about her turn on
season 15 of the U.S. version. “I was just the angry Mexican,”
she says of the latter, but the exposure helped her open her
own restaurant, El Jardín, in San Diego’s Liberty Station. (She
left the project in the summer of 2019. Her next restaurant,
not yet officially announced as of press time, is expected to
open in winter 2020.)
In the telling, Zepeda often lands as an earth mother,
attempting to heal generational trauma in her lifetime: “As
women, we carry the burden, the pain and suffering of our
ancestors, in our wombs,” she says, speaking to her experi-
ence as a single mother of two children before the age of 21, or
remembering her grandmother, who knew, she says, exactly
two English phrases: “good” and “I love you, too.” But a beat
later, she’ll shift gears: “There are certain bridges I have no
problem torching to the godd--- ground,” she says, recalling a
particularly toxic coworker or a time that she was passed over,
unseen, or belittled. One starts to understand that Zepeda’s gift
lies in inhabiting both roles—mother and militant, empath and
hard-ass, protector and avenger. It’s part of her charm.
At Mercado Hidalgo, we snake our way through the 80 or
so stalls, pausing to pinch fresh tamarind pods, to buy pink
pine nuts and Ramonetti cheese
and tiny chiltepín chiles like
edible bang snaps, and to watch
vendors wage and lose their infi-
nite battle against bees that swarmTHEY ARE TALL AND CROOKED THINGS,
HOT TO THE TOUCH, PACKED INTO A
BROWN PAPER BAG DARKENED WITH OIL,
SPARKLING AS THEIR CRYSTALS OF SUGAR
CATC H AND REFRACT THE LATE-DAY LIGHT.
Zepeda’s Cinnamon-Sugar
Churros with Cajeta
pay tribute to the flavors
of Tijuana (recipe p. 120). FOOD^
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0420_FT_Claudette_Zepeda.indd 100 FINAL CONTENT 2/18/20 10:46 AM