• Rick Bayless/Facebook
  • Rick Bayless in the rooftop garden above Topolobampo and Frontera Grill on Clark Street.

Three decades ago fine dining in Chicago happened at places with names like Maxim’s, Le Perroquet, and Chez Paul. Then the 1980s saw three restaurants open and refine other national cuisines besides French—Spiaggia for Italian food in 1984, Charlie Trotter’s for American cuisine in 1987, and, most surprisingly, Rick Bayless’s Topolobampo for Mexican, a cuisine then inextricably associated with cheap eats and big strong drinks, in 1989.

Rick Bayless: Yeah, it is, it’s the 25th anniversary year. We’re doing a whole bunch of anniversary menus, and every other one will have a historical perspective. The next big change after [the arrival of the Spanish] is when Mexico becomes independent. So it’s the beginning of what people would call, not New Spain, which is what they called it before, but Mexico. It’s the emergence of Mexico.

Let’s talk about the pre-Columbian menu. The challenge, as your chefs told me when I was photographing the menu, is working around all those things that the Spanish hadn’t brought yet. How did you do that and how did you come up with the menu?

  • Michael Gebert
  • Stirring mole in the kitchen at Topolobampo.

And Mexico was incredibly enriched during that period with all the spices that we associate with moles and things like that. So that wave came through, and the French wave came through, a second French wave came through at the end of the 1800s with the Porfirio Diaz era, then a staunch “We are Mexican,” throw-off-all-that-stuff era came in the early 1900s.

It came to me because I teach so much. And people were asking me [to] talk about the different types of food. And I started developing this list and I said, there’s this group of dishes that seem to have a relationship, and this group. But as I began to do that in my class I thought, well, I could put a name on those groups. But it’s not exactly a class of dishes that you could say, “Oh, these are the ceviches.” Because it was a group that was a little bit wider than that.

Then we brought to that the idea that, why don’t we make all the dishes the same size? So it’s not like you’re going from small to large. That kind of came to me when I was visiting my daughter last summer in France and all the restaurants that we went to, every course was the same size. Just because your first course is first, doesn’t mean it’s smaller. So we thought, why don’t we just do that? It makes it easier for our guests.