The new restaurant from Daniela Soto-Innes, the wunderkind Mexican chef who has cooked in some of the world’s most influential Mexican kitchens, has been more than two years in the making – namely, in the landscaping. Before Rubra opened last month in a lush and stylish corner of the W Punta de Mita hotel on Mexico’s Pacific coast, Soto-Innes had to build its garden.
Down a sloping expanse by the main hotel lobby, farmhands turned over the soil a half dozen times and tested a thousand types of seeds in the hot jungle climate. Chilis were planted and replanted in an heirloom style and greenhouses were enforced to withstand strong rains.
What has sprouted since is like an epicurean Eden, crowded with fruit trees and greens from the global tropics in tiered, winding rows, together composing a menu that offers a refined, smart-sunny identity of the region.
“We wanted to have a lot of chaya, hoja santa – all the Mexican medicinal herbs that you could think of,” Soto-Innes said. “We have papaya, mango, cacao, acacia, a lot of different tropical ingredients, guava, fresh hibiscus, jackfruit – lots of different, fun ingredients that I wasn't able to have access to in New York or anywhere else.”
Rubra, Soto-Innes’s return to the kitchen since she left the Manhattan mainstay Cosme in 2020, is a departure from the sleek restaurants that made her one of the most talked about chefs of the past decade. When we speak last month, a few hours before opening night, she has come straight from the garden – “redoing some of the trees” – where guests are welcomed before dinner at a chic thatched-roof bar.
Eating out in this part of Mexico, an hour north of Puerto Vallarta on one of the country’s most coveted coastlines, can be hokey – think mass appeal mango ceviche – or fussy, in the form of glass-paneled resort dining rooms. Rubra is singular: an all day, indoor-outdoor space carved out of soft pink stone that feels elegant and casual all at once.
In the daytime, a cafe and wine bar menu headlined by a stunning seafood tower is served as light pours in in patterns through a slatted-wood ceiling. At night, the nearly all-female team magics up an a la carte menu and a nine or ten course tasting that’s neon-threaded: a flakey starfruit tostada topped with burst sweet tomatoes; Sinaloa scallop in a bath of lemon verbena aguachile.
“With this space that is not big, we wanted to create something like a womb, a cocoon, a cave, but also like a really fun ambience.” Soto-Innes said. “It’s a feeling of belonging somewhere.”
Soto-Innes first worked in professional kitchens as a teenager in Texas after a family move from her native Mexico. An admiring letter she sent to Mexican chef Enrique Olvera out of the blue led to a role in his kitchen at Pujol, the Mexico City fine dining pioneer awarded Two MICHELIN Stars last year.
At 23, Olvera sent her to open Cosme in New York as executive chef, where she developed a trendsetting menu of Mexican staples made with New York farmers market ingredients. An extraordinary level of recognition followed.
In 2016, the James Beard Foundation named her the Rising Star Chef of the Year and in 2019, at 28 years old, she became the youngest woman to be named World’s Best Female Chef by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
For Rubra, Soto-Innes said, she tossed most of her past winning playbook, focusing instead on her surroundings with her team of close-knit collaborators.
“For someone to create a new generation of cooks and a new idea of cooking, you have to absolutely think progressively. Use the moments and the energy that you cultivated before, but it's really important to innovate and start a new style of cooking,” she said.
“What I like is to bring technique but not recipes to every single project,” she added.
A mid-tasting course of briny banana flower is an emblematic treat. The meaty inner leaves of a Thai banana blossom are steeped in a salt solution for a month then cooked with galangal from the garden and laced with a peppery mojo de ajo.
“The weather of Nayarit (the Mexican state where Rubra is located) is the same weather as Thailand, so I started doing a little investigation of Thai food,” Soto-Innes said.
In Thailand, the flower is typically fried. Soto-Innes took a more familiar approach, treating it like hearts of palm, a Mexican favorite often snacked on straight from the can.
“(Thai banana blossom) tastes just like a heart of palm or an artichoke. I was like, ‘How do I love artichoke?’ And it's with a little bit of herbs and olive oil,” she said. “It's something para picar.”
The dish is served along with a sourdough made from wheat that Soto-Innes first drove back across the border from a small grower in Arizona – land that "used to be Mexico” – as well as a jurassic-sized hoja santa leaf painted on one side with masa and toasted to a crisp.
Later, a bluefin tuna course is a showstopper. A generous plank of the fish is cooked in the steam of a pound of chamomile flowers bunched on the grill. It’s plated in the shape of a sunrise, with five different sauces radiating out in Crayola beams.
“When I smelled the chamomile with the tuna I just said, ‘guava,’ like, it has to go with guava. And then everyone was saying different things. ‘Oh, what about tamarind? What about wasabi?’” she said.
“(We decided that) everyone wins. We’ll have the guests pick what their favorite is. And that's the fun thing – being playful with such an important ingredient, such an important animal of the sea,” she continued.
It’s an approach to fine dining that Soto-Innes likens to taking guests back to their childhood.
“When you’re a kid, you just have fun,” she said. “You’re in a place where everything for you is new. And we really wanted to create the experience of: ‘Hey, everything, literally, that we made is custom-made for everyone to be surprised.”
All images courtesy of ©Rubra
