Within days of Barack Obama being elected president of the United States in November 2008, a rumour started circulating around his home town of Chicago. The president would surely need a new chef for the White House, and who better for the job than the man who ran his favourite Chicago restaurant, Rick Bayless, chef of Frontera Grill. There was only one problem, as Bayless acknowledged just days later in an effort to quash the rumour. He cooks food from one country, and it most certainly isn't France. "We cook this really wonderful Mexican food," he told one journalist. "I don't think that's what they want at every state dinner."
Indeed. In the end the Obamas decided to stick with the incumbent White House chef, Cristeta Comerford, who had been appointed by George Bush (though they did employ their one-time personal chef, a Chicagoan called Sam Kass to look after them in Washington). Still, the fact that Bayless was considered a reasonable candidate for a post at the heart of the establishment spoke volumes for what he had done for the reputation of Mexican cooking, long regarded as the poor relation to the French, Italian or even Japanese traditions in America's high-end kitchens.
His position was secured in August last year when he won Top Chef Masters, a US TV reality cookery show, in which 24 chefs competed over 10 weeks both for charity and bragging rights. I was one of the three judges who chose him in the final over big names from French and Italian restaurants. After his barbecued quail and his suckling pig, and most importantly, his Oaxacan black mole – pronounced mole-ay – a dish of staggering depth and subtlety that contains 27 ingredients and had taken him 20 years to perfect, there really was no doubt as to who had come out on top. Not bad for a white boy who grew up in Oklahoma City, in the heart of the Corn Belt.
Obama's favourite chef opened his first restaurant, the Frontera Grill, on North Clark Street in Chicago in 1987. Today it is part of a mini-empire. Sharing its front door is its upmarket sibling, Topolobampo, and right next door there is Xoco – pronounced Shoco – a casual joint specialising in cheaper grilled sandwiches and soups and in, the mornings, shamelessly moreish churros, deep-fried pastries dredged in sugar and cinnamon. Bayless, aged 56, has had myriad shows on TV, has written books and fronts a line of branded products in supermarkets, but the heart of it is still the Frontera, a bustling urban brasserie painted in bright shades of yellow and ochre, the walls hung with bursts of Mexican art. On a midweek night it is packed to the gunwales. It has always done well, his staff say, but since he won the show it's been off the scale.
Still, they have found space for me, and soon Bayless himself is standing tableside: slender, wiry, but boyish for all his grey-bristled goatee and steel-rimmed glasses, presenting his own dishes. For all his intensity, he has a warm, informal midwestern homeliness. He likes to describe things as "superdelicious" or "supertasty". He's not wrong. We are served a trio of ceviche, the finely diced raw fish – tuna, a little Hawaiian sunfish, shrimp with coriander – "cooked" in citrus juice and seasoned with punches of fresh chilli. We have green-chilli marinated shrimp, and long-braised then roasted goat in a dense sauce flavoured with peanuts and the smoky, earthy tones of roasted chillies.
Best of all there are chicken enchiladas, in the inky blackness that is that mole, a dense, deep thick sauce with dark caramel tones and chilli heat but most of all a robust ripe savouriness. Later Bayless will tell me that, in Mexican food, the challenge is to create new flavours, "not to produce dishes that taste of their ingredients. If you do it right you should just say it tastes of mole". And it does. It seriously tastes of mole. This Mexican food is so layered and complex, so finessed, it kicks 10 tons of crap out of the ersatz version most of us in Britain have experienced. It does the same to most of the gluey, plastic, molten-cheese-smeared, iceberg-lettuce-bedded monstrosities that pass for Tex Mex in the US as well. It feels like a culinary artefact.
Which, in a way, is exactly what it is: the product of a restless man who is less diehard chef than cultural academic. We get to talk the next day, in his development kitchen upstairs from the restaurants. That morning he had given a cooking demonstration at a local farmers' market, of which he is a trustee. He is a serious campaigner for sustainable farming, and set up a charity that gives grants to small-scale midwest farmers who need investment. "I'm an accidental activist," says Bayless. "I just want to serve good food, and sustainability means taking care of the garden."
The way he tells it, almost everything about him is accidental. It happens that he was brought up in the catering business. His parents ran a well-known barbecue restaurant in Oklahoma City but, while he credits that with putting him in touch with flavours – sweet, salty, sour – that would stand him in good stead when he came to learn about Mexico, he didn't for a moment imagine going into the business. "I loved the restaurant," he says. "I cooked there all the time. But my food back then was more of the French classics taught to America by Julia Child."
He took his love of cooking to college, where he formed dining clubs with friends. He studied Spanish language and literature before embarking on a PhD in anthropological linguistics. Underpinning everything was a love affair with Mexico that began on a family holiday when he was 14. "From the moment I stepped foot there I felt like I was home. It was the vitality, the street life." In 1980 he decided to take time off from his doctorate. He never completed it.
For six years he lived part time in Los Angeles and part time in Mexico with his wife Deanne, working on his first book, Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking From the Heart of Mexico, written before he had opened a restaurant. "I would go into Mexico and detail everything that was available," he says of these years of research. "I would go into restaurants and list everything they were cooking, how they were cooking it. Because I was light-skinned, marketholders would view me with suspicion if I took notes." They would assume he was some kind of policeman. "So I had to memorise exactly what these ingredients were that they were selling. What they were used for."
With the book completed he was drawn back to Chicago. "I thought I was going to become a food writer but at the same time I knew I needed to do something else. Suddenly I was not driven to write about the food. I had to cook it." With the help of wealthy friends from Los Angeles he opened the Frontera Grill. I suggest to him that the restaurant was essentially his interest in anthropology expressed by another means. "I think that's exactly right." The title of his long-running television show for PBS and the book that has accompanied it, Mexico –One Plate at a Time, speaks to that sense of a man working to understand a country directly through its food.
"What does the world know of Mexican food?" Bayless asks rhetorically. "In the Sixties there was a group of southern Californians who decided to make it very accessible to a white audience. So it became about melted cheese on everything, salsa that has no heat, iceberg lettuce on everything." Taco Bell and its ilk emerged from California's Orange County, he says. And that's what he's been fighting against.
Asked to define the true food of Mexico, he talks in terms of the formal meal: a brothy soup to begin, seasoned with squeezes of lime juice, a second dish of rice with vegetables. "The third course is the bold course, the place for moles in which meat has been long simmered. That is the heart of the cookery." He admits that the first time he saw a proper mole being cooked he was baffled. "Black mole requires controlled burning of the chillis, the seeds, the onions. The key is knowing when to stop. I found it astounding." He prints me out the recipe. It is four pages long. I tell him how the great Auguste Escoffier was once taken to task by a grand woman who had asked for the recipe for one of his dishes but had found at home that she was unable to achieve the desired result. "Madame," Escoffier replied, "I only gave you the recipe. I did not teach you how to cook."
Bayless laughs. It's exactly the same with mole. "It's the hardest thing in the world. I want to rewrite that recipe because I feel I finally understand it." What? After so many years? He nods. "Exactly." In the restaurant, only one person is allowed to prepare the black mole, and he's been with Bayless for almost two decades.
So can Mexican food finally hold its head up high? "It's different in Chicago because so many of the chefs who have worked here have gone on to open Mexican restaurants in this town," Bayless says. Elsewhere in the US he accepts that it is still not held in high regard. "Japanese has been legitimised but it's still mostly French and Italian that is taught in culinary schools." That was why Top Chef Masters mattered. After the cameras were turned off, French chef Hubert Keller put his arm around American Italian Michael Chiarello and said: "We were beaten by fucking mole." Bayless relishes the story.
Curiously, very little criticism greeted his win. After all the US is a country that lets its racial politics hang out. So it would be easy to imagine that a white man from Oklahoma could come in for serious abuse for apparently hijacking a culinary tradition. He has dealt with very little of that during his career, he says. "One blogger for the Chicago Tribune said the white guy was stealing Mexican food from its rightful people. Immediately a whole bunch of people piled into support me. I've never said I was inventing the stuff. I've just done my research, maybe more than anyone else."
As to the White House rumours, Bayless can see exactly how they started. "The first time Obama ate here shortly after becoming an Illinois senator we put him on a very visible table, because that's generally what politicians like. He didn't seem so comfortable so the next time we put him on a quieter table and from then on he insisted it would be his. He and Michelle really are a couple who just like to come here on a date night." They became regulars, so much so that during the campaign Michelle spent five hours there one lunchtime catching up with friends. It was therefore natural, Bayless says, that the question of the White House would arise. "But it was never going to happen. For a start I would have been forced to divest myself of all my business interests in a week and a half." That would have meant getting rid of the restaurants and for the king of America's Mexican chefs that really was unthinkable. He has too many people left to feed, he has too many dishes to explore. He has too many people left to educate.
Jay Rayner stayed at the Affinia Chicago, a Cityscape hotel, 166 East Superior Street, Chicago; 001 312 787 6000
Click here for Rick Bayless' mole recipe
