26 September 2024
Black aguachile from Tacos del Cartel. | Fernando Gomez/Tacos del Cartel
Restaurants are dishing out the spicy Sinaloan specialty with a newfound fervor
In the summer months, many New Orleanians turn to cold seafood dishes to counter their sweltering environs — towers of iced shrimp and oysters, bowls of soy-spiked tartare, or plates of crudo steeped in olive oil — with a frozen drink to wash it down and maybe a sno-ball, too. But there’s something to be said for adding more heat to your palate, in the form of a fiery, chilled broth that acts as a bath for red onion, cucumber, and shellfish. Enter aguachile, the glorious Mexican specialty with complex origins that’s finally made its way onto a multitude of New Orleans restaurant menus.
That heat, traditionally derived from chiltepín, a wild chile from Sinaloa, primarily sets aguachile apart from ceviche, its even more acidic counterpart. While the seafood in a ceviche sits in its lime juice cure to the point of being completely cooked, a true aguachile is raw, with the seafood, typically shrimp, mixed with its chile water just before serving.
Back to aguachile’s complex origins: The unofficial state dish of Sinaloa, Mexico, is now so prevalent that almost every marisquería in Mexico serves some version of it. But the seafood-laced version that exists across menus today is a relatively recent invention; the original aguachile was used mainly by rural Sinaloans to season and soften meats like venison and wild boar. It’s unclear when exactly aguachile became a shrimp dish, but the version most diners are familiar with now began to gain traction in the early 2000s, most likely reaching the U.S. via Los Angeles first.
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The aguachile wave has hit New Orleans.
More recently, it’s showing up all over New Orleans. Loya’s in Mid-City, which opened a few years ago, is one of the more casual Mexican restaurants in town to serve the bright dish. It’s gained favor on menus at trendy new Mexican and Central American restaurants, like Bésame, where tuna swims in the spicy tomatillo broth, La Tia Cantina, and Espiritu Mezcaleria. Splashy downtown hotspot Tacos del Cartel serves a black version made with chargrilled chile paste instead of powdered chiles. Alma Cafe, a popular Honduran brunch restaurant in New Orleans’s Bywater neighborhood, also serves an aguachile negro, this one made with morita and pasilla chiles as well as the sweet-savory addition of black garlic.
Aguachile is even showing up on non-Mexican restaurant menus. Restaurant R’evolution, the French Quarter fine-dining spot in the Royal Sonesta New Orleans, served up a vibrant version this past spring topped with a blue corn tostada. Seaworthy, one of the city’s gold-standard seafood restaurants, recently had a version made with clams on its menu that celebrates all things shellfish. And Aguasanta, the brand new Oak Street restaurant with a Mexican influence but global scope, serves aguachile alongside tiraditos, ceviche, and other raw seafood and fusion dishes.
There is, however, one new aguachile in New Orleans to rule them all — arguably. It’s the Gulf shrimp aguachile verde at Acamaya, Ana Castro’s Mexican mariscos restaurant that opened in July. The shrimp, which remain translucent with just the slightest pink edges from soaking in a brilliant green broth, are meaty, slick with liquid, and sweet. The tomatillo broth is infused with serrano, the chile most commonly used for the dish in the Sinaloan port city of Mazatlán. (Chiltepin makes appearances elsewhere throughout the menu of hot and cold seafood dishes; in a vinegar doused on raw oysters, for instance, and in the creamy crab mixture that tops a supple sope.) The finished product, with its paper-thin cucumber slices and strips of red onion, arrives in a bowl closely resembling a molcajete, the volcanic stone bowl common in Mexican kitchens. The refreshing and reviving broth leaves the tongue buzzing with electricity.
Put simply: There was no wrong way to aguachile this summer, and, lucky for New Orleans, the trend seems to have staying power for fall.