Lily Ramirez-Foran/Photo: Fashion photography by SpireVision Studio

Mexican cuisine is the most popular and long-lasting North American food tradition. When I first ate Mexican food in the 1970s, there were few Mexican restaurants in Chicago, but today it is estimated that there are nearly 2,500 Mexican restaurants in our city.

The delights of Mexican cuisine are being discovered all over Europe. I ate passable Tex-Mex food in Florence and a fantastic Mexican-British fusion in London at Wahaca, where we really enjoyed the empanada with mint and peas.

Chinese and Italian dishes are already popular around the world, and Mexican food seems to have a good chance of taking its place among the world’s most popular cuisines. All three cuisines – Chinese, Italian and Mexican – come from what we Italians call “cucina povera,” peasant cooking that is inexpensive, nutritious and delicious. None of this is luxury food, although upscale restaurants use expensive ingredients and charge a lot of money. Mexican food reflects centuries of refinements in domestic kitchens; once people from other cultures try it, they fall in love with it.

As I walked through Dublin’s lively Temple Bar district on a recent Saturday night, queues were forming outside the more popular pubs… and also outside the area’s Mexican restaurants. Dubliners who have quenched their thirst with a few pints stop for a tasty fried snack at Sweet Churro; not far away, Acapulco, Dublin’s oldest Mexican joint, which opened in 1999, was packed, as was Boojum, just across the street, a shop that packages its burritos with instructions on how to eat them. (Pro tip: “Peel off the foil when eating.”)

To get some practical information on the popularity of Mexican food in Ireland, I sought out Lily Ramirez-Foran, author of Tacos and co-owner with her husband of Picado Mexican in Dublin, considered one of the few and best sources of Mexican food and ingredients in Ireland.

You were one of the pioneers in introducing Mexican food to Ireland. What was it like in the beginning?

I have spent the last twenty years introducing the Irish to Mexican food. When I arrived here in the early 2000s, people had a very different idea of ​​what Mexican food was. There were a lot of stereotypes: everything was brown, everything had to have a truckload of grated cheese, and the word “verde” was added to every sauce and presented as “salsa verde” even though there were no tomatillos in sight! Man, that made me pretty angry! A lot of what was considered – or passed for – Mexican food was far from it, more like a – sometimes trite – version of Tex-Mex or Cali-Mex.

When I was strolling through Dublin last spring, I noticed many more Mexican restaurants than I had a few years ago. To what extent is Ireland ready for Mexican cuisine?

People returning to Ireland on J1 visas – a student work visa that many young Irish people get to spend the summer in the US – raved about Mexican food. But while some had great ideas, the lack of ingredients and knowledge was quite evident in the final product.

A few things happened in Ireland that fueled interest in Mexican food: First, the Celtic Tiger years (the mid-1990s to early 2000s, a time of rapid economic growth in Ireland) allowed many people to travel and experience new cuisines. When these travelers returned, they wanted to try these delicious dishes again, and this sparked an urge to source and eat authentic foods from other cultures.

In 2009 I started a blog about Mexican food and the blog became popular; word travels fast in a small country. I got a lot of enquiries about ingredients and substitutes. So I knew there was a market for people who wanted to cook and eat Mexican food, so I started developing the idea for Picado Mexican, a shop and kitchen where people could learn about Mexico and Mexican food. Irish people are quite experimental when it comes to new flavours, so the blog was a means of educating readers about traditional Mexican food and my shop Picado became a source for others to get Mexican ingredients. I used every tool at my disposal to convey the complexity and subtlety of Mexican flavours. Education has always been key.

It seems that Mexican food could become even more popular in Dublin. Do you agree?

We have quite a few Mexican restaurants in Ireland now and many of them focus on tacos, quesadillas and nachos; some are authentic while others rely a little too much on the Tex-Mex tradition but we are slowly seeing improvements. We have restaurants that make their own tortillas from scratch and we are about to open the first traditional molino (mill) in Ireland which will allow us to make fresh maize porridge from scratch just like my grandfather and great grandfather did, which we hope will encourage businesses to do a few traditional dishes. Complex moles are not yet on menus outside of our own but that’s OK, they will catch on eventually. We host an average of thirty people a week for classes and supper clubs; during the classes they learn about moles, cochinita pibil, tamales, gorditas, adobos, chillis, tortillas, salsas and a variety of different flavours and ingredients. After ten years of weekly classes, we are confident that we have helped improve many Taco Tuesdays in homes across Ireland!

What are the major challenges in preparing Mexican food in Ireland?

The biggest challenge for most restaurants is the cost of authentic ingredients and labor. Traditional Mexican food is labor intensive. That’s why tamales don’t appear on any of the menus of Mexican restaurants in Dublin. Ingredients are also expensive. With supply chain issues, transportation costs, administration and import taxes, ingredients aren’t cheap and it all adds up. There’s also a lack of knowledgeable staff. The Mexican community in Ireland is small, but Ireland is thirsty for more Mexican restaurants.