In Mexico City, find a culinary ode to the Pacific Northwest at Marmota

In Seattle, plenty of food trucks and restaurants advertise Mexico City-style cuisine, like La Chingona, Los Chilangos and Carmelos Tacos. But since spring of 2020, Mexico City has also had a restaurant featuring Seattle-style cuisine.

Marmota, opened by chefs who spent time cooking in the Pacific Northwest, focuses less on the specific dishes of Seattle — there’s no teriyaki chicken or cream cheese hot dogs — and more on the overall local ethos of food.

“Marmota is a little sample of Puget Sound in the heart of Mexico City,” the website explains. Chefs Federico Patiño and Poppy Powell both worked in Seattle, including together at London Plane for a spell, and bring the cuisine and style from the area to the restaurant in the Roma neighborhood.

“The Pacific Northwest has a very special relationship with food,” says Patiño. When they had an opportunity to open a spot in Mexico City, “We felt it was almost a duty to spread that philosophy of good, honest food.”

The food at Marmota centers on an open hearth, which they use to roast beets served with homemade yogurt and smoke seafood. “We utilize a lot of smoke and fire in the restaurant,” he explains. “Techniques that are more wild and unpredictable, a good analogy for many facets of the Pacific Northwest.”

Wild mushrooms, stinging nettles, and crab show up to represent the ingredients of the Pacific Northwest, even if the exact species differs from those found here in Washington. Dishes like smoked burrata with heirloom tomatoes, shiso, and peas could be on the menu anywhere in Seattle. But they are also specifically on the menu here, in Mexico, made from ingredients that grow or are raised locally, like wild seafood, and the fermentation they do at the restaurant.

Marmota is less a copy of a Seattle restaurant and more driven by the inspiration of the region. Patiño describes what makes Pacific Northwest cuisine special as “sustainability, seasonality, respect for ingredients.” 

The connection to the region shows in the simple line drawing of Mount Rainier that elegantly graces the top of the paper menu and in the dreamy landscapes the restaurant posts on Instagram, of woods and waterfalls, along with odes to ingredients so earnest and reverent they would teeter on satire if they were not so heartfelt. “A world without cebollín could not be” one reads, about the small, sweet onions similar to bulbous scallions. “They are a force almost as important as gravity, as strong and contradictory as Eros and Thanatos, as fundamental as the union of two bodies becoming one.”

At Marmota, two things do become one: Mexico City and Seattle. Patiño has deep culinary roots in his home country — his aunt, Monica Patiño has been a big name in Mexican cooking and restaurants for decades — and they shine through the menu in ways big, like the sourcing, and small, like the hoja santa yogurt mentioned by The Infatuation when it said Marmota “makes some of the heartiest (and best) food in CDMX right now.”

As for the audience in Mexico City, Patiño says people are unsure of what to expect at first, they come thinking they will get a caricature of the Pacific Northwest (“like smoked salmon or clam chowder,” he notes). Most customers know of Seattle only for having lots of rain and the Pike Place Market, and they show off “the philosophy, techniques, and elements that make PNW food so alluring to us.”

That improvised style of cooking is what Patiño feels really sets Marmota apart, calling it, “An interesting translation in a country that prides itself on food traditions.” But one that has been welcomed with an overwhelmingly positive reaction — good news for Marmota and for the Pacific Northwest culinary scene as a whole.