Zarela Martínez

Zarela Martínez came to the United States from Mexico in 1973. Her NYC restaurant, Zarela, which opened in 1987 and closed in 2011, was famed for its high-quality regional Mexican food. Martínez has promoted authentic Mexican food not only via her restaurant, but also through her cookbooks (Food from My Heart: Cuisines of Mexico Remembered and Reimagined, 1992; The Food and Life of Oaxaca: Traditional Recipes from Mexico’s Heart, 1997; and Zarela’s Veracruz: Cooking and Culture in Mexico’s Tropical Melting Pot, 2001). She also presented a 13-part PBS series, ¡Zarela! La Cocina Veracruzana, on the food of the Veracruz region. Her podcast, Everything you could possibly want to know about Cooking in Mexican from A to Z, can be heard on the Heritage Radio Network. Zarela was inducted into the James Beard Foundation Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America in 2013. She lives in New York City.

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Behind the Cookbook: Zarela’s Veracruz

Zarela Martinez is one of the US’s leading authorities on Mexican cuisine and currently co-hosts the podcast Cooking in Mexican From A to Z on the Heritage Radio Network with her son Aarón Sánchez. Zarela’s Veracruz, was published in 2001, and was accompanied by a 13-part PBS TV series. In this edited extract from the original book proposal, the author describes how she came to write about the cuisine of this region, a bustling modern area of Mexico which contrasts in many ways with Oaxaca, the subject of her previous cookbook.