BRATTLEBORO — With the opening of the Three Stones Restaurant, lovers of authentic Mexican food have access to handmade tortillas, passed down by generations of Mayan-Mexican women with strong hands. It is like tasting the history of maize, the source of creation and the love of humanity all in one bite.
And the tortillas at Three Stones Restaurant are just the beginning of the magic woven into the edible fabric of Alejandra Bolles's delicate toppings, the ancho chilies, the pumpkin seed salsa, and the flans and spicy hot chocolate.
The new restaurant is an example of magical realism - that a restaurant can be made real because lovers of authentic Mexican food have wished it so, for so long and for so many winters - that a simple tortilla made by strong, Mayan hands can bring a warm and nourishing magic to the cold heart of winter.
Open the door of this unpretentious little, white diner, and the food traveler is transported to another world, like entering a Mexican hacienda in the highland tropics.
The three owners have shape-shifted the old, worn-out diner located at Canal and Elm Street into a welcoming place of strong Mayan medicine.
Within the adobe-colored walls, the aroma of Mayan-Mexican cooking beckons like the call of a scarlet feathered macaw: the essence of chilies, the coax of chocolate, the tantalizing smell of beans and rice cooked to perfection in traditional Mexican-Mayan simplicity.
Following in the footsteps of their Mayan ancestors, mother and daughter, Alejandra and Mucuy Bolles, have partnered with the younger Bolles's fiancé, Christian Makay, to imagine a creative endeavor in Southern Vermont filled with the artistry of cooking and magical works of art.
With Chris's carpentry skills and culinary support - he had built sets for The Lion King on Broadway, where he met Mucuy, who danced for years in this long-lasting Broadway show - this mother-and-daughter team transformed the tiny diner into a Mexican-Mayan cochina, with cozy booths lit by lots of windows and a skylight and seating for a large party decorated with the warm browns and reds of tapestried pillows and the green of tropical plants.
Named for the traditional three cooking stones that hold the pot or griddle in the Mayan cooking stove known as a koben, the restaurant is an offering of Mayan hospitality.
Mucuy's intention for the restaurant has always been to have it be an art gallery as well the opportunity to preserve some of her Mayan culture. A pottery aardvark made by Alejandra suns himself in a window, bringing a southwestern feeling to the warm adobe-like space. A stained glass hanging of golden daffodils tilts winter sunlight through the window, bringing a sense of spring inside.
“I thought about it, to have it as a venue for my mother's artwork,” she said. “ If I had a restaurant I would learn about my mother's cooking and history.”
The restaurant provides an outlet for Alejandra to bring out her repertoire of Mayan-Mexican recipes. Items such as Sopa Negra (Black Soup) made by charring chilies added to a chicken base. Alejandra decided to leave out the traditional chicken feet, which are usually floating in the black, rich broth.
Growing up, Alejandra was the eldest of 10 children and did most of the cooking, cleaning and childcare for her eternally pregnant mother.
“We ate anything that moved. We were really poor. I married a gringo, he gives me money to buy real food.”
* * *
Alejandra and Mucuy proudly carry on the traditions of their rich heritage in their cooking and their artwork.
From the third to the ninth century, the ancient Mayan civilization flourished. Centered in Southern Mexico and the high plateaus and tropical jungles of Guatemala, the area was known as the jewel of Mesoamerican civilizations. Considered one of the greatest civilizations in the world, its people built temples and pyramids.
The only civilization at the time to record its history, the Mayans chiseled great works of art and writings in hieroglyphics similar to those of the ancient Egyptians. Only recently have modern anthropologists been able to decipher these chiseled stone writings.
Their highly developed agricultural practices, such as irrigation canals and dam systems, came into use as early as 800 B.C.E. and allowed the Mayans to increase their population through better nutrition, while creating more leisure time to perfect agricultural techniques and enjoy artistic endeavors.
Maize, or corn, was such an important food source; the Mayan mythology claimed it as the source of human creation. Today, corn provides the basis of many menu items at Three Stones Restaurant: tamales, tortillas and empanadas. Alejandra is very fussy about her ingredients, and finally found that Quaker Oats makes a masa harina, a prepared corn flour, that meets her Mayan standards.
Chocolate was used by the Mayans centuries before the Aztecs, and Alejandra is definitely in touch with her ancestors' chocolate witchery. You will not find her small chocolate cakes, rich and thick as the earth itself, in her cookbook.
Although it is still a mystery why this highly sophisticated civilization collapsed, there are direct descendents, including the people of Guatemala, and Alejandra Bolles, who grew up in Ticul, “The Biggest Mayan City of the World,” now a suburb of the urban center of Mérida, Mexico in the Yucatán peninsula.
Descendants of these creative and scientific Mayans, mother and daughter continue to carry on many of the Mayan traditions.
True artists, mother and daughter also have a mini-gallery of their art work gracing the walls of the restaurant, with Alejandra painting the Mayan landscape of her childhood and Mucuy painting the artifacts of her ancestors, using hieroglyphics in her mythological paintings deciphered with the help of her anthropologist father.
A professional dancer, Mucuy executes small watercolors of high energy and delicate movement. The details are striking in their mystical aspirations. She uses real archaeological motifs from the Yucatán and draws on the collective imagination of her ancestors to create new images evoking ancient rituals, gods, and goddesses. Always present is the Mayan understanding of the blurred borders between humans and the natural world.
Mucuy also follows in her father's footsteps, as she is formally studying anthropology and using her art to help her understand and translate her Mayan roots, as well as visually tell the stories of her ancestors.
Her father, David Bolles, an anthropologist and Marlboro College alumnus, is an authority on Mayan culture and met Mucuy's mother in the Yucatán while he was finishing research for his father, an archaeologist in the 1930s at the Carnegie Institute.
As Alejandra tells the story of their romance in a simple, straightforward style, she recalled: “He saw me, he wanted to marry me, I said OK.”
As David tells it, he was “wandering around the ruins.” There were very few foreigners as the road was snaky and windy, and the town at that time was remote and undeveloped. Being “the only gringo,” he said, he was noticed by everyone, including Alejandra.
“He started following us around all day,” Alejandra continued. Her brothers became David's tour guides to the ruins he was studying. The two fell in love, but had to get permission from the Mexican government to get married. So, David returned home, eventually returning to Mexico to marry Alejandra.
At the restaurant, there is a stunning, black and white photograph of David and Alejandra on their wedding day, he in his casual American attire, she in traditional hand-embroidered Mexican dress. Often, mother and daughter wear traditional Mayan-Mexican dresses at the restaurant, adding an additional flair to the exotic ambience.
After marriage, Alejandra joined her husband to live in the states, but the Bolles family returned often.
Mucuy, who uses her memory of Mayan ruins in her artwork, recalls being 4 years old and visiting a pyramid underneath a pyramid. Mayans believe in a 52-year cycle of renewal, and they often built new structures over old ones. As David described it, the Mayan ruins are “like onions, peeling off layers.”
Mucuy recalls the older pyramid underneath being “preserved so well, the colors.” She remembers that her father could read the hieroglyphics. Her painting of the Mayan calendar which hangs in the restaurant reflects her deep connection to the Mayan relics of her ancestors.
* * *
The Bolles family bought an apple farm in Deering, N.H., growing macoun and sheep's nose apples. David grew wheat and harvested it with his own combine to produce flour for Alejandra's home cooking.
“He was crazy about planting everything,” Alejandra said.
Early on, the couple learned about the tribulations of growing vegetables. Growing too much summer squash one summer, they “started putting squash in people's cars,” she said. The same with sweet peas.
“In New Hampshire, they really don't lock their cars,” Alejandra said with a laugh and a twinkle in her eye.
Finally, the family acquired a local marketing source for all the peas they were growing, and they had pea-picking parties. “I'd make tamales; after picking peas, I'd feed them tortillas,” Alejandra said.
“After we got married, all kinds of things started happening,” she said. “Being a farmer is like having a restaurant.”
Her habit of cooking for people led to the restaurant.
“Chris started coming over - he loved my food,” she said. “He kept saying he couldn't wait-”
“Tortillas,” Mucuy broke in. “No substitute to it - just the tortillas.”
“Chris started dreaming,” Alejandra continued. “I didn't think it was going to happen that quick. All of a sudden it started happening.”
For the restaurant to work, Alejandra needed another cook. “I'm not going to be here all the time,” she said. Chris stepped up to learn.
Alejandra began giving Chris “a few lessons” in cooking in a two-week crash course. When Mucuy was out of town on a dance tour, “they would cook together,” she said.
“He already knew how to do it, but I wanted to make sure,” she added.
Mucuy chimed in: “She was pulling out these recipes, never made them [for me growing up] - pulling them back out of her memory, unearthing from her childhood. I've had a good time watching her.”
Looking straight at he mother, Mucuy said: “You never made that for me - pumpkin seed salsa.”
Authenticity has its limits and challenges.
“Wasp larvae, iguana. Can't find,” Alejandra says. She laments over buying a chicken in the supermarket, “The more I boiled it, the tougher it got. These American chickens are no good”. (She must have found a good source for chicken for the restaurant, since her Panuchos contain moist, tender chicken, shredded in typical Mexican style.)
As for wasp larvae, she warns, “some of them are hallucinatory.”
Directions for roasting an iguana can be found in the “Mayans Only” section of her Mexican-Mayan Cookbook, sold at the restaurant. The recipe for wasp larvae is also in her cookbook in the “Mayans Only” section.
Alejandra mourns the loss of the tradition of handmade tortillas to “tortilla machines in every town. Now, doesn't taste good. Only the Navajo and Hopi still making from scratch.”
Meanwhile, Mucuy is also trying to keep her culture alive by learning to weave a hammock. “I would hate for it to die. I am learning my own culture. Now, no one in the Yucatán knows how to weave.”
* * *
Alejandra seamlessly weaves the conversation from the best way to roast an iguana and cook wasp larvae to the connections between soap operas and art. “When my third daughter was born, when she was 3 years old, I was bored. Everything was done. Washing machines. Chicken is cleaned already.”
She recalled her life as a modernized woman: “I started watching soap operas. I was getting crazy. David said, 'I am going to take you to the university'."
To the University of New Hampshire, David brought Alejandra, who at that time could not speak English. She recalled him saying: “Here's my wife, she only went to second grade. What can you do with her?”
She studied English as a second language, began writing a journal as part of the curriculum. She also took classes in painting in watercolor and oil. She had been studying Van Gogh, when she fell in love with sunflowers.
“I love sunflowers. David planted a row; I couldn't see the end of it.” He planted over an acre of different varieties, and they sold the cut flowers at their farm years before it became popular to do so at New England farm stands.
Other favorite subjects she paints include Mexican landscapes depicting inactive volcanoes, farms on the edges of tropical rain forests, and bright birds, flowers, butterflies. One painting can be seen at the restaurant.
While her mother captures the natural and agricultural landscape, Mucuy's art is transformative and brings a shaman's eye to her paintings. She often starts with an archeological image and adds meaning through color, detail such as vibrant colors of a headdress, the hieroglyphics of mythology to tell a story of her people, the spiritual history of a nature-based culture, which did not see itself separate from plants and animals, jungle, sky, and earth.
One small watercolor painting is of “God D,” as he is called, shows a tamale laid out as an offering on a traditional Mayan stove pot.
She finds it “interesting to show how the food passed down through the centuries, through the ancestors and to the present. My mom gives me the action lived out. My father helps me research things - these hieroglyphics.”
She points to the symbols bordering the painting which she has added to the original image of a carved figure of a god. She says there are also celestial symbols embellishing the work. “He helps me research the glyphs, and I added them. I created the headdress. I wanted to bring back the meaning.”
Another painting, Chan Kiik, is a cryptic watercolor of Hun Hunapah, known as the hunter, who seems to be half plant, half god spitting into the hand of a Mayan maiden, Chan Kiik (little blood).
Surrounding this symbolic impregnation are images of maize, food of life and the source of human creation. In the symbolism of fertility, the erotic imagery portrays a naturalist version of an immaculate conception. It is a Mayan sensibility to the way and will of nature, and the lack of separation between plant and human.
Magical realism has provided a rescue remedy to the winter blues, the collective act of imagining a warm, welcoming place where one could be transported to another country, where warmth and savory cooking welcome us.
As if the desire for traditional methods of cooking Mexican foodstuffs would be answered if hungered for long enough, Three Stones Restaurant has appeared out of nowhere.