Lose the Meat, Beef Up the Color
A purple disc quartered to neat wedges, topped with a colorful array of glistening fungi and vegetables, arrived on a dark gray ceramic plate. I’d ordered the tlayuda ignorant of the word’s meaning; I simply trusted that the components I recognized—blue corn masa, cauliflower puree, oyster mushrooms, salsa macha—meant something good. My appetite for vegetables is vast; they’re what I crave most. An immensely flavorful, multi-textured, wholly satisfying dish made almost entirely of plant-derived ingredients (but for the scant cheese) such as this—it’s a joy to stumble upon.
My first bites affirmed this confidence: There was the unmistakable and comforting flavor of nixtamalized corn with a crunch softened by sweet cauliflower puree. There was the hearty bite of sauteed mushrooms and cauliflower, the delicate crunch of fresh greens, the gentle tang of queso fresco, and the rich, nutty heat of salsa macha.
And so, months later, I’ve come back to Community Table, in the quaint northwest corner of Connecticut where I live, to observe how the restaurant’s chef, Bolivar Hilario, makes the tlayuda I enjoyed so much. We’ve met in the otherwise empty colonial house-like structure. It’s a Wednesday, and the restaurant won’t open again until tomorrow evening. Hilario gathers long waves of black hair into a bun and indulges my asking about how he got here: to Preston, to this restaurant, to James Beard Award semifinalist, and soon, to open his own place called RSVP in West Cornwall, Connecticut.
He moved with his family from Guerrero, Mexico, to Haines City, Florida, as a 6-year-old. Hilario describes the latter as a rough place an hour south of Orlando where he was introduced to the world of professional kitchens out of necessity. Through his teens, he’d worked in construction, but those jobs dried up in 2008 at the onset of the financial crisis. At his new dishwashing job at Pei Wei Asian Kitchen in Orlando, he started to ask a lot of questions of the wok-wielding cooks. He eventually joined their ranks and was promoted to lead line cook at 20. A restaurateur customer noticed his talent and poached Hilario for a Disney World–adjacent restaurant where he’d work for a year before following a Cordon Bleu–bound girlfriend to the Northeast.
In Connecticut, he’d make fresh pasta for a couple of years, work as garde-manger at another restaurant, then another—which happened to be Community Table. His subsequent employment at Cosme, the famed Mexican restaurant in New York, and the stages it allowed for at its sister restaurant, Atla, marked a turning point for Hilario: evidence that fine dining and the familiar flavors of home were not mutually exclusive.
Hungry to learn more, he moved to Chumley’s, then the Musket Room, then Shoji at 69 Leonard Street where he absorbed the rigorous precision of a sushi restaurant. By the spring of 2022, he was drawn back to Litchfield County to cook at Swyft and Ore Hill, partner restaurants that were gaining a buzz. The following year, Hilario made his way back to Community Table, this time as executive chef. He is adamant that he still has a lot to learn, and despite fresh accolades, insists that his priorities remain cultivating knowledge, refining his skills, and pleasing diners.
His tlayuda embodies all of this. The Oaxacan tlayuda (sometimes spelled “clayuda”) is a close relative of the corn tortilla, but it differentiates itself by its large size, its thinness, and the crispiness it acquires from ample time on a hot comal de barro. It gets laden with toppings—typically refried beans, cabbage, meat, avocado, cheese, and salsa—and it’s often folded in half, the better to melt and meld its fillings. I tell Hilario that the tlayuda reminds me of the Ligurian focaccia di recco or the Lebanese man’oushe. He shows no surprise at the connection. “We all come from the same place,” he’ll repeat a couple of times during our afternoon together. Since I met with him, Hilario has left Community Table to prepare to open his own restaurant, RSVP, in the nearby town of Cornwall. And so, he has added to his list of goals: "Make RSVP a successful business." To him, that means establishing it as a year-round dining destination, a lab in which to experiment with local farmers’ offerings, and to produce sometimes unexpected and unfamiliar food.
Hilario hasn’t been to Oaxaca; he was introduced to tlayudas in Manhattan, while at Cosme and Atla. “CT isn’t a Mexican restaurant,” he concedes, using the restaurant’s nickname, so to put a tlayuda on the menu, Hilario had to adapt it; the components, the presentation—how could he tweak them to make sense in this setting, with the smoked trout dip and six-grain sourdough, the Josef Frank wallpaper and sheepskin throws?
The essential components of a traditional tlayuda are the crispy flatbread itself, a spread of asiento (flavorful, fatty residue left from cooking carnitas or chicharron), a layer of refried beans, shredded lettuce or cabbage, and stringy Oaxaca cheese. The rest—meats, avocado, various salsas—are up to the cook and the diner.
For his version, Hilario omits the meat and amps up the color. He makes the tlayuda itself with blue corn masa harina, mixing with a splash of grapeseed oil and warm water until it’s a dough that makes a squishing sound against the metal of the mixing bowl, no longer cracks, and feels sticky but doesn’t actually stick to your fingers. He lines a tortilla press from a shop in Queens with a cut-up cellophane-like plastic bag from the nearby Tienda Latina, the way his mother would. He presses an eighty-gram ball of masa into a disc as thin as the tortilla press can manage, then rolls it thinner and wider with a rolling pin. He lays the tlayuda in a very hot cast-iron pan, cooks each side for five seconds at a time, then ten, until bubbles reach the center of the leathery, lavender saucer. To crisp the tlayuda, Hilario sandwiches it between two hot cast-iron pans that have been waiting in a scorching oven. He puts the apparatus in the oven for five minutes, until the tlayuda is rigid and crisp, no longer limp and pliable. With the tlayuda on a cutting board, he brushes it with grapeseed oil and spreads on a golden puree, reheated in a pan, of caramelized cauliflower with red chili pepper flakes and salt (this in lieu of the asiento and beans). The puree provides an adherent bed for the next layer: a blend of lightly sauteed silvery oyster mushrooms and sparkling cornmeal-colored cauliflower florets. Salsa macha, its dark amber chili-dyed oil, sesame seeds, and peanut bits, is generously scattered across the vegetables. Finally, a dusting of crumbly queso fresco is introduced, followed by a green and burgundy layer of mesclun, glistening with lime juice and salt.
Hilario quarters the assembled tlayuda with a chef’s knife and places the wedges on a gray ceramic plate. I pick up a wedge; Hilario grabs another. My teeth meet the tender greens, the meaty vegetables, the buttery puree, and finally the brittle crunch of the tlayuda. My palate receives the perfume of the masa, the sweet umami of the cauliflower and mushrooms, the fruitiness and spice of the salsa macha—which Hilario makes mild by mixing guajillo chiles with the traditional anchos—the tang of the cheese, the freshness of the leaves, and the lime.
Hilario offers me the rest of the tlayuda; I insist, reluctantly, that we share. Once we’ve finished, he waves off my offer to help clean up and gets to it.
Brian Levy is a writer and recipe developer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Epicurious. His first cookbook, Good & Sweet, was named one of the "best of the year" by The Los Angeles Times and Serious Eats. He writes regularly at Formal Assignment, his online newsletter. Brian previously made desserts at Michelin-starred Babbo, cooked as a private chef, worked the fields and kitchens of farms and inns in Europe and Martha's Vineyard. Outside of the kitchen, and studied architecture at Yale.
