Owner Dr. Montaño spent years perfecting recipes for the menu, which reflects his nutritional philosophy. Photo by Michael Robinson Chavez.
The relationship between food and health creates an undeniable conundrum—one that Dr. Cuauhtemoc Montaño, the owner of Barroco’s, a Downtown Oxnard restaurant specializing in organic homemade cuisine and baked goods, sums up simply: “People hate to be sick, but love what makes them sick.”
One look at the rising rates of obesity and diabetes in this country confirms that Americans love to eat foods that are bad for us. Fast food, junk food, synthetic food—the foods that gather in the inner aisles of the grocery store and grab our eye as we are speeding past. And the media doesn’t help. It’s difficult to do the right thing when we’re bombarded with advertisements for sumptuous, pleasure-promising foods. Food is a complicated matter. It is solace. It is peace. Food is therapy. Food often fills voids beyond the ones that are the most basic: hunger and the need for nourishment.
According to Dr. Montaño, “We don’t know how to eat. We eat because we are hungry. We don’t know how food can be medicine.” A doctor of naturopathy who has been practicing for eight years, Montaño admits that, like many people, he had been oblivious to the power of food. He was one of the walking ill—people who look relatively healthy but internally are a physiological mess. The doctor suffered from panic attacks, anxiety, and stress, and even after visiting a dozen different doctors he wasn’t getting the answers he needed.
Ironically, Montaño, who today has a radio show in Spanish that airs five days a week, was introduced to natural medicine by a radio advertisement for the International College of Healing Arts. After extensive research, the former business consultant decided to attend. While learning about natural forms of healing using disciplines such as nutrition, herbology, aromatherapy, and homeopathy, the doctor not only found the answers to his ailments, he found a new career and food philosophy, which years later led to the creation of a menu and eventually to the opening of Barroco’s.
Simply calling the menu at Barroco’s a menu is misleading. This is a collection of 100 recipes that Montaño has been perfecting over the past three years. Meals are cooked with produce that is mostly locally grown, and the bakery products are 99 percent organic. With the exception of five dishes, everything is vegetarian, yet chicken, beef, or salmon can be added to any meal upon request. Perhaps most importantly, the cuisine is transparent—there are no hidden ingredients waiting to clog arteries, spike blood pressure, or encourage unwanted weight gain.
The space at Barroco’s is elegant, with a full bar and expansive dining room.
“We prepare foods the way they did in the early 1900s. No microwaves, no lard, no cans, no frozen food, no preservatives, no additives,” says Montaño. He sits calmly in a soft yellow button-up shirt tucked into black slacks. His thick, black hair is neatly trimmed. The doctor is diligent. He has organized the menu according to his beliefs on how people should structure their meals. There are three groupings of dishes clearly marked on the menu. The first dishes are salads. “Every time you have your main meal, have a salad,” he recommends. The second dishes include four groups: vegetables, pastas, legumes, and grains. “One day you eat a salad and a vegetable dish; the next day, a salad and pasta dish; and so on so that you rotate your diet.” The third dishes consist of soups, pizzas, hot sandwiches, hamburgers, Mexican dishes, and appetizers, which Dr. Montaño says should be shared.
“The first dish is going to nourish your body. The second dishes are body builders. The third dish is going to satisfy your desire for something even more tasty then the first two,” he explains. It’s lunchtime, so I start with the Mexican salad as my first dish and move on to the baked stuffed potato with vegetables for my second. I then satisfy my compulsion for something sweet with an apple tart from the bakery. The ingredients sound almost painfully healthy on the menu, but every bite satisfies my desire for savory cuisine.
The menu at Barroco’s is instructional, and its author is the teacher. Montaño is teaching his patrons and his community how to eat. He is doing what he believes is a doctor’s true vocation. “The word doctor means to be a teacher, a guide to a community,” he explains. “But unfortunately, with the rise of commercialized medical health services, most doctors don’t focus on educating you on how to overcome your health issues. They recommend that you take pills.” And pills, according to Montaño, are not the solution to any medical issue. They are a false promise of health.
Food, on the other hand, is a solution, he tells me. “Everything can be cured with food—from diabetes to cancer to the flu and arthritis.” I throw a list of illnesses at him, and he quickly repeats, “Everything.” Although a powerful belief, it is now new. Albert Einstein once said, “The doctor of the future will not give medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and the cause and prevention of disease.” Before him, Hippocrates said, “May your food be your medicine and may your medicine be your food.” Both of these quotes are written in the menu at Barroco’s, and the doctor repeats them like a mantra.
Montaño does have the look of a doctor of the future, and Barroco’s is clearly ahead of its time (10 to 15 years, according to him). The restaurant shows us that food does not have to be an albatross that excites taste buds and pleasures the mind while slowly poisoning the body. It reminds us of why we need food in the first place: to nourish the human body, allowing it to function optimally and sustain life. Somehow this has become a lost knowledge, hidden away next to the secrets of child rearing and how to care for the land that keeps us alive.
06-01-2008
