LA BAMBA

Nixta is not just Singapore's most authentic Mexican restaurant - it is also the best.

- INDRAN PARAMASIVAM

AT ONE POINT during my time at Nixta, I disengage from the sensory wonders I am tasting, drinking, and taking in to ask myself, why?

Why is every tangible facet this restaurant generously offers to the diner imbued with a level of care so uncompromisingly considered, right down to the most granular detail? Why is it important to this restaurant that it diligently partakes in the ancient Mesoamerican culinary method of nixtamalisation, in which it transforms non-GMO heirloom corn from small Mexican farms into masa? Why is Nixta the only emphatically Mexican restaurant in Singapore that nixtamalises?

Caught in the currents of that reverie, I am led to a climactic moment in Dead Poets Society (1998), itself a production so passionately and arduously committed to its message that it transcends itself. Known on the Internet as the “What Will Your Verse Be?” scene, it immortalises Robin Williams’s performance as the English teacher Mr. Keating, as he teaches his students about the sublime urge that fuels the reading and writing of poetry.

I present you with the exact utterance that transported me back then. “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race”. Continuing to qualify his stance, he reaches the clincher, “Poetry, beauty, romance, [and] love—these are what we stay alive for”.

Taking my seat in Nixta’s plush, earthily rendered elegance, I cannot help but feel poetry, beauty, romance, and love radiating from every hand that has laid its bricks.

A Panorama Of Mexico