Roberto Solís is that kind of chef. When the Michelin Guide arrived in Yucatán for the first time this year, it handed his Mérida restaurant group a result most cooks would frame and hang above the pass. He seems more interested in the next ingredient to come through the kitchen door.

“I’m a chef always seeking not to be comfortable,” he tells me, and he says it the way other people give their job title.

At the Michelin Guide Mexico 2026 ceremony in Guadalajara on 20 May, the guide expanded into Jalisco, Puebla and Yucatán, and the peninsula came away with three stars. Two of them went to Solís. His 16-seat tasting counter Huniik and its neighbour La Barra de Huniik, an omakase-style bar built around native corn, each received a star. Huniik’s front of house lead, Rodrigo Caltenco Núñez, took home the national Service Award for good measure. Néctar, the restaurant Solís opened in 2003 and the place where the whole story began, earned a Michelin recommendation.

For a chef who has spent more than 23 years arguing that the food of his home region belongs in the same conversation as the great cuisines of the world, it was less a surprise than a vindication.

The ingredient in front of him

At the centre of Solís’s cooking sit the defining flavours of Yucatán: achiote, the brick-red paste of annatto seed; naranja agria, the bitter Seville-style orange that sharpens everything it touches; habanero; and recado negro, the jet-black paste of burnt chillies that is the peninsula’s most dramatic seasoning. Around them are the techniques of smoke, fire and the pib, the underground pit oven that has been used in the region for centuries.

Yet his approach, he insists, starts with something far simpler than a signature flavour.

“My approach to food is always about the ingredient: seasonality, freshness, lightness and, of course, flavour. Everything I cook starts from what the land is giving us at that moment, and my job is to treat it with respect and let it speak.”

It is a philosophy you hear from a great many chefs, and one that is far easier to state than to practise. Solís has the credentials to back it. Before building his own kitchens in Mérida he trained at a remarkable roll call of restaurants: Noma in Copenhagen, Per Se in New York, Narisawa in Tokyo and, closer to home for readers of this magazine, Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck in Bray. Those are kitchens that obsess over provenance and precision in very different ways, and it is not hard to see the imprint of each on the way Huniik treats a tomato or a piece of fish from the Gulf.

Saturdays at the grill

The roots go back much further, though, to a childhood in which food was simply what happened around him.

“My earliest memories of food go back to when I was really young, my father grilling every Saturday, and my grandmother cooking, making handmade tortillas, everything fresh from the mercado. That’s when I realised that becoming a chef was what I was meant to do.”

The detail matters. Yucatecan cooking is, at heart, domestic cooking. Its great dishes were shaped in family kitchens and backyard pits rather than restaurant brigades, and the market, with its piles of chiles, its bitter oranges and its stalls of freshly ground masa, remains the engine room of the whole cuisine. Solís grew up inside that system. Much of his career since has been about finding ways to bring it into a dining room without losing what makes it work.

Those early experiences, he says, continue to shape the food he creates now. The ingredients, traditions and techniques of Yucatán have remained the fundamentals, even as the presentation has moved a long way from his grandmother’s comal.

What tells the story of Yucatán

I asked him which ingredients and methods best explain the region to someone who has never eaten there. His answer reads almost like a manifesto.

“Achiote, naranja agria, habanero, recado negro, the use of smoke, and cooking underground in a pib. Together they tell the story of Yucatán: a cuisine shaped by Mayan roots and centuries of outside influence, where fire, earth and time do as much of the work as the cook. These are the flavours I grew up with, and they’re the foundation of everything we do.”

That phrase, fire, earth and time doing as much of the work as the cook, is worth sitting with. It explains why Yucatecan food tastes the way it does, and also why it has travelled less successfully than the cooking of Oaxaca or Mexico City. You cannot easily reproduce a pib in a London basement kitchen. The slow, low, smoky heat of meat wrapped in banana leaves and buried for hours is not a technique that scales neatly or ships well.

The peninsula’s history adds further layers. Yucatán was, for long stretches, closer in trade and outlook to the Caribbean and Europe than to central Mexico, and its pantry reflects that: Mayan staples such as corn, squash, chile and wild game sit alongside Spanish citrus, Middle Eastern influences carried by Lebanese immigrants, and spices from the old Atlantic trade routes. Mexican cuisine as a whole has been recognised by UNESCO, with traditional Mexican cuisine inscribed on its list of intangible cultural heritage since 2010, but Yucatán’s version remains distinct enough that many Mexicans from elsewhere in the country treat it as something almost foreign.

The dishes the world is missing

For international diners who have yet to discover the region, Solís has a short list of dishes he believes deserve far wider recognition.

“Dishes like pavo en relleno negro, papadzules and tikin xic tell you so much about Yucatán, and they deserve to be far better known. Relleno negro, for example, turkey in a jet-black recado of charred chiles, has this haunting, smoky depth that you find almost nowhere else in the world. These are dishes with real history behind them, and I think anyone who loves food would be moved by them.”

It is a persuasive trio. Papadzules, tortillas filled with chopped hard-boiled egg and bathed in a sauce of ground pumpkin seeds and tomato, are one of the oldest recorded dishes in the region and are often cited as having pre-Hispanic roots. Tikin xic is fish marinated in achiote and sour orange, wrapped and cooked over fire, the ancestor of countless grilled fish dishes along the Gulf coast. Relleno negro, meanwhile, is the dish visitors most often describe with a kind of bewildered reverence. The colour alone stops people in their tracks.

Black onions and the art of the familiar

His own cooking takes those foundations and looks at them through a contemporary lens. Asked for the one dish that best represents him as a chef, he does not reach for anything showy. He chooses black onions with xcatic chile mayonnaise.

“It looks simple, but it carries everything I care about: a humble, local ingredient treated with real technique, the smoke and depth of Yucatán, and a little heat from the xcatic. It’s familiar and unexpected at the same time, which is exactly what I want my food to be.”

Xcatic, a pale, mild-to-medium local chile, is a telling choice. It is an ingredient that barely registers outside the peninsula yet is everywhere within it. Building a signature dish around an onion and a regional chile rather than lobster or wagyu says a good deal about where Solís believes the value in his cooking lies.

The same thinking runs through the menu at Huniik, a small, dark room designed to evoke the region’s cenotes, the flooded limestone sinkholes that pepper the Yucatán landscape. The Michelin inspectors singled out dishes such as an aguachile of lightly cured shrimp with crisp pork belly and lamb chops slow-cooked in the pibil style. Next door at La Barra de Huniik, the focus narrows further, to corn in its many native forms.

The season decides the menu

That focus on the ingredient extends to how Solís builds his menus. Seasonality and relationships with producers decide what arrives in the kitchen and therefore what reaches the plate.

“They’re essential. The moment an ingredient comes into season, we start working with it and build new dishes around it; the whole menu moves to that rhythm. Our relationships with local producers are the backbone of the kitchen. When you cook this way, the season decides the menu, not the other way around.”

That approach chimes with a wider shift among high-spending travellers, who increasingly prize authenticity and a sense of place over formality, a trend this magazine explored in our piece on why the ultra-rich are ditching fine dining and where they’re going instead. What makes Huniik interesting is that it straddles both worlds. It is unmistakably a Michelin-starred tasting counter, and yet everything about it points back to the market, the milpa and the family kitchen.

No shortcuts

Over more than two decades Solís has built and led restaurants that have earned international recognition, including a place at No 89 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants 51-100 list in 2025. Throughout, he has kept refining his understanding of his own region and what he wants his cooking to say.

Looking back at the start of his career, he is candid about what he lacked.

“I wish I’d had more discipline, more maturity and a deeper knowledge of my own region earlier on, a clearer sense of what I really wanted to say through my food. But that kind of clarity only comes with time. It’s taken me more than twenty-three years to get here, and honestly, I don’t think there’s any shortcut. You have to live it.”

It is a striking admission from a chef who trained in some of the most celebrated kitchens on earth. There is a familiar arc in modern gastronomy in which a young cook goes abroad, absorbs the techniques of Copenhagen or London, and returns home determined to apply them. The harder, slower work is the second half, learning to look at your own culture with enough humility to let it lead. Solís clearly believes that part took him the longest.

What michelin changed, and what it didn’t

The stars have, inevitably, brought a brighter international spotlight and a new kind of guest to Mérida. What they have not done, Solís says, is alter how his kitchens cook.

“Michelin changed the restaurants, of course, especially in terms of the guests now coming through our doors. But the way we do things hasn’t changed at all. If anything, it’s given us a platform to keep climbing, to take the next step and the one after that, while staying completely faithful to who we are. Our philosophy is the same: to showcase Yucatán, the same flavours we’ve always loved, but more refined and more thought through. In the end, it’s simply about trying to be better.”

For the business traveller, that new visibility coincides with a region that is becoming much easier to reach. Mérida has its own international airport, and the Tren Maya railway now links the city with the Caribbean coast. Cancún, a couple of hundred miles to the east, remains the main long-haul gateway to the peninsula and continues to attract heavy investment from the big hotel groups, from the all-inclusive relaunch of Grand Hyatt Cancun to Hyatt’s wider pipeline of more than 30 openings across Latin America and the Caribbean. A lunch at Huniik is now a realistic add-on to a conference or incentive trip on the Riviera Maya, and a considerably more memorable one than another hotel buffet.

A table in london?

For British diners hoping to taste his food without a transatlantic flight, the wait continues. Solís has no UK appearances in his diary for now, though he is quick to say that Britain is somewhere he would like to cook.

“If the right opportunity came along, I’d be there in a heartbeat.”

Given his time at The Fat Duck and London’s growing appetite for regional Mexican cooking, it is not hard to imagine a guest residency finding a willing audience. Relleno negro in a London dining room would certainly make people talk.

Always wanting more

After 23 years at the stove, Solís remains firmly focused on what he can discover next. It is a mentality that returns to the way he described himself at the start of our conversation, as a chef determined not to get comfortable.

“Curiosity, discovering new things and refusing to settle into my comfort zone. The real challenge is to improve against myself, to be better than I was. That’s what keeps pushing me toward new ideas and new goals. There’s always more to reach for, and I always want more.”

Two Michelin stars, a Service Award, a recommendation for the restaurant where it all began and a region suddenly on the global gastronomic map. For most chefs, that would be the summit. For Roberto Solís, it sounds rather more like base camp.

Fact file: Roberto Solís’s Mérida Restaurants

Huniik: One Michelin star (2026) and the Michelin Guide Mexico 2026 Service Award for front of house lead Rodrigo Caltenco Núñez. A 16-seat tasting counter opened in 2019, designed to evoke Yucatán’s cenotes. Calle 60, Parque Santa Ana, Centro, Mérida. Lunch service, Monday to Saturday. huniik.com

La Barra de Huniik: One Michelin star (2026). An omakase-style counter beside Huniik, focused on native corn and regional ingredients

Néctar: Michelin recommended (2026). Solís’s original restaurant, opened in 2003, which helped pioneer modern Yucatecan cooking in Mérida. nectarmerida.com.mx

Getting there: There are no direct flights from the UK to Mérida. Connect via Mexico City or fly into Cancún, then continue by domestic flight, road or the Tren Maya