Last week’s column talked about my mother raising me to appreciate three things: books, food and travel. Two weeks ago, much to her surprise, she turned eighty, which we commemorated with a 21-course meal in Mérida, México, where I, much to my surprise, was brought to tears twice during our four-hour meal. Beyond being infinitely Instagrammable, the 10th Anniversary Tasting Menu at avant-garde Yucatán restaurant K´u´uk’s was the perfect celebration of a life spent fascinated with travel, food, history and culture.

K’u’uk, which means bud or rebirth in Maya, offers regional cuisine reimagined through “molecular and avant-garde techniques.” In an interview in México Desconocido magazine, Chef Pedro Evia talked about how travel inspires him to write about the ingredients and techniques he sees, which he and partner Eduardo Rukos then spend months developing. In honor of their decennial, K’u’uk is offering a taste of greatest hits over the decade. The menu comes in a leather folio that opens out into a 3D paper replica of the mansion that houses the restaurant, breakfast café and research laboratory. Reminiscent of children’s pop-up books (or the credits in La Casa de Papel, for Money Heist fans), it includes a QR code for a secret menu with the story behind each dish.

When I was growing up in rural Washington State, Mom tried to bring the world to our mobile home behind my grandparents’ farmhouse. She planned itineraries for aspirational trips, bought me multicultural books and toys, and designed international menus. Her quarterly “United Nations” dinner parties consisted of the few West African stews my father taught her before returning to Nigeria, smörgåsbord and pastries learned from her Finnish and Swedish parents, and a few recipes picked up from international classmates at college. The rest came from the Time-Life Foods of the World series.

Four times a year we took the Greyhound bus over the mountains to Seattle, where we spent the weekend sightseeing, stocking up on books, and eating. Once, after watching a film in geography class about a schoolgirl who lived on a houseboat in France, I scoured the Seattle phonebook until I found a French bistro that prepared escargot the way the girl’s father had, while my classmates shrieked and pretended to gag. By the time I started traveling abroad in my teens, I viewed street food, fine dining and cooking classes alike as crucial aspects of travel. Now, as age and arthritis decrease Mom’s mobility, the food-as-event aspect of our trips increases.

Her birthday meal opened with Fake Fossil (2014), a Gingko Biloba bite inside a translucent tapioca web atop an actual piece of 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite. It set the stage for dramatic reveals involving smoke, droppers of essence, and specialized tableware. Mom actually applauded last year’s invention – a social media darling consisting of a soup plate of glossy black persimmon and date mole garnished with organic sunflower petals radiating in a circle to resemble an actual sunflower.

Moments of humor reminded us not to take the meal too seriously. There was a 2018 nugget named for its resemblance to monkey excrement, and we were sent home with a narrow box that turned out to contain chocolate busts of the K’u’uk team. Mom giggled wildly when served beef tongue and freeze-dried heart (2017) in a white ceramic mask bowl with a silicon-squishy, tongue-shaped spoon dangling out its mouth. She squealed at the sight of a perfectly-round smoke bubble created with a Flavour Blaster, a tool favored by mixologists. It burst at the touch, revealing a silky pumpkin, yogurt and candied almond medley (2012), one of several dishes showing the long-standing Lebanese presence in the Yucatán. Just as the smoke cleared and I leaned forward to study the bed of moss cradling the glass bowl, the fresh basil hit my tongue, creating a visual and gustatory synergy that instantly transported me to the forest.

I nearly cried to receive pibinal (“buried maize”), cooked for three days in an underground Mayan oven. The dish (2013), traditionally consumed after harvest or for the Day of the Dead, was literally offered up in a coconut shell nestled inside two cupped terracotta hands. It was filled with umami and meaning, while this year’s delicate slices of scallop and young coconut fanned atop a bittersweet fenugreek wafer tasted like a dreamy memory at the tip of my tongue, just out of the reach of language. This destination restaurant took us on a journey indeed.