Sampling Flavours in Puerto Vallarta a Hands-On Delight for Pauline and Gerry Clark Pauline Clark - Sault Star
go to original April 8, 2017

Pauline Clark / Special to The Star Gerry Clark makes guacamole at Rosie's

Six times in Puerto Vallarta and we still want to go back?

“What’s the big attraction?” people ask.

“We haven’t done everything we want to do there yet,” I answer. And while that’s partly true, it goes deeper than that.

First, there’s the food. Except … I’d be lying if I led you to believe our annual trek is all about Mexican cuisine. We don’t even eat Mexican food for much of the time we’re there.

There are plenty of restaurants in Puerto Vallarta (PV). You might even call it a food lover’s paradise with top-notch restaurants featuring chefs and foods from around the world.

But this year we wanted to pay more attention to genuine Mexican fare. A cooking class was the perfect place to start. And so, a few weeks before our trip, and with the aid of Google and some recommendations from TripAdvisor, we found Rosie (Rosaelia Romero Rodríguez). She’s the master chef behind Rosie’s Vallarta Cooking.

I’d seen signs for cooking classes previously, some offered by the chefs at those fine restaurants. But we wanted more. We wanted a real Mexican experience.

And so, for the hefty price of $84 US per person, we were going to spend a few hours cooking in an authentic Mexican home. It didn’t us take long to figure out the day was going to be worth every American dollar.

We took a bus from our boutique hotel, Casa Dona Susana, in the romantic zone (Zona Romantica) in old town PV. Unlike the more “Americanized” resort areas, this part of the city has a small-town atmosphere amidst a setting of cobblestone streets, white stucco, and red-tiled roofs — and this year, an overabundance of condos going up.

We were meeting Rosie a few miles away, at Starbucks in a mall near the marina. Yes, there’s a Starbucks in Mexico. There’s also McDonald’s, Outback, Subway and other familiar chains –but we tend to avoid them.

Rosie was easy to spot, looking every bit the tour guide in blue jeans, a pale yellow polo shirt and identification on a lanyard around her neck. Later, she’d transform into a professional chef, complete with white hat and jacket.

After introductions, our journey into real Mexican food began.

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