We describe Batyrev’s construction of the mirror to a family of Calabi–Yau hypersurfaces in a Fano toric variety, based on polar duality for lattice polytopes. We revisit the example of the quintic threefold in this language, and briefly mention connections with later developments, such as the Batyrev–Borisov construction for complete intersections in Fano toric varieties, and the Gross–Siebert program.