Food

Why you plan the trip around eating

Mexico City is one of the best food cities on earth, and the best of it is cheap. You do not need reservations at famous restaurants to eat brilliantly here. You need to know which stalls and market counters to stand at, and roughly when. Prices below are approximate; the cheap end is not the compromise, it is often the highlight.

The dishes and where to eat them

• Tacos al pastor. The city’s signature: chili-marinated pork shaved off a vertical spit, a sliver of pineapple flicked on top, doubled corn tortillas, onion, cilantro, salsa. Roughly 15 to 40 MXN a taco (approximate). Eat them at night at a busy corner taquería in Roma or the Centro, El Vilsito or Los Cocuyos being the classic pilgrimages. Go where there is a line and a spinning trompo.
• Tacos de canasta and guisado tacos at lunch, soft steamed tacos filled with beans, chicharrón, or potato, sold from baskets on street corners for a few pesos each.
• Quesadillas, tlacoyos, and huaraches off a market comal, especially at breakfast. A tlacoyo is a stuffed masa oval; in the capital ask whether the quesadilla comes with cheese, because here it often does not by default.
• Tamales and atole, and the very local guajolota, a tamal shoved inside a bread roll, sold from stands and bicycle carts on the morning commute. A carb bomb, and a real one.
• Barbacoa and consomé on weekend mornings, slow-steamed lamb in maguey leaves, ladled with its broth. This is the Sunday hangover cure.
• Churros con chocolate, late night or early morning, at the Centro’s long-running churrería near the Alameda.

Where to eat

• Markets. The single best strategy. Mercado de San Juan in the Centro for specialty bites and a stand-up jamón plate; Mercado de Medellín in Roma for a home-style comida corrida, the fixed lunch that runs roughly 90 to 140 MXN (approximate); and the food counters inside Mercado Roma for a cleaner, browsable version. Market fondas do full meals for very little. More on the market circuit in where locals go and across the markets pages.
• Street stalls in Roma, Condesa, and around the Centro. Follow the crowd and the smoke, and eat where locals are eating standing up.
• A sit-down mid-range meal: find a traditional cantina or a neighbourhood fonda for enchiladas, sopes, and a comida corrida with a beer. Unhurried, cheap, and the real everyday food.
• High-end, once. The city has a serious contemporary Mexican fine-dining scene, the kind that books out weeks ahead. Worth one splurge if the budget allows, but it is not the point of the trip.

Meal timing

Mexicans eat breakfast early and light (tamales, guajolotas, coffee), then the big meal, la comida, in the mid-afternoon between about 2 and 4 p.m., which is when fondas and comida corrida menus shine. Dinner is late and lighter, and that is when the al pastor trompos start spinning. So: market and tamales in the morning, comida corrida after 2, tacos al pastor after dark.

Order this, not that

At a taquería, order al pastor con todo off the trompo, not the pre-cooked “surtida” tray sitting under a lamp. And skip the tourist-strip “combo platters” near the Zócalo; walk two blocks to a counter with a queue of office workers and pay half for twice the food.