MEXICO CITY — A small line forms next to wire cage displays holding hats and decorative underwear. Fragrant smoke rises from a flattop beyond it.
Fellow visitors told us to expect an hourlong wait for tacos here. We’re pleased that just six people are in front of us.
Diners holding hot white plates crowd around a wooden stool with two sauces: one pale green with diced white onions and another dark red and accented by bits of chilis. People in Balenciaga shoes stand next to others in tired Nikes. One man wields a selfie stick.
He’s filming a man — with silver hair slicked to the side and tattoos covering his forearms — who slaps wide, flat pieces of steak onto the sizzling surface. He intermittently flips them with a silver spatula, squirting each piece with lime. The beef and pork sizzle with vigor.
Taquería El Califa de León in Mexico City serves four types of tacos.
To his right, a woman feeds fresh masa through a hand-operated tortilla machine. She’s standing on a step stool to reach the old-school silver contraption.
We order each of the four tacos on the menu — gaonera (beef filet), bistec (beef steak), chuleta (pork chop) and costilla (beef rib) — behind where she stands. We wait near the worn griddle, where the fresh-made tortillas are fanned for a kiss of heat. Sampling the entire menu at Taquería El Califa de León costs 287 pesos, about $15.
There’s beauty in the simplicity of the offering at this decades-old taco stand, which earned celebrity status in May when the Michelin Guide released its first Mexican edition. Taquería El Califa de León made history, becoming the first taqueria in the world to earn a star from the French guide.
Its tacos are wonderful, with large hunks of meat sinking into the pliable, earthy tortillas. But then I think back to the others we’ve had over the past few days.
The colorful one with diced bits of green sausage. The rolled one suffused with orange meat and onions softened from the fatty drippings. The crunchy flat one hooded in slow-roasted pork and pickled red onions. The blue corn one folded and filled with a corn fungus called huitlacoche.
There are thousands of taco stands in Mexico City. Many are clustered along Calle López — a famous food street in a part of town known as Colonia Centro. It’s hard to choose just one.
Luckily you don’t have to — many of the city’s top tacos cost $1-$2. For a better understanding of this country’s cuisine and culture, start your Mexico City travels by sampling several.
Traveling to Mexico City
An air of enchantment surrounds North America’s most populous city. Friends are eager to share their dining and drinking recommendations. Many lists divulge the same names: Rosetta, Odette, Contramar. The arrival of the Michelin Guide and its coveted stars only emboldened the food fascination for the city.
The air is crisp, cool and bugless in late June. We’re told it’s the rainy season, but we see the sun almost every day. When there is a downpour, we dip into a cozy bar for a cocktail or generous pour of natural wine.
Life moves impressively fast here, particularly in the historic and business district, Colonia Centro.
Cars crowd into tight roads, drivers abandoning lanes and honking their horns. Men in suits with loosened ties stride down tight sidewalks near bikers racing to their destination. Americans delight in chance run-ins with friends they didn’t expect to see so far from home. Locals grab hurried lunches packed in Tupperware next to tourists posing for selfies.
And then suddenly, it slows to a relaxing halt in other parts of the sprawling metropolis.
Watch everyday happenings from a bench beneath the trees in one of the city’s many parks, where a man in sweats is dragged down the sidewalk by three large leashed dogs.
A soccer team winds down after a match over juice boxes. People play pickleball and ride skateboards. A couple shares a kiss. Men and women griddle tortillas and blend salsas on the side of the street nearby.
Ricos Tacos Toluca in the Centro Histórico of Mexico City near the Mercado De San Juan.
Evolution of Mexican food
There are more than 11,000 registered taco stands in Mexico City, according to The New York Times. How does one navigate a food scene so large?
Start by looking into the country’s past.
Paulina Gutiérrez, a chef, journalist and local food guide, grew up in Mexico City. In her view, the city’s history and its culinary scene are intertwined, representing the confluence of cultural influences that saturated the area over the years.
Indigenous people first cultivated chilies, and Native Americans refined nixtamalization to make tortillas. Spain ruled Mexico for hundreds of years after the fall of the Aztec Empire, leaving an indelible mark on the country’s cuisine. French and Lebanese immigrants traversed the Atlantic Ocean for Mexico in droves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, influencing baking and cooking practices across the country.
Take tacos al pastor — pork cooked on a rotating spit with fire emanating from the top and singeing the meat. The now well-known Mexican preparation was inspired by the Lebanese people who settled in the Yucatán peninsula in the late 1800s.
That influence shines through at Mexico City taquerias today, said Gutiérrez, who attended culinary school in Massachusetts and worked at restaurants in the U.S. before returning home to lead tours with a company named Club Tengo Hambre.
Cochinita pibil traces its roots to the Yucatán Peninsula.
She leads us to El Huequito Tacos Gourmet, which has been serving al pastor since 1959. Onions rest under a hunk of spinning meat at the roadside destination, once visited by Anthony Bourdain. They’re placed in a tortilla with bits of shaved meat and folded into a miniature wrap. The process is repeated over and over again.
Gutiérrez points out the citric marinade and seasonings. It reminds her of meats in the Yucatán peninsula — like cochinita pibil.
El Huequito represents a still-thriving culinary side of Mexico City that is appreciated by both locals and visitors. Other spots are catering to the increasing number of tourists flocking to the city each year, Gutiérrez said.
“It’s so settled and it’s so grounded, the food that we have in Mexico,” Gutiérrez said. “However, I do believe that certain ingredients are changing to the palate of Americans and Europeans that visit so much.”
What’s changed?
It’s easy to forget you’re in Mexico while walking the streets of La Condesa, Roma Norte and Polanco. There are expensive stores and coffee shops and guava pastries and craft cocktails and high-end hotels with rooftop views of the city. It feels European.
The changes to Mexico City are impossible to ignore — even for first-time visitors. As American tourists and remote workers flocked here post-pandemic, the restaurant scene shifted as some chefs catered to their new clientele. Now, menus are translated in English. The salsas are less spicy. Decades-old destinations have been superseded by trendy new establishments.
We’re staying in La Condesa and become painfully aware of tourists’ contribution to the rising housing crisis, as areas like this become overrun with hotels and Airbnbs. Gentrification has manifested in this and other neighborhoods.
San Jacinto Market in Mexico City.
We ride 25 minutes south to El Bazar Sábado, an indoor-outdoor Saturday market in San Ángel. Stands sell handcrafted earrings, belts, purses, artwork and picture frames decorated with pressed flowers.
When we finish strolling the shops, we seek out a noteworthy quesadilla stand in a colorful courtyard near the heart of the weekly market.
We walk and walk and walk — thankfully it’s 75 degrees and not 90 — before finally asking for help. A vendor points to a trendy tree-covered restaurant that's said to take guests on a “gastronomic journey.” Before the pandemic, though, it was the place where women “in kerchiefs hand-turn(ed) fresh tortillas on blazing griddles, and gentlemen in crisp vests deliver(ed) frosty margaritas to guests seated in the lacy shade of the courtyard’s trees,” we read online.
The casual quesadilla eatery closed and this modern restaurant has taken its place, we’re told. The jewelry seller directing us lamented the loss before suggesting we visit the nearby San Jacinto Market.
Once inside, we stride by a stand with hanging bags of chicharrón and another serving hamburgers and pancakes to the locals who fill the seats. We think of eating Mexican food in a U.S. food court and note how different this feels.
A few paces away, a man methodically chops pork, placing the shreds inside a pair of corn tortillas. We pay for the cilantro-sprinkled tacos with the spare change in our pockets.
A few years ago, they might have been showered in the herb that first arrived via Spanish conquistadors in Mesoamerica as coriander seeds. The country’s historic drought, which is leaving its mark on Mexico’s beer industry, has left the taquerias that provide CMDX workers with fast and cheap meals paying exorbitant prices for cilantro. Fearful of losing business, most owners have not raised prices but are now forced to use cilantro sparingly.
Mexico City is remarkably affordable but not in Polanco, where well-dressed diners go to eat at two-Michelin-star Pujol, whose entrance is watched over by two security guards. It’s one of two restaurants that received a pair of stars in the inaugural Michelin guide. Sixteen other destinations, including Taquería El Califa de León, were handed one.
We decide to try Esquina Común, another eatery honored with one star. We make our reservation through Instagram, and a message with the address is sent the day before our 7 p.m. dinner.
We’re dropped off at a coffee shop and stopped by a young man in a white shirt with a 3D “E” stamped on his left shoulder. He leads us past a barista frothing milk for a cappuccino and up a steep metal staircase to a second-story apartment.
We reach the top to the smell of incense burning. A woman in a leather jacket greets us near a small kitchen, whose white cupboards look more like the ones in my childhood home than a professional kitchen. She asks where we would like to sit. We select a two-top that overlooks the small team of chefs led by Ana Dolores González.
A six-course meal ensues. There are sweet plantains and miniature croquettes topped with edible flowers and wagyu beef, which rests in a banana leaf next to our bottle of South African wine. We struggle not to mentally compare Esquina Común to Taquería El Califa de León, given their dual standing as one-Michelin-star restaurants.
The two dining experiences are, in some ways, worlds apart. Together, though, they’re beautiful representations of the city’s diverse culinary scene. One provides the framework; the other showcases where that base can take chefs who yearn to experiment and innovate.
Knowing where Mexico City has been is essential to understanding what it’s like today.