Category Archives: Mexican Food

Five More Places to Eat Breakfast in Oaxaca

It could be the reverberation of a night of mezcal, but breakfast tastes better to me in Oaxaca. It might also be that it satisfies my need for variety. Breakfast here can be decadent like mole, fresh like green juice, comforting like hot chocolate. It can be enjoyed in the corner of a restaurant playing Joni Mitchell, it can be in the halls of a busy market. I am into all of the possibilities. Here are a few places I visited this last trip.

Mercado Sánchez Pascuas

The juice bar at this neighborhood market is bumping club music at 7 am every day, and it gets me so pumped! They have pitchers ready to go, they have multiple blenders going, they’re chopping papaya and strawberries for your fruit salads, they have flashing lights, and they will get you your order before the track ends. There are many things I love about how straight up Mexican juice bars are, and one of them is the drink names. In the U.S. juices are often aspirational: the cleanup, cosmic cocoa, golden cure, you know what I’m sayin. But in Mexico they’re prescriptive, so in a juice bar no wider than five feet, the walls are plastered with juice combos labeled for heath problems: gastritis, diabetes, exhaustion… Shout over the music, “I’ll have indigestion please” and you’ll be set with an excellent start to your morning.

Immediately across the hall (the stand second from the left) is a woman making memelas and her guisados are a cut above the rest. Memelas are masa vessels covered with beans and cheese and a topping of your choice. You can also get the same topping in a quesadilla. The costilla de res is where it’s at here for meat, and the mushrooms, ever so humble and overlooked next to the flor de calabaza, are great here too.

La Cosecha

For a solid breakfast I often relied on this market with organic goods and products from small farmers, as well as a bunch of stands serving hot food. In the center are shaded picnic tables, so you can order at multiple stands and they’ll find you and bring you your food. I also came here sometimes when I just wanted a caldo de gallina or felt like picking up some dried mangos for a road trip.

One of the drink highlights for me was a stand serving pozontle. Oaxaca has the greatest diversity of cacao drinks in Mexico, and this one includes cacao, panela, a root called cocomecatl and granillo de maiz. It’s frothy and lightly grainy and chocolately, and served in a giant jicara. If your hangover brain is struggling between choosing sweet chocolatey comfort and caffeine, no fear get a choco-café from the guy who sells coffee and he’ll stir it up in a clay pitcher over the fire. There is also a juice stand, which takes so long they might be hand-plucking the parsley from a secret garden but you’re enjoying your giant chocolate beverage anyway.

My favorite stand was introduced to me by T.J. Steele, who buys his corn for his Brooklyn restaurant, Claro, from this cheesemaker and corn farmer couple. The cheesemaker and cook has big eyes and a huge smile, and her all natural guayaba yogurt which you can take home is the thing I want to eat every morning. Anything with cheese here is a winner, try the empanadas to start. She also has ricotta and quesillo to take home.

El Fortincito

Beatles paraphernalia, black and white photos of old Oaxaca, and plastic 1980s style office chairs braid the decades weirdly together at this family restaurant north of the centro. 

There is also a  little fetish for the time that never existed: the walls carry artwork by Jesus Helguera, you’ve probably seen his work from the 1940s mostly on calendars, romantic scenes of Mexican life with characters that might be dressed in traditional indigenous textiles but look European. The Aztec warrior carrying the Barbie-bodied white lady with long hair over a smoking volcano, for instance. The important point is that the food is not quirky, it’s tasty and affordable. 

I love the decadence of a Mexican breakfast, and this is a place for that. We ordered fresh juice, hot chocolate, coffee, atole, and they brought over a basket of pan de yema, an airy bread made with egg yolks. My housemate was anxious to try the estofada, a mole you might not see as often at restaurants. This one was certainly on the sweet side, with flavors of almonds and raisins, and served in enchilada form. They offer lunch too and if I were to come back I would try their caldos, of which they had a bunch, and their moles. Open from 7 am to 7 pm. 

Gourmand Delicatessen

Being in Oaxaca for six weeks, I appreciated this deli and all-day restaurant with a bunch of different offerings. If you want to get good bread, artisanal Mexican cheese, and cured meats (the lengua especially) to compliment your market produce at home, this is the place. If you want a well-made cappuccino and a bagel with perfectly cooked eggs and cheese that makes you feel like a kid again this is the place. If you want to be a responsible grown up and have a salad, this is also the place. You can also get a meal here at anytime of the day (if you miss the comida window in Oaxaca the variety of casual food for dinner can get slim). They have a sweet artisanal beer selection too.

Chepiche Café

Chepiche Café is like the neighborhood it lives in: so peaceful it feels far from Niños Heroes, the busy PanAmerican highway that cuts through Oaxaca city even though it is a few blocks away. Xochimilco is lined with stone streets and walls, bougenvia that hangs over colorful garage doors, and on the right corner the sounds of weaving looms. Chepiche Café fits in. There’s a big patio with enough leafy big plants and space to make you feel like you are dining alone. Joni Mitchel played in the background. There’s just enough cement, Easter-egg pastel colors on the walls and chairs, and pockets of shade under lime tree blossoms for it to feel cool on an ominously warm morning.

I was tempted by the breakfast torta ahogada but I ended up trying a dish of plantains, quesillo melted with beans and wrapped in hoja santa, floating in a mild chile-tomato sauce with two poached eggs. It had all those textures and flavors you want together: creamy, salty, spicy, sweet with the singular earthiness of hoja santa and black beans.

For more breakfast options in Oaxaca visit these older posts here and here.

Seven Places to Eat and Drink in Mexico City


I recently went back to Mexico City and while I discovered that I would be happy sipping on a Victoria and eating chile-covered fruit floating on the Xochimilco canals all day, here are some stationary food and drink options to mix it up!

Ricas Quesadillas y Tlacoyos Light
It’s most likely that nearby each tourist destination in Mexico City there is a street food stall that is a destination in itself. A few blocks away from El Museo de Arte Popular there is a line of vendors sheltered by red plastic tarps. At this stand you can enjoy a quesadilla or tlacoyo (a torpedo-shaped masa snack that’s stuffed) with the backdrop of a church’s blue and yellow stained glass windows across the sidewalk.

The masa here serves as a vessel for guisados, which literally translates to stews or braised meats, but can be different toppings that sit in cazuelas waiting to be scooped into a taco or other masa creation. We sat at the short stools and ordered three quesadillas filled with squash blossoms, huitlacoche and mushrooms. The blue corn  masa tortillas are freshly pressed, coming off the comal like the color of a flame’s heart. Quesadillas can be made with requeson and/or quesillo oaxaca, and there are meat guisado options too. Sitting on the sidewalk at a table decorated only with salsa, limes and salt, eating my favorite childhood snack reminded me that often eating one dish made just right can be more exquisite than anything at a fancy restaurant.
Closed on Sundays. On Av. de Balderas between Independence and Juarez.

El Auténtico Pato Manila

I’m still confused by what Manila has to do with this place, but continuing on the theme of doing one thing and one thing well, this is a taqueria devoted to duck, one of the few meats you typically don’t stumble across at  taquerias. The narrow Condesa restaurant fits 15 seats, half of them around the kitchen counter.  The only spots of color in the white-tiled space are a portrait of Mao (interesting), a blue speaker that lights up, and the jamaica, tamarind, and sweet and sour sauces on the counter. The signature dish here is the Tacos Kim: roasted duck, plum sauce, carnitas, cucumber, and green onions on a flour tortilla. The dish mimics the fixings for pecking duck, which the owners were inspired by while traveling in China. Here the mandarin pancake is subbed for a flour tortilla. Between the plum sauce and the flour tortilla, it’s a fun mingling of food memories if you grew up with both genres of flavors.  For a more Mexican take, go for the Tacos Manila: duck, beans, epazote on a corn tortilla (although I didn’t find them as tasty).


There are a few beer options here, and if you’re smart you’ll flag down the camote and roasted platano vendor circling the block for some dessert (Thanks Jeronimo!) $70 pesos for a plate of four tacos, and they have tortas on the weekend.

Cafe Avellaneda

Sometimes when traveling it’s the small victories and not the over-the-top meals that are the most memorable. The coconut crema on the side of the road, the copita of mezcal in a dive bar, the day-changing coffee on a busy city trip. At Cafe Avellaneda that was the coffee drink I had, made with tamarindo, espresso, juniper and tonic. The tartness of the tamarindo played with the bitterness of the espresso and the tonic mellowed things out.

This tiny cafe and bar a few blocks away from the touristy area in Coyoacán opens up to the street and has a few places to sit at the copper counter. There are a number of coffee and tea cocktails on the menu, however the cafe works with small coffee farms and has a range of specialty beans from Mexico, so even the straight-up is special here (the owner is a barista competition champion too).

Pasillo del Humo

Pasillo del Humo is a project by the son of Celia Florian, one of Oaxaca’s culinary heroes (read an interview with her I did last year) and I am so pleased that we came here for brunch. As all proper breakfasts should begin, we were immediately served café de la olla (choice of hot chocolate too) and given a selection of golden brown pastries: the chocolate croissant was buttery perfection and the concha was fluffy and not too dense, one of the best I’ve had. The breakfast menu offers some of my favorite Oaxacan staples, like chilaquiles with choice of guajillo sauce, moles or frijol, with an optional fried egg or tasajo. There’s a tamale plate with a trio of yellow mole, black mole, and bean tamales. I had the cazuela de huevo y chapulines: grilled hoja santa, melted quesillo, chapulines (grasshoppers) and a fried egg in salsa chile pasilla mixe. It was earthy and tart, flavors true of chapulines and hoja santa, which might be intense if you’re not familiar with them.

The space is on the top floor of a food hall in the Condesa, with high ceilings decorated by murals of Istmeño lace headdresses and embroidery blooming over the tops of wooden panels. The kitchen is open, bookended by piles of pastries on one side and colorful tortilla baskets on the other. It would be a great place for lunch as well.

Xaman

I’m not really recommending this place. More just compelled to comment on it. Part SNL parody of Ojai, part mixologist haven, this bar’s schitck is incorporating pre-Hispanic ingredients into craft cocktails. Punch bowls are served in jicaras and rosemary garnishes are lit on fire as they leave the bar. A guy with a man bun walks through the floor periodically with copal.

On one hand, the space is beautifully designed with apothecary-like bottles behind the bar, crystal cups of rose petals and ginger sitting on the counter, and elegant wood paneling and private booths. Also, I like drinks with cactus fruit and zapote shrub. On the other hand, I wonder how the people who spend and make money at Xaman identify with and give credit to the indigenous people who have kept alive traditions and knowledge of these plants and fruits. This is why I’m not wholeheartedly recommending this place, but I think it captures a trend we should talk about. The DJ here was one of the better we heard, with disco beats getting us up to dance in the copal smoke (I’m rolling my eyes at myself).

PataNegra
Come to this long-time neighborhood bar for live Son Jarocho, music from Veracruz, on Sunday evenings around 6 or 7. There was one professional dancer with the band, and a whole bunch of impressive audience participants. In the evenings it feels like PataNegra is a low key tapas bar, but as soon as the live music stopped the playlist went right to pop and the lights went down so expect a change in the vibe. Look out for other shows as well, they are known to bring in some well-known acts.

Felina
If you like a classic cocktail with a side of Don Draper fantasy, come here. The low lit corner bar feels like a mid-century posh library with swanky velvet chairs and couches, patterned wallpaper and circle mirrors.

They’re know for their classics, but I was pleased sipping on a drink with orange blossom, lemon, mezcal and ruda (a bitter herb) for garnish. With Brazilian soul on the turntables this is a sexy spot to lounge before a night out.

In between meals:

The Suprema Corte de Justicia in the historic center has what are probably some of the most moving and under-admired murals in the city. Down each stairwell of the Supreme Court are murals interpreting the theme of justice. The History of Justice in Mexico by Rafael Cauduro is the most contemporary and chronicles the history of abuse by the government against its citizens. It’s hyper-real with police officers in riot gear poking out through the windows and torture cell basements at the bottom of the stairwell. It’s a fierce cry for justice in a building where it has so often been denied.

The Museo Dolores Olmedo is housed in a 16th century hacienda with peacocks and hairless Xoloiztcuintle dogs roaming around the property. Olmedo was a wealthy business woman who administered Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s estates, so there are rooms full of their work as well as photos of the couple, all interspersed with a big collection of mostly pre-colombian art. A perfect day would be to come here in the morning and then head over to the nearby Xochimilco canals for snacks and beer on a boat (it’s good to leave the canals by 4 pm, when they get crowded with college kids).

Thanks to my sisters, Jenny and Kyana for scouting a few of these places and being the best company, and to Jeronimo for showing us around!