We all know and love the classic dishes and drinks like nachos and margaritas, but real Mexican food is so much more than just tacos and burritos!
As we ate our way around Mexico we learnt its cuisine is rooted in ancient cultures, it's diverse and delicious. We will remember the country for its tastes alone. Mexico is indeed a foodie's paradise.
There's no denying it, Mexico is the land of food. Most towns and neighbourhoods have markets filled with interesting food stands. On nearly every street you will see food vendors at any time of the day, or night. And there's an infinite range of restaurants to choose from. There is no shortage of options for delicious food in Mexico! Keep reading to see more information about the food as well as recommendations and our top highlights.
We travelled around Mexico in June 2022 for nearly 3 weeks, exploring the different sides and tastes of the country. For more info about our grand Mexican adventure, click here.
What to expect
When eating local dishes, expect a lot of flavour, colours and variety. Spice will nearly always be an option, they tend to serve the hot sauces next to your food, along with other dips and toppings. This way you can calculate your spice. But, warning, just double-check if it is a dip or a hot sauce before dipping and double dipping - I certainly leant the hard (hot) way!
Local cuisine reigns supreme, but if you do want a night off from tacos, we found there are many international food options, especially in bigger cities like Mexico City. However, when we had non-Mexican meals we felt a bit like we were cheating on Mexico!
Street Food & Markets
My big foodie tip? Go where the locals go. With countless authentic markets to eat your way around and street food on every corner, I promise you will never go hungry.
Mexico is one of the best countries in the world for street food, but just like the rest of Mexican food, street foods in Mexico vary according to the region.
Tacos
One of my favourite tacos is the Cochinita Pibil. It's a traditional Yucatec Mayan slow-roasted pork dish from the Yucatán Peninsula. They are lovely and juicy, and go down well with a michelada - making for a good hangover cure!
Gourmet
The incredible popularity of Mexican staples like tacos and beans means that Mexican fine dining often goes overlooked. But contemporary cooking in Mexico is ever-growing.
The best meal of our trip was at Tierra y Cielo, a restaurant in the historic centre of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. It offers a gourmet fine dining experience in an old colonial-style house and uses local ingredients, taking inspiration from ancient Mayan recipes.
The restaurant is part of the gastronomic hotel that bears the same name. Its goal is to rescue Chiapas food through its Regional and Author Cuisine, in this case, the renowned chef Marta Zepeda.
They serve typical dishes of the area but with the gourmet touch that makes for an unforgettable experience.
My favourite dishes from the night were the handmade tacos, which mixed black corn with white corn, to get black and white streaks, then filled with sausage.
Other highlights were the 12 hours of slow-cooked pork - extremely rich - and the fish ceviche, it was delicate and refreshing.
The cocktails using smoky Mezcal and Mexican wine were excellent too.
For our meal, we paid around 50£ each. We were happy as we could never have got such an amazing and high-quality meal with many cocktails and drinks each in London for that price!
Drinks & cocktails
Tequila and Mezcal are the signature alcoholic drinks of Mexico. Drink them as a shot - if you're brave! - as a cocktail or as a beer concoction. They are both agave spirits and some of the oldest spirits in the world.
Michelada is a must-try. It's a beer-based cocktail with a spicy kick. Since it is easily adaptable to different tastes and preferences, Michelada can be prepared in a variety of ways with beer as a base, and the addition of lime juice, salt, assorted spices, hot sauces, and peppers.
Due to its spiciness, Michelada is often drunk as a hangover cure. The variety prepared with clam and tomato juice is known as Clamato, while the version with Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, chilli, and salt goes under the name Cubana.
Coyoacán, Mexico City's best food neighbourhood
Coyoacán is a fabulous area of Mexico City known for the Frida Kahlo museum Casa Azul. We recommend heading there to check it out and walk down its cobbled streets, squares and markets full of food stalls.
A must is visiting the Mercado de Coyoacan, just a few blocks from the Frida Kahlo Museum. It’s a mix between a local market and a tourist market with tightly-packed alleyways of local goods as well as many food vendors and sit-down restaurants.
We saw many locals grabbing lunch on plastic stools, endless food stands, fruit, toys, colourful textiles, different spices and smells, and piñatas hanging from the ceiling. It's a fantastic sensory overload.
When we visited Coyoacán It was market day, which meant the market extended out to the streets and up to the plazas. I recommend going there when the market is on, it was so much fun seeing all the different stands, and the atmosphere was buzzing.
We did not see many foreigners and most people seemed like locals who came out to enjoy their Sunday with their families.
We wandered to Plaza Hidalgo, a big shady square with tall trees, more food vendors, bars, and restaurants. We plotted ourselves at the local corner bar for the next hours to people-watch, and drink beers, classmates, micheladas, and margaritas.
Breakfast
You’ve undoubtedly heard the time-old saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Well, in Mexico, this is truer than ever. Breakfasts in Mexico are nothing short of impressive and certainly beat a bowl of cereal or toast any day.
Traditional breakfasts tend to include tortillas, a type of sauce (Verde, Rojo), eggs, beans, cilantro and cheese.
Chilaquiles are one of the most popular breakfast dishes, featuring lightly-fried tortillas cut into smaller pieces. They are then topped with salsa, eggs, cheeses, cream, or chicken, and served with a generous side of refried beans.
Hotels tend to offer generous breakfasts included in your stay. For example, in our hotel in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, they allowed us to choose from an extensive breakfast menu. Dishes included different variations of tortillas with eggs, beans, plantain and sauce. They would also serve different breads and jams, fresh coffee and juice.
Late-night food
Bar food and street food are found in Mexico late into the night. For instance, one night in Mexico City we headed to the hip area of Roma, to check out the trendy gourmet food market: Mercadoroma. By 11 pm most food stands in the market were closing for the night, but up on the rooftop area, there's a fun bar which serves late-night food with a DJ and a great atmosphere.
I recommend checking Mercadoroma out. Personally, I felt right in my element, singing reggeaton loudly while eating tacos and sipping on mezcal - heaven right?
Mexican Ingredients
From street food to gourmet, there are a few staple ingredients you will see on repeat and across Mexico, check them out and be prepared to get used to them:
Corn
Corn is the main source of grain in Mexican cuisine. It's most commonly dried and ground to make masa harina, a dough used to make corn tortillas for tacos, quesadillas, burritos, and totopos.
We noticed that corn can be of different colours. For example, we saw black corn and thus black tortillas. 
Corn is also used in other Mexican dishes including soups, stews, tortilla chips and atole — a traditional, thick corn-based drink.
Beans
As a paste, a side, a dip or a sauce. Beans act as the perfect counterpart to the chilies and spices that are so popular in Mexico.
Cheese
Cheese is an important part of Mexican food, adding a salty, savoury dimension to tacos, soups, tamales, and more.
Meat
It surprised me how big of a meat-eating country Mexico is. Perhaps consumption is linked to ancestral elements as well as to agri-food globalisation. Menus have mostly chicken, pork and beef options.
Toppings & sauces
Most tables will have little pots and bowls with white onions, cilantro, pickled onions, pico de gallo, and homemade salsa for you to help yourself, which is a lot of fun to try different ingredients and spices.
Mole
A sauce made with a blend of dried chiles, spices, seeds, and a delicious touch of Mexican chocolate. It is used to top dishes like Chicken Flautas, a classic Mexican dish every foodie should try. They use long and thin fried tacos, stuffed with juicy chicken and bathed in mole.
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