The City That Made Us Walk Ten Miles a Day Just So We Could Keep Eating

Latin America  |  Spring 2025

 Mexico City wasn't on the original lifetime pity list the way Machu Picchu or Petra was. It snuck up on us. You hear enough people describe CDMX as one of the greatest food cities on earth, and eventually that becomes its own kind of pull. A city of 22 million people with a culinary tradition going back thousands of years, a history so layered it practically has its own geology, and a street food culture that makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about what tacos could be.

Then we watched a Joshua Weissman YouTube where he literally ate tacos across the whole city for like 16 hours straight and we knew we had to go, so we went. We walked constantly. We ate constantly. We had the altitude to contend with. And we came home already talking about going back.

One thing nobody tells you enough about Mexico City before you go: it sits at 7,350 feet above sea level. That's higher than Denver. If you've done any high-altitude travel before (and we have, hello Cusco), you know that your body's reaction to that is its own thing entirely, unpredictable and occasionally humbling.

We were cautious about it going in. The first day we took it easy, drank water aggressively, and paid attention to how we felt. By the second day we both felt completely normal, which was a genuine relief. When altitude behaves, it changes the whole shape of the trip.

We spent a morning on a guided food tour of Mexico City's history with the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan literally under your feet and the Spanish colonial architecture built on top of it. The whole place is one civilization written over another.

There were several food stops woven into the tour, which is exactly how it should be done. Street vendor tacos and a stop at a local market. Not restaurant tacos. Street tacos from people who've been making them the same way for years, served on small tortillas with cilantro and onion and whatever salsa you choose from the row of containers on the cart.

There's a moment on any good food tour where you stop thinking about what you're tasting and start just tasting it. That happened early in CDMX. The food has a directness to it. Nothing is trying to be anything other than what it is.

We had dinner in the “trendy” area of the city with an octopus tostada to start. Now, We’ve had octopus a lot of places at this point, but a well-executed tostada is its own thing: the crunch of the tortilla, the tenderness of the octopus, whatever acid and heat the kitchen is working with. This was excellent.

Then nopal tartar. Nopal is cactus, and it's one of my favorite things in Mexican cooking. The texture, the slight tartness, the way it takes on whatever it's dressed with. As a tartar it was unexpected and completely right.

The dish that got us both was the flautas with bone marrow. Flautas are crispy rolled tacos, and serving them with bone marrow is the kind of decision that sounds indulgent to the point of excess and then turns out to be exactly as good as you hoped. Rich and savory and the kind of thing you talk about on the way back to the hotel.

We went to a seafood-focused restaurant for lunch on day two and I want to be clear that ordering more octopus was a completely deliberate choice and I would make it again.

The Mexican shrimp cocktail also deserves a moment here because it is not what you might be imagining. It's not cold boiled shrimp with cocktail sauce. It's a glass or bowl of citrus-bright, slightly spicy shrimp in a tomato and clamato-based liquid with avocado and cucumber, and you eat it with tostadas and it is one of the most refreshing things you can put in your body, especially when you've been walking in the sun all day.

The Baja-style fried fish tacos were the third anchor of that lunch. Crispy battered fish, crema, shredded cabbage, a lime wedge. Simple in theory, and in the right hands completely perfect.

We saved the best tacos for last, which was either a stroke of planning genius or just luck, and I'm going to claim it was intentional.

Birria tacos. If you haven't had proper birria, it's braised meat (traditionally goat, often beef in modern variations) with a consomme for dipping. You take the taco, you drag it through the broth, you eat it. Then you drink the consomme. It is the kind of food that makes you slightly angry at every other version of it you've had before, because now you know what it's supposed to taste like.

These were the best birria tacos we'd ever had. That's not hyperbole. We both said it at the same time.

The final dinner was at our hotel's rooftop restaurant, looking out over the Zócalo and the old city below. The Zócalo is one of the largest public squares in the world, and at night with the lights and the cathedral and the Palacio Nacional framing it, it's a genuinely spectacular view.

Mexico City operates at a scale that should feel overwhelming and somehow doesn't. It's enormous and alive, and yet within a few hours of arriving you find your rhythm in it. You start to understand the neighborhoods. You figure out what you're eating next. You stop worrying about the altitude.

The food is the obvious headline, and it fully deserves to be. But its real heart is its deep history AND extraordinary food AND the specific energy of a city that has been continuously inhabited and continuously fed for thousands of years. And did I mention the best churros of your life are here? Ok…Barcelona may tie for this award, but still…you don’t know how amazing a churro can be until you’ve had one here.