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

MEXICO CITY (CDMX) Latin America | April 2025

Mexico City wasn't on our original list the way Machu Picchu or Petra was. It snuck up on us. You hear enough people call CDMX one of the greatest food cities on earth and eventually that starts pulling at you. Twenty-two million people, a food culture going back thousands of years, and a street food scene that made us rethink what a taco could even be.

Then we watched a Joshua Weissman video where he ate tacos across the city for something like 16 hours straight, and that was it. We booked it. We walked constantly, ate constantly, dealt with the altitude, and came home already talking about going back.

One thing nobody tells you enough: Mexico City sits at 7,350 feet. Higher than Denver. If you've done high-altitude travel before (we have, Cusco says hi), you know your body just does its own thing up there, no warning.

We took it easy the first day, drank a stupid amount of water, and paid attention. By day two we both felt normal, which honestly felt like winning something. When the altitude cooperates, it changes the whole trip.

We spent one morning on a guided food tour where you're literally standing on top of Tenochtitlan with Spanish colonial buildings stacked over it. Street tacos and a stop at a local market, not restaurant food. People who've been making tacos the same way for years, served on tiny tortillas with cilantro, onion, and whatever salsa you pick off the cart.

Somewhere in there you stop thinking about what you're eating and just eat it. That happened early.

Dinner that night was in the trendier part of town, and we started with an octopus tostada. We've had octopus plenty of places, but a tostada done right is its own thing: crunch, tender octopus, the right hit of acid and heat. This one nailed it.

Then nopal tartar. Nopal is cactus, and it's one of my favorite things in Mexican cooking, that texture and slight tartness. As a tartar it shouldn't have worked as well as it did.

The dish that actually got us both was flautas with bone marrow. Crispy rolled tacos with bone marrow sounds like it's trying too hard, and then it's just... exactly as good as it sounds. Rich, savory, the kind of thing we kept bringing up on the walk back to the hotel.

Lunch the next day was at a seafood spot, and yes, I ordered more octopus. Fully on purpose. Would do it again.

The Mexican shrimp cocktail needs its own paragraph because it's nothing like what you're picturing. Forget cold shrimp and ketchup sauce. This is citrus-bright, a little spicy, shrimp swimming in a tomato-clamato base with avocado and cucumber, eaten with tostadas. After a morning of walking in the sun, it might be the single most refreshing thing we ate all trip.

Baja-style fried fish tacos rounded that lunch out. Crispy battered fish, crema, shredded cabbage, lime. Simple on paper. Perfect in the right hands.

We saved the best tacos for last, which I'm going to call intentional planning even though it was probably luck.

Birria. If you haven't had real birria, it's braised meat, goat traditionally, often beef now, with a consomme for dipping. You drag the taco through the broth, eat it, then drink the broth. Best birria tacos either of us has ever had, and we said so out loud, at the same time, without planning to.

Last dinner was on our hotel's rooftop, looking out over the Zócalo, one of the biggest public squares in the world. At night, with the cathedral and the Palacio Nacional lit up around it, it's genuinely one of those views.

CDMX should feel overwhelming at that scale and somehow doesn't. It's enormous, and within a few hours you've found your rhythm. You start recognizing neighborhoods. You stop thinking about the altitude and start thinking about what you're eating next

The food is the obvious headline and it earns it. But it's really the history underneath it, layers of a city that's been feeding people for thousands of years, that makes it stick. Also, and I will die on this hill: the best churros of my life are here. Barcelona can fight for second place.