Just a block away from Mexico City’s financial district one unlikely food star sets up shop every morning. From Monday to Saturday, at La Abuela, 72-year-old Arnulfo Serafin Hernandéz feeds hungry office workers, commuters, neighbors, school kids, government officials and tourists from all over the world with one of the simplest Mexican dishes: tacos de canasta. He fries a corn tortilla a little in lard or oil, fills it with one of the prepared ingredients, folds it in half and places it carefully inside a canasta, or basket. He wraps the tacos in cloth and covers them with plastic to keep them warm. This also makes them moist and soft when serving, two of the most important characteristics of a good taco de canasta.

No matter how long your stay in Mexico City, you’ll simply never “taste it all.” In the cycle of each day, from tamales, atole and morning licuados to midday comida and evening tacos, this great culinary city is in perpetual motion. Want Yucatecan cuisine? Oaxacan? Restaurants abound where you can experience the cuisines of other regions, but the street food, fondas and market stalls in general reflect the regional cuisine of Estado de México. To properly understand “Mexican food” and its regional diversity, get out of town. Just a little more than two hours from Mexico City’s Centro Historico is a Pueblo Mágico called Tepoztlán. The bus ride there passes through three national parks along the way.

Mexico City is blessed with great weather all year round. Summer is not very hot because it’s the rainy season, and at 2,200 meters above sea level, things cool down very fast as soon as the rain starts falling. However, we still get our hot days, especially in the spring, and even early afternoons in summertime can make us break out in a sweat. Two of the many delicious ways we have to cool down are paletas (popsicles) and raspados (shaved ice). Paletas and raspados are popular treats all over Mexico, but they’re especially popular among schoolkids. It's common to see paleta and raspado vendors around schools waiting for eager little customers at the end of any school day.

“I’m a vegetarian – what will I eat in Mexico other than beans and rice?” Taco-madness has so consumed the world’s view of Mexican cuisine that the traditional mainstays of the diet often don’t get the billing they deserve. Beans, corn, squash, chilies and tomatoes are grown together in milpa farms – a biodynamic system of agriculture. Anyone who has ever grown anything knows: if you let a garden grow naturally, you’ll have an abundance of leafy greens that most of us call “weeds.” Well, in Mexico, nothing edible goes to waste. Just as every bit of meat from an animal is used, so are those weeds and all the other tender leafy bits.

For every level of society inside and outside Mexico, cantinas serve as both toxin and tonic for drink, song, jocularity, wit, mayhem and mishap. Tio Pepe, now thought to be the oldest such bar in the old Aztec capital, has provided both in equal measure since way before it received its present name in 1878. The cantina is nowadays a refuge for Mexican politicians, as the nation’s state department and the city’s supreme court sit in front of it. On a Tuesday at noon, we found a huddle of operatives gathered in a booth arguing amid cocktails.

Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula was home to some of the most important Maya cities during pre-Hispanic times. One can still get a glimpse the glory of those cities in ruins such as at Chichen Itza, considered one of the seven wonders of the modern world. On the ruins of a smaller Mayan city, T’ho, the Spanish conquistadors founded Mérida in 1542; since then, the city has been the economic, cultural and gastronomic center of the Yucatán Peninsula. We visited the city recently and fell in love immediately. Thanks to its proximity to the harbor of Puerto Progreso and the importance of the henequen industry – which turned the fibers of a native agave plant into rope – Merida’s culture, economy and architecture grew dazzlingly from the 19th through the early 20th century.

The northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa is nestled between the western Sierra Madre Mountains and the Gulf of California – putting it between surf and high desert, and the sea doth offer bounty. Be it gigantic squid, run-of-the-mill “fish” or marlin, the sinaloenses fear not the chopping block when it comes to seafood, and the state’s devil-may-care attitude (cooking with lime instead of actual heat) comes full force at Los Sinaloenses, located in trendy Roma Sur. The scrappy refuge lights onto a seafood-based, regional cuisine that manages to stand out in a nation with more than 9 km of coastline. It’s characterized by an array of ceviches, cocktails and other arthropod and piscine specialties.

In landlocked Mexico City – the nearest coast is 250 miles away – you might think that it would be difficult to find fresh seafood. However, ever since Aztec times, the ocean’s bounty has been brought to the valley daily. Back then, the Aztec emperors got their goods using a system of relay runners that covered those hundreds of miles from sea to city per day. Things require less footwork today: technology and Mexico’s highway system allow daily deliveries of fresh seafood to the capital from the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts. That said, feeding the Mexican capital’s fish craving still requires some hustle.

As Mexico’s northern neighbors look forward to early spring rains, in Central Mexico, the dry season will continue having its way with the landscape into May, sometime even June. The sun shines hotter by the day; dust blows scratchily against yellowed and crackly brush and scraggly, twisted branches of mesquite. Mexico City is located on desert plateau, and there, amongst the dry spines of the cacti, there are signs of new life well before the rainy season of summer officially begins. Red, orange, fuchsia and yellow blooms splash across the arid desert regions. From Sonora in the north, south beyond Mexico City to Puebla, even including parts of inland Veracruz and Oaxaca, the cacti burst into color.

We’d heard from a colleague that Renatos had the best barbacoa game in town, and we finally got the chance to confirm this claim for ourselves a couple of weeks ago. This family joint in Mexico City’s Azcapotzalco neighborhood has been in business for 55 years. Its owner, Renato Álvarez, gave us a little history lesson about his family and their barbacoa business. The barbacoa recipe prepared in Renatos is from the state of Hidalgo, famous for mutton slow-cooked in a pit dug into the ground.

For more than six decades now Café La Habana has served great coffee from the state of Veracruz and also sells the beans by the kilo. As in many Mexican restaurants, it offers café lechero, which is one or two shots (depending on the customer’s preference) of very strong espresso in a large glass that is then filled up with hot milk. One of our favorite drinks here, however, was the café bombón (roughly translated as “marshmallow coffee”), a cortado double espresso shot with ground coffee sprinkled on top.

Visiting the Jamaica plant and flower market is one of our favorite activities in Mexico City; we love getting lost in its green alleys and never fail to emerge with at least one new plant and a beautiful bouquet of flowers. And of course, we’re always on the lookout for new places to eat. Our favorite barbacoa joint is in this market, but when we want a different experience we head to the huarache alley, where several stalls offer this tasty Mexican specialty.

We were sitting at the counter, trying out the goods, when an elderly man who has clearly had a tough life copped a squat at the next bench. Leaning on a crutch, with only one eye and a very dinged-up forehead, he patted our shoulder to offer us a cup and a pitcher of fresh, cool water. We chatted a bit. Telling us he’s a regular and praising the preparation of the veggies at El Comunitario, he flashed his toothless, but endearing, smile, “What do you think of how much people are paid here?” It was a genuinely pleasant immersion into the social whirl of this community kitchen, located in one of the more troubled corners in the heart of Mexico City’s Centro. We began to pour water into our other neighbors’ cups and chatted with the cooks in the kitchen, enjoying some great, incredibly cheap grub.

Deservedly famous for its rich food traditions, the state of Oaxaca is one of our favorite culinary destinations in Mexico. But with Oaxaca City lying nearly 300 miles southeast of Mexico City, we’re always on the lookout for places to satisfy our appetite for Oaxacan cuisine in the D.F. Specializing in tlayudas, one of Oaxaca’s most typical foods, the recently opened Aguamiel is a very welcome addition to the local dining scene.

A market with a million stories, the Mercado de la Merced lies sprawling across some 12 blocks in Mexico City, offering a mind-boggling array of goods, as it has for centuries. Operating in the northwest corner, next to the 17th-century Santo Tomás Apóstol La Palma church, is a 67-year-old association of dulcerías – purveyors of sweets and candies – with 154 stalls selling traditional goodies in elaborate and tantalizing displays. Willie Wonka would eat his heart out. According to the association’s president, Daniel Jiménez Chavarría, it is the only market of its kind in Latin America, and it is deeply ingrained in the traditions that thrive across Mexico. “What we sell is purely artisanal, and we are offering a different presentation,” said Jiménez, a silver-haired man with glasses, describing how these small stalls differ from their larger competitors.