With a simple façade, the unassuming Fonda Margarita sits next to a carwash and wouldn’t attract much attention if it weren’t for the line out the door and around the block by the time it opens at 5:30 a.m. Construction workers come at the crack of dawn, office workers arrive in shifts and sleepy teenagers meander in just before they close at 11 a.m. “We’re traditional,” says owner Richard Castillo when we ask him why his restaurant, which only serves breakfast, is so popular, “and there aren’t many traditional places left in Mexico City. We still cook using clay pots and 100 percent coal-fired grills.”

Like many of Mexico’s best taquerías, Tacos Manolo greets its patrons from a block away with its alluring smell. But it isn’t the well-known odor of fired achiote on a swirling spit of al pastor or the equally recognizable heavy scent of bistek searing on a griddle. No, the aroma wafting down this particular block of Calle Luz Saviñon is a mystery to the uninitiated – a unique, unplaceable perfume that allures as much as it confuses. It is the smell of onions and unknown meats and mystery sauces bubbling together, fusing into something greater and more delicious than the sum of its parts. It is the smell of the eponymous Taco Manolo, a one-of-a-kind dish that has brought the restaurant fame and accolades.

We’ve written previously about flautas, one of our favorite street foods. Those crisp, finger-friendly “flutes” with their deeply savory, spiced chicken, pork, beef or potato filling are all about the gratifying crunch of the golden, deep-fried rolled tortilla (and the sour cream and grated cheese don’t hurt either). It’s hard to imagine how that winning combination can be improved upon, but at El Rey de las Ahogadas in Colonia Del Valle, we’ve found a delicious alternative. Although El Rey offers quesadillas, tacos and other Mexican delicias, as the big banner above the open storefront advertises, people come here mostly for the flautas ahogadas. These “drowned” flautas sit in a bowl filled with a soupy salsa verde so that they soften.

Corn is so vital to Mexican cuisine and culture that we could scarcely avoid it even if we wanted to. Not that we would ever want to – one of the things we love most about dining in Mexico is the high likelihood that our meal will have a healthy dose of corn in one form or another. Take atole, a traditional beverage made of corn flour, fruit, spices, and milk or water, which is often sold alongside tamales, corn patties most often stuffed with meat or veggies, steamed in a corn husk or banana leaf. Wash down your corn with some corn; that’s the Mexican way.

The market plays an important role in Mexico City’s daily life, not just because of its vendors but also because of its food makers – these market districts are home to a dizzying mix of street food sellers and small specialty restaurants. We sample some of these treats, tacos included, on our Market Watch walk.

It’s almost 2020, and Mexico City continues to be one of the best eating cities in the world. So maybe you won’t find world cuisine the likes of New York or London, but instead you will be bowled over by a deep culinary tradition, genius chefs who were self-taught and a delicious meal waiting on every corner (and we mean every). No “best of” list will ever cover all the deliciousness awaiting you in Latin America’s foodie megalopolis, but here are a few places that we fell in love with in 2019.

In the tale of Don Lázaro El Viajero, a Spanish Jew named Lázaro L. Torra, escaping the fascist advance in that nation’s civil war, fled in 1939 to Mexico City – one of tens of thousands that then-President Lázaro Cárdenas invited to find refuge in Mexico amid the black conflict of that war. By 1944 Torra had become something of a restaurateur/maestro, teaching kids in a kinda-working-class, kinda-middle-class neighborhood to speak in English and improve their Spanish and feeding them some decent grub in the same go. (The name of the restaurant, Mr. Lazarus the Traveler, has to do with its proximity to a road heading out of town before the city went all crazy huge and viral.) That was the deal. You got food, but you had to learn something in the process.

Mexico City-born chef Danny Mena, the man behind some of the most exciting Mexican restaurants in New York, has penned a love letter to his hometown in the form of his new cookbook, Made in Mexico (Rizzoli; September 2019). Written with journalist and recipe developer Nils Bernstein, the book mixes recipes inspired by Mexico City street food, local eateries, and higher-end restaurants, resulting in a delicious blend of classic regional and contemporary Mexican cuisine. More than a cookbook, it also functions as an image-filled guide for your next trip to Mexico City. We spoke to Mena about Mexico City’s food scene, Chilangos’ eating habits, the cookbook-writing process and more for the latest installment in our Book Club series.

For the most part, hamburgers in Mexico City disappoint. The accepted bread-to-beef ratio is shameful, with slender slices of overcooked meat hiding somewhere within the pillowy fluff of too much bread. The stringy, flavorless beef underwhelms. Even worse are the fancy sandwiches one finds at upscale burger joints, where blue cheese and spinach and a dozen other inappropriate ingredients only momentarily distract from the aforementioned defects of bad meat and a surfeit of bread. Against this dim backdrop of underachievement, the hamburgers at the Legión Americana shine like stars. This is something of a surprise considering the no-frills, dive bar atmosphere here.

On our Xochimilco walk, we learn about the one-of-a-kind agricultural system in this UNESCO heritage site. Called chinampas, the island plots of farmland between the canals were first built by the ancient Toltecs when the area was on the edge of a long-gone lake. Today they are still used to feed nearby Mexico City.

“Caliente!” Juan calls out, and we all duck to avoid the steaming hot pan as it floats across the kitchen. He holds one side with a folded up towel, the other with a pair of pliers. Kitchen might be a bit of a misnomer. The small stall sits on the sidewalk, with a temporary tin roof overhead and brand new white tarps tied tightly to the back to protect against Mexico City’s afternoon thunderstorms. Each day for the three weeks leading up to Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead holiday, Tito Garcia, the stand’s owner, and the rest of the crew, will make hundreds of pan de muerto sweet rolls, as part of the Jamaica Market’s holiday romería.

On sunny afternoons in the sleepy neighborhood of Narvarte, crowds of adults huddle around the glass counter at La Gaspacheria, eyes aglow as they consider possible toppings. While the scene evokes children at an ice cream parlor, the ingredients before them strike the uninitiated as a strange mix. Jicama. Hot sauce. Onion. Cheese. Orange juice. Even among chilangos, who famously love to cram their favorite ingredients together in ever stranger combinations (tortas de chilaquiles and tortas de tamales, for example), the idea of mixing orange juice, mango and raw onion gives pause.

The wine harvest is about timing. The time it takes for a grape to ripen to optimal sweetness, the moment they are cut from the vine, the days or weeks that each mix of crushed grapes and juice sits in fermentation tanks or oak barrels. Timing is everything and to get it right, you not only have to be obsessed with accuracy, but also have a passion for perfection. Alejandra Cordero, the winemaker at Tres Raices, a winery in Dolores Hildago, located in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, has both. Wearing a black lab coat, her hair in a tight bun and her hands stained ruddy red with wine, Cordero is testing the sugar levels of the latest batch of Tres Raices wine. This year’s harvest went fast. There was little summer rain and the grapes matured quickly. They started cutting in July and were finished by the start of September. Timing was vital.

At exactly the right moment, and not a minute sooner, lunch will be ready at La Cocina de Q.B.D.O. Generally, the magic hour of comida corrida – affordable, multi-course midday meals offered on weekdays and often Saturdays – is between 2-4 p.m., the typical lunch hour for Mexican workers. The comida corrida, also known as menú del día, is a fixture across Mexico and especially common in Mexico City. These dining options run the gamut from humble to gourmet, often depending on the neighborhood you find yourself in. But there is never a doubt that it will be satisfying – and quick (comida corrida can be roughly translated as “food on the run”).

The oft-heard quote from Pablo Neruda, “Mexico is in its markets,” is rarely truer than at the Mercado San Juan de Pugibet. Not only is Pugibet likely the only market on the face of the planet where you can pick up bok choy, ostrich meat, black-eyed peas and chicatana salsa (made from Oaxacan flying ants!) on any given day of the week – and, to be fair, that last one is probably hard to find anywhere – this downtown market is positively dripping in centuries of history. The market has its origins in the pre-Hispanic open-air market, or tianguis, in the San Juan Moyotlan quarter of colonial Mexico City. Before 1548, the neighborhood was simply Moyotlan – “place of the mosquito” in Nahuatl – a nod to a common (and persisting) nuisance in the formerly marshy area bordering Lake Texcoco that surrounded ancient Tenochtitlan.