Just got back from a great trip to Mexico, where we stayed in Mexico City (CDMX), Mérida, and Tulum. We had a super chilled out time and ate exceptionally well.
We stayed for six nights in CDMX in an Airbnb duplex in an apartment tower in La Condesa. Increasingly popular as a home base for visitors, La Condesa is a beautiful and verdant neighborhood that is eminently walkable and full of life. It is easy to get around by bus or subway, via absurdly cheap Uber rides, or as we ultimately preferred, the Ecobici bike shares. It is super fun to ride around the area on bikes and it saves a lot of time and expense doing so! We spent much of our time in Condesa as well as the adjacent Roma Norte and the lovely Bosque de Chapultepec park.
After getting settled in our apartment we started our CDMX excursion with a late lunch at Taqueria El Greco. This place is renowned for its “doneraky” tacos. El Greco’s doneraky is sort of a precursor to al pastor, which itself is derived from shawarma brought to Mexico by Lebanese immigrants. (The name seems to borrow from Turkish döner kebab.) The seasoning on the pork here is not at all like al pastor; doneraky relies on garlic, lemon, parsley, and other spices (sumac?). The meat is both crisp/crusty and very juicy. Also, you can have your taco in either a corn tortilla or pita-like flatbread. Even more unusual for Mexico, you can have your tacos with cheese. The doneraky taco on pita with cheese is flat-out delicious. Recommended.
We had dinner that night at Hugo, a charming wine bar in Condesa with a well chosen list of natural wines. This place is run by New Yorkers and it has a lower Manhattan kind of feel. The food is excellent; the menu is not really at all Mexican and so I would recommend Hugo especially as a break after several days of tacos. We enjoyed the fennel, fava and stracciatella salad, the heirloom tomatoes, fried squash blossoms (great) and pork schnitzel. We had a bottle of 2021 Clos des Grillons Calcaires blanc, which was oxidative and a bit funky and was a good match for dinner.
Having had two somewhat atypical meals, the next day we did a “taco tour” that was really fantastic. Our guide Clara took us to five different taco places in Roma Norte / Roma Sur and we tried the whole gamut of tacos: al pastor (particularly good place, great), guisado (mole verde, Campeche, something else I am forgetting), carnitas (regular and surtido, made with all parts of the pig, outstanding), cochinita pibil, mixiote (lamb, amazing!), fried fish, and shrimp! To say we were glutted is an understatement, but we managed by sharing a number of the tacos so it wasn’t totally overwhelming. We were eating and moving on fairly quickly and I forgot to jot down the names of the places we went to, but the tacos in the Mercado Medellin were great (where we had Mixiote). Taco tour definitely recommended.
We took it easy that night at ate a light meal at NIV, a trendy but good wine bar in Condesa. We needed a soft landing after the taco spree and this worked just fine. We had a 2021 Delaporte Sancerre Les Monts Damnés that was good but was no Cotat.
The next day we headed up to the Juárez neighborhood and walked around some before settling in for lunch at Masala y Maiz. We did not particularly enjoy what we saw of Juárez or the Zona Rosa / downtown areas nearby, but Masala y Maiz was one of the highlights of our trip. This place is killer. The food is a fusion of Indian, East African, and Mexican cuisines and is one of the more exciting restaurants we have been to in recent times. The flavors here are amazing, the food richly seasoned and saucy with vibrant spicing. You can’t go wrong here except to order too much food, which we did. The menu changes often so specific recommendations are sort of pointless, but we loved the carrot salad, samosas, crisp fried poussin, amazing chile relleno, and, most epic, the whole prawns with vanilla brown butter – omfg. Strongly recommended.
That night we followed the lead of a CDMX expat blogger and went to a French restaurant called Pascal. Don’t bother. The food is good but not good enough to choose over the many other great options in the city.
The following day we took a day trip to Teotihuacan. I would rank this as a must-do for any trip to Mexico City. We hired a driver/guide to take us there and that worked out perfectly. The drive is about 1h20m. I had read about Teotihuacan and was familiar with the art and culture from a traveling exhibition many years ago, but I was surprised at how large the overall site is. Be prepared for a decent amount of walking and persevere to the far side of the site and ascend the majestic Ciudadela for some beautiful views (one cannot climb the other, larger temples).
Back in CDMX, we had dinner at the wonderful Lardo in Condesa. This is a Mediterranean/Mexican fusion place and it checks all the boxes – great food, great vibe, the kind of place you’d go to weekly if you lived there. We just had cocktails, which were great. Recommended.
The next day we headed to the Cuyoacán neighborhood, which I heartily recommend. It took us a little bit of time to get to Cuyoacán as it is across the city from Condesa and requires a lengthy walk from the metro, but it was one of my favorite parts of the city. Cuyoacán is a beautiful neighborhood that was once an independent town that was eventually absorbed into Mexico City, and it has a strong local identity and classic Spanish-style plaza at its center. The Mercado Cuyoacán is famous in CDMX and is worth a visit. I had terrific shrimp aguachile tostadas at a stall inside.
Cuyoacán is also well known for being the home of Frida Kahlo, and many visitors to CDMX will come to Cuyoacán to see the Frida Kahlo Museum, as we did. I’m a fan of Frida Kahlo, and the museum, which was her home for all of her life, is a nice, small museum that does a good job of telling her notoriously difficult and sad life story. Unfortunately none of her greatest works are in the museum’s collection, but I knew that going in and wasn’t disappointed. The Frida Kahlo Museum is one of the most visited sites in CDMX and you must get your tickets in advance, but the visit itself won’t take more than 30-60 minutes, depending on your level of interest. Recommended.
That night we went to the vaunted Máximo, and it delivered. On everyone’s list of top restaurants in the city, Máximo is a stunningly beautiful and wonderful place to spend an evening. This was the “fanciest” restaurant we went to in Mexico. The food is impeccable and their cocktail game is top-notch. We enjoyed the gazpacho, salad with blue cheese vinaigrette, creamy corn with roasted porcinis and bearnaise sauce (omg), foie gras torchon, and insane grilled Wagyu rib eye. The only thing we didn’t much care for was their fresh oysters, which struggled under the ponzu sauce. Definitely recommended.
On our last day in CDMX we visited the Museo Nacional de Antropología – the national anthropology museum. I was really looking forward to this, especially having visited Teotihuacan and as we were heading to the land of the Maya after CDMX, and it did not disappoint. This is a world-class museum with an extraordinary array of artifacts from the many distinct Mesoamerican civilizations that have inhabited what is now Mexico. The design of the museum is extraordinary with both presentations of precious artifacts indoors, often accompanied by life-size architectural recreations as well as elaborate maps and dioramas, as well as garden-setting outdoors. One weaves effortlessly from interior to exterior as one goes along through the museum. It’s a brilliant design and unlike any museum I have been to. A+, recommended.
The rest of the day we mostly walked around and grazed on street food. I took no note of where we were when, but there is so much incredible street food it boggles the mind. I am not super well-traveled, but I have never been to a country where food is as central to one’s identity as Mexico.
That night we ate at Páramo, a buzzy cocktail-forward place with a younger tourist crowd. Lots of French and US parties. The space upstairs is funky/cool and the food is good but not great, and no need to repeat.
We got on a plane to Mérida the next day and spent three nights there. Mérida is a charming city where the old historic center that was largely crumbling and seemingly forgotten has had new life breathed into it in the past few years by largely foreign buyers fixing up the old houses. Apparently many are Canadian. We stayed in such a renovated house and it was amazing. That said, the majority of houses are very worn, a number appear abandoned, and some are verging on collapse, which gives this low-rise urban center a picturesque ruin kind of vibe. The very center of Mérida defined by the Plaza Grande is more fully intact and there is a lot of street life.
Did I mention that it is hot in Mérida? JFC! It’s stunning how blazing hot it gets during the day. We’re talking mid-to-high-90s and 107-110 on the heat index. And August isn’t even the hottest month. Happily it rained every afternoon, which helped crush the highs of the day and led to much more comfortable evenings. Our first day the afternoon rain was more of a three-hour thunderstorm that flooded many streets with 4-6 inches of water – that was interesting. Our house had a small pool in the interior courtyard and that helped with the heat enormously.
The most notable part of our Mérida stay was a day trip to the ruins of Uxmal. We hired a driver to take us there and back, which takes about an hour or less. We left at 9:00am, ensuring we got there before the temperatures went nuclear.
Uxmal is simply amazing. The site is relatively compact but the quality of the architecture and its decoration is off the charts. The Governor’s Palace is regarded as one of the very finest expressions of pre-Columbian architecture anywhere. If you’re going to Mérida, or anywhere in the Yucatán, you should definitely see Uxmal. We opted not to go to Chichen Itza because it is said to be very touristy, and we had no regrets as Uxmal was extraordinary and sparsely attended as well. We were able to roam freely and take in the ruins at our own pace. Of course, it was a bazillion degrees and we were covered in bug spray, but there were opportunities for shade under trees, etc. that made it possible not to completely melt away. 100% recommended.
Food-wise we enjoyed Mérida and its Yucatán cuisine. We went to a few well-known local favorites, including Micaela Mar & Leña (interesting “home cooking” and very good), Chaya Maya (very good), Museo de la Gastronomia Yucateca (MUGY) (good), Cuna (good), Taqueria La Lupita (great), and my favorite, El Lucero. I particularly enjoyed the panuchos at El Lucero – a Maya-style taco with a fried tortilla, refried beans, chopped cabbage, and meat, in this case excellent cochinita pibil. Damn that’s tasty. Also at El Lucero they bring you something like 7-8 small dishes of appetizing bites in addition to whatever you order. Sliced sausage in sauce, dried beef, refried black beans, fried tortilla strips, jicama salad, pickled cucumbers – kind of like banchan but way more than that. Nutty, but awesome! I could see idling away the day at Lucero, picking at small plates and drinking ice cold beer.
Another Yucatán winner is poc chuc, sour-orange marinated slices of pork that are cooked over a grill. Chaya Maya had particularly good poc chuc. And chaya, or tree spinach, which is put in everything from cornmeal to aguas frescas. Speaking of which, everyone you meet suggests Chaya Maya. And it is quite good. But I am sure if you spent more time in Mérida that you could easily find surpassingly excellent Yucatán specialties from any number of hole-in-the-wall places that so typify Mexico.
From Mérida we hired a van and were driven to Tulum, where we stayed at the La Zebra resort. La Zebra is very nice, small (~30 rooms), family-oriented, and right on the beach. It’s very comfortable and the staff is excellent. During the day they play a loungy downtempo electronic playlist over the beach but they cut that short around 8:00pm. The restaurant is decent and does a good breakfast. The sister resort Lula next door also looks nice and is modest in scale. The Italianish restaurant there is decent. From these resorts You can easily walk to some of the more heralded restaurants in the area.
Tulum has long since gone fully over to the tourist zone for better or worse, but for whatever reason the hotels that line the long strip of Tulum’s prime beaches are all smaller in scale – nothing like the Miami-like wall of gleaming white hotels of nearby Cancun. If you are fortunate enough to stay in one of these Tulum hotels, you have access to extraordinary beaches that are never crowded.
It’s just as hot in Tulum as Mérida, but the coastal breezes make it much easier to take. And the 86-degree water (!) makes it possible to just float around all day and stay cool. Sargassum note: We were fortunate not to have to contend with sargassum in any meaningful amount. Aside from the very first day of our visit, there was virtually no sargassum in the water at all, and none on the beach as it is raked every day.
One day we hired a guide and went on a cenote tour. This is one million percent recommended anywhere in the Yucatán. Our guide took us to two nearby cenotes (like the roadside food stalls, cenotes are everywhere in the Yucatán) of two very different types. The first, Cenote Nohoch, involved ranging well underground into pitch black caves. We donned life vests and snorkel gear along with flashlights and made our way into the unknown beneath the massive crust of limestone above us. This was nothing short of amazing. Caves filled with stalactites and underwater stalagmites, illuminated only by our flashlights. The other cenote, Cenote Nicte-Ha, is more of an open-air pool that is bedazzled in water lilies. Again with the life vests and snorkel gear. So beautiful.
There is an over 200-mile long underground freshwater river that runs through the Yucatán peninsula (the longest in the world) and it is popular for scuba divers to enter one cenote and swim along through the deeps and exit through another. While we were in the caves of Cenote Nohoch we looked straight down to see divers swimming beneath us. Just so cool.
After our cenote swims our guide took us to lunch at a terrific taqueria in the town of Tulum called Taqueria Honorio. @Robert_Dentice has recommended this place so you know it has to be good. Killer tacos – we had lechon, cochinita pibil, and my new favorite from this trip, poc chuc. Though the lechon was probably the best thing here.
Other places we went to in Tulum include Gitano, which was quite good and had the best guacamole of any place we went to in Mexico (there’s never enough, or any, lime or salt). We also went to the overhyped Arca - meager portions that are absurdly expensive, plus I dislike any dinner billed as an “experience,” as our waiter introduced the place. The food is really very good but the pretense is beyond Miami levels.
But the best meal we had in Tulum, by far, was at Hartwood. Supposedly René Redzepi considers Hartwood one of his favorite restaurants, and it’s not hard to see why. Hartwood follows a similar extreme-locavore approach as Redzepi’s Noma, sourcing all ingredients locally and even foraging for some. This results in a menu driven mainly by extremely fresh fish that changes daily (haters of The Bear can suck on it!). Also Hartwood is supposedly carbon-neutral, and all that is cooked with heat is done in their wood-burning oven.
We decided that we would center our meal on the 18oz rib eye (may daughter loves beef) and, in fear of over-ordering as we had done almost everywhere else, we stuck to just two starters: the ceviche of the day, and the tostada de tartar. Both of these were amazing! The tostada in particular – it was a fish tartar (grouper, I think) in a light mayo/aioli with red onions, cilantro, etc. and it was divine. My daughter does not care for fish much but went crazy for this. The rib eye was just perfect and served with an ample quenelle of red pepper butter. Just friggin’ great. It’s an open-air restaurant (as nearly everything is in Tulum) and too warm for wine, so we stuck with cocktails, which were very good. This was maybe my favorite dinner of our entire trip as the setting and feeling of the place are as special as the food.
In all, it was a fantastic trip with many highlights and much relaxation. Thanks to everyone who chimed in on recommendations in this thread: Mexico City and Yucatan - summer trip ideas. I really appreciate it.