Lydia Carey

Mexico City offers a wealth of culture, food, music and art. There is so much to see and do here that it would take you years to explore it all. After 14 years' living here, one of my favorite things about my adoptive hometown is that I will never run out of local experiences. CDMX, as it’s often called, is just a few hours from most major US cities, and in the Central Time zone making this the perfect weekend getaway for a group of friends who don’t want the hassle of jet lag but do want to be immersed in a completely different culture and vibe.

On Sunday morning, the dining room at Le Fu is dominated by the soft tapping of bamboo dim sum steamers being shuffled around by the server behind the food line. “Hottest ones on the bottom,” she says to me as we point out our selection. Inside each bamboo steamer, or zhēnglóng, there are char siu bao buns with savory pork filling and Chinese five spice; ngao yuk, or Cantonese steamed beef meatballs with green onion; and pork and ginger rice paper dumplings slightly crispy on one side, along with dozens of other options. As it turns out, Chinese food in Mexico is serious business.

For some diners, eating anything but Mexican cuisine in what is one of the best cities in the world for it is blasphemy. But I would caution that ignoring the amazing new arrivals just because they are from a different culture or kitchen, is missing out on some of the most exciting dishes currently on offer here in the capital.

A plate of piping-hot, oven-roasted goat meat is placed in front of me, a crusty top layer sealing in its juicy underbelly. Gorgeous handmade tortillas wrapped in a clean white towel soon arrive, along with a steaming bowl of consommé, a broth with enough tomato and oregano to please the most demanding Mexican grandmother.

Besides my home base in Mexico City, Valle de Guadalupe and Ensenada in northern Baja California are my hands-down favorite places to eat in Mexico. The fresh seafood needs almost nothing added, the wine is outstanding and the chefs who live here have taken the culinary influences of the area and created a food scene that is a multicultural mosaic of flavor.

On every trip I make to Valle de Guadalupe, I am blown away by the quality and variety of the wine being produced in this tiny region. For wine fans who haven’t yet been, this is an obligatory stop in Mexico. But wine isn’t all there is. As Valle has become a buzzy food destination over the years, its options for imbibing have rounded out to include excellent cocktail bars, mezcal dives and craft breweries that compete with many across the border for prominence.

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Many people think of Mexico as ethnically monolithic, a mestizo nation made up of the descendants of Spaniards and Indigenous peoples. In fact, many groups of immigrants have also come to the country and left their indelible mark on the local food scene. One of these groups is the Japanese.

Mexico City has a unique combination of old-world and new-world charm – top museums, sidewalk cafes, music in the streets and an eternally pleasant climate that makes walking its streets a year-round delight. For visiting couples looking to relax and reconnect I always suggest scheduling in plenty of time for people-watching, naps and leisurely meals. True romance sometimes means simply spending time together, so whatever you do you will likely find it refreshing.

Travelers once sought out Mérida as a sleepy alternative to Yucatán’s buzzy beaches, but the peninsula’s inland capital has come into its own. The new Cancún-Mérida leg of the regional Tren Maya train line will clue in even more visitors to this bastion of regional cuisine, where patrons line up at market stalls like Taquería La Lupita for relleno negro and cochinita pibil tacos, or seek out roadside vendors for fried, Lebanese-ish kibi.

Riding the coattails of a decades-long mezcal and tequila boom, an array of new and newly popular Mexican spirits are exciting aficionados and compensating for years of hard work on the part of promoters and producers. Both ancestral concoctions like pox or sotol as well as distillation experiments in gin and whiskey are suddenly front and center in bars across Mexico as well as north of the border.

A renaissance of Mexican spirits, resulting from the current mezcal boom both here and across the border, has meant that the nerdiest of spirit lovers are looking even further afield for traditional distillates reflecting Mexico’s vast variety of flavors. If you’ve frequented bars in major Mexican cities lately or have spent any amount of time in the southern state of Chiapas, you may have seen pox, sometimes written posh, on the menu.

How do you sift through Mexico City’s roughly 57,000 places to eat — more than twice as many as there are in New York City — and choose the most essential dishes? “In a city like Mexico City, how do you narrow it down? It’s insane. The exercise is absurd to begin with,” says Gabriela Cámara, the chef and owner of Contramar and three other restaurants in the Mexican capital.

With unprecedented exposure, Mexico’s wide-ranging cuisines earn newfound respect throughout the culinary world.

“Oh,“Oh, look, this one is hiding,” Isela Islas Montiel says as she digs into the tiny tunnels at the bottom of a rotting agave leaf. Like kids in a schoolyard, we wait as cherry-red chinicuil worms, the larvae of the Comadia redtenbacheri moth, are pulled from their hiding places. “They feed on the magueys and they attack the weakest and smallest,” Montiel explains, gingerly pulling the worms from their burrows with the needle-like tip of a maguey leaf.