The Hacienda del Parián in Ocoyoacac, a rural village on the outskirts of Mexico City, got its start twenty-six years ago, when the local Ocampo family joined forces with other charro (“cowboy”) families to recreate a traditional estate. The idea was to preserve two very strong Mexican traditions that used to live side by side in haciendas: la charrería, the Mexican equestrian tradition, and rural Mexican cuisine. The estate they built is big enough to celebrate a wedding or a charreada, Mexican-style rodeo, or even both at the same time! It’s also home to a restaurant, which is managed by Christian Ocampo, who started working in the catering side of the family business before moving over to run the restaurant side of things.

During the dry season in Mexico’s Mixtec highlands, when it’s windy, bugs called chinches (or jumiles in other regions) are ready to be collected from the epiphytic bromeliads – dramatic plants that grow on trees or other plants – where they live. “Children climb the trees, grab the epiphyte, bring it down to the ground and shake it until all the bugs fall from it. They eat them alive; and appreciate them for their spicy taste, reminiscent of chilli pepper,” write the scholars Esther Katz and Elena Lazos in an article that’s part of the 2017 book Eating Traditional Food. Scorpions, ants, crickets, grasshoppers, worms from the maguey plants – Mexico is the Latin American country where the most bugs are eaten according to Katz and Lazos.

“Do you want fat on those?” At Quesadillas La Chaparrita in Mercado Jamaica, the correct answer is always yes. At the nod of our heads, the young woman manning the grill splashes a little melted lard onto each of our quesadillas with her spatula and slides them over into the hot center of the concave grill top. Somehow she keeps each bunch of quesadillas or gorditas separate from the next as three other women buzz around her – one prepping fillings, one making tortillas on a hand press, and one to her right making change and wrapping up to-go orders. It’s a perfectly timed culinary dance.

At Culinary Backstreets, we tend to opt for tradition over trendy, street over chic. We delve into a city’s blind spots when it comes to local favorites. Taking that approach makes it too easy to dismiss new spots out of hand. So, if it weren’t for our friend Liz hounding us for months about a newish “falafel place” near her house, we almost certainly would not have thought about visiting it. But that’s the great thing about friends – they take us out of our routine and generally bring us to unexpected places, as was the case with Kebab Nation.

We know that spring has arrived in Mexico City when street carts crowned with whole mangoes begin to roll into town. While wandering the Centro Histórico’s bustling streets just last week, we bumped into Maria, a seasonal worker whose cart is currently laden with this favorite springtime fruit. Intrigued, we stopped to watch as she deftly skewered the mango in her hand with a stick, peeled off the skin, made decorative cuts to transform the bright orange flesh into a beautiful flower, which she then brushed with chamoy, a classic Mexican sauce, and dipped in one of the brightly colored powders stored in plastic boxes: salsa tajín, chamoy, salt, chile or everything mixed together.

Located less than 200 kilometers from Mexico City, Tequisquiapan is one of Mexico’s Pueblos Mágicos, or Magical Villages, places deemed to be rich in cultural traditions and symbolism by the country’s Secretariat of Tourism. Before Covid times, it was a favorite weekend getaway and a popular place to unwind. The “magical” qualities of the town are plentiful. Tequis, as locals call it, first became famous for its hot springs. The area is also ideal, weather-wise, for growing wine grapes, even in spite of the occasionally severe winters. International brands such as Martell, and later Freixenet, developed vineyards in the area; the latter now makes excellent sparkling wines using méthode champenoise as well as reds and whites here.

It’s finally hot in Mexico City. We’re smack dab in the middle of that two-month window between March and April that brings a dry, summer heat before the snow has even started to melt in some northern climates. The city is steaming, and chilangos are hunting down their favorite cool foods and the ubiquitous agua frescas sold in outdoor markets. We’re scouring the market, too, in search of our favorite hot weather treat, a cold chicozapote. A palm-sized oval with a rough brown exterior and an interior similar to a cooked pear in consistency, the chicozapote is not a fruit you find outside of many tropical or sub-tropical climates. Called a different name in almost every Caribbean and Central American country, this fruit and its cousins trail down the continent.

Like many cities around the globe, Mexico City has seen the pandemic wreak havoc on tourism and restaurants, two often intertwined industries. Many restaurants and hotels have already closed their doors, and many more employees have lost their jobs. Yet in the midst of this storm, two young siblings, Pamela and Jaime, decided to open a world-class coffee shop. Forgoing the high-end and trendy neighborhoods of Condesa, Roma and Polanco, they opened Di Caffé in Tlalnepantla, one of the northern suburbs, in May 2020. We spoke to these young entrepreneurs about their decision to open a business during the lockdown as well as their travels around the world, which inspired them to create an international coffee menu.

Nodding to a table laid with bars of alegria, rainbow-colored obleas, and packages of churros and chicharon made with amaranth flour, Alma Rocha says she can remember her grandmother making sweets from amaranth seed, but nothing like the repertoire that she and her husband, Arturo, have now. Everything is shiny and neatly packaged below the D’Alva Productos de Amaranto sign in the cooperative’s workshop, which is located inside the home of 43-year-old Alma and 58-year-old Arturo. “They taught us [recipes] in a certain sense,” Arturo says, referring to the generations of amaranth farmers that came before them, “And we have tried to modify them. For instance, this one here that we are making now, uses honey [instead of regular sugar], the chocolate one here, that’s local chocolate from Oaxaca.”

With its neo-industrial decor, Tizne looks like a lot of new Mexico City restaurants and shops riding the “rough hewn” interiors wave. Metal chairs, uncovered cement walls and digital art work give the place the feeling of a warehouse or underground club, albeit one that happens to have amazing tacos. Tizne’s full name, Tizne Tacomotora (“the taco motor”), explains some of the machinery references in their decor. Partners Pilar Canseco and Jorge Vaca started their business with a bike cart outfitted with a meat smoker that they would cart around from music festival to music festival, selling three of what would become their limited (and heavenly) menu of smoked-meat tacos.

We recently spoke to Mely Martínez about her cookbook, “The Mexican Home Kitchen” (Rock Point, September 2020), which compiles the traditional home-style dishes that feed Mexican families day in and day out. These include comforting foods like caldo de pollo and carne con papas, celebratory recipes like mole poblano and pastel de cumpleaños, and classics like tamales and pozole, as well as basics like corn and flour tortillas, salsas, rice, and beans. Mely is best known for her popular blog, Mexico in My Kitchen, which she started in 2008 for her teenage son, hoping that someday he will use it to recreate the Mexican food his mom made for the family. Although born and raised in the city of Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mely has traveled to most states in Mexico and lived in several of them.

Making chilaquiles always seemed a little out of my reach. I’m familiar with the dish’s humble beginnings, invented as a way of making use of day-old tortillas, but it still held some element of mystery for me: Under the practiced hands of locals, what seemed to be normal, everyday ingredients – fried tortillas, cooked salsa, raw onion, fresh cheese, double cream – transformed into a blend of flavors that felt impossible to recreate. This is a dish that I came to love after moving to Mexico City, where it quickly became my go-to when I sat down at a restaurant for breakfast. If I couldn’t find anyone to accompany me, I would often go out to breakfast alone just to eat chilaquiles.

Before the pandemic, the night shift that Juan and Hugo work at a 24-hour taco stand in Mexico City’s Del Valle neighborhood did a booming trade. From 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., they served office workers on their way home, locals having dinner and the late-night party crowd soaking up the alcohol. Nowadays a trickle of evening diners stop by for a taco, but the crowds of last year are mostly gone. It’s a common scene across the city, where those who can are mostly working from home (and no longer reliant on street food for a cheap meal) and the number of tourists, who were increasingly coming to sample the city’s food, has fallen significantly. Many street vendors are still operating but struggling to make ends meet.

“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.

Initially, it was books that led Fernando Rodriguez Delgado to his interest in cacao. Today Rodriguez runs Chocolate Macondo, a café that specializes in ancient preparations of cacao, but prior to that he was a bookseller, fanatical about reading and fascinated by the history of Mexico. The day that he came across the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century manuscript documenting Mesoamerican culture, was an important one: it would eventually spark his countrywide search to discover the traditions of cacao and seek out ingredients, the names of which he only knew in Nahuatl. Rodriguez didn’t speak this native language of Mexico, so trying to work out the recipes for cacao drinks he found in the codex was no easy task.