Travel Like Bourdain
Mexico
The mole has been cooking since yesterday. The market has been here since before your country existed.
The Forgotten Atlas — Field Report
The mole has been cooking since yesterday. The market has been here since before your country existed.
Oaxaca is three hours from Mexico City by plane and feels like a different country. The food is different — more complex, more indigenous, rooted in Zapotec and Mixtec traditions that predate the Spanish by a thousand years. The mole negro, the black sauce that takes three days to prepare and contains over thirty ingredients, is the signature dish of a cuisine that has no real equivalent anywhere else on Earth. Bourdain called Oaxacan food some of the most sophisticated and misunderstood in the world. He was not wrong.
Oaxacan food is extraordinary. Complex, beautiful, and deeply, deeply Mexican in a way that most of the world has never tasted.
Anthony Bourdain
The Mercado Benito Juárez and the Mercado 20 de Noviembre have been operating continuously in the same locations since before the Spanish arrived. The 20 de Noviembre market contains the famous corridor of meat vendors where you choose your cut, take it to a grill station, and eat it at a shared table with strangers. The smell of chiles and charcoal smoke and cacao is overwhelming in the best possible way. Walk through the markets first thing in the morning before the heat comes and the crowds arrive.
Oaxaca is the centre of the mezcal world. Not the mezcal that comes in a bottle with a worm and sits on a shelf in an airport bar — the real thing. Single-village, single-agave, made in clay pots by families who have been doing it this way for generations. The Mercado de Mezcal has dozens of producers to sample from. Go with someone who knows what they are drinking. Ask questions. Take notes. Bring empty bottles home.
Allow at least five days. Take a day trip to Monte Albán, the Zapotec ruins on the hill outside the city. Eat your weight in tlayudas. Come back before you leave.
The colonial centre. The zócalo, the cathedral, the markets, the restaurants on the ground floor of centuries-old buildings. Everything begins here.
A quiet neighbourhood of painted houses and bougainvillea-covered walls. The best breakfast spots and the most peaceful morning walk in the city.
A working-class neighbourhood on the hill with the best tlayudas in the city. Go for dinner when the families are out.
Not a restaurant. A covered market where you choose your meat, have it grilled, and eat at communal tables. The single most important meal you will have in Oaxaca.
Chef Alejandro Ruiz's flagship restaurant. Oaxacan ingredients treated with the care and creativity they deserve. The mole negro here is a reference point.
Chef Jorge Vallejo's Oaxacan outpost. Outstanding. The tasting menu changes with the season and showcases ingredients you will not have encountered before.
A tortillería that has elevated the corn tortilla to an art form. Different heirloom corn varieties, cooked on a comal, served simply. Go for breakfast.
Isthmus Zapotec cooking from the coast. The estofado and the tasajo are unlike anything else on the menu and unlike anything you have tasted.
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