“Ewww, I don’t think I can do it,” Carroll Jones, our good friend and traveling companion, said. We were looking at a freshly made bowl of guacamole with a side of chapulines, tiny dried and roasted grasshoppers. We’d already enjoyed the crunchy, slightly herb-y tasting bugs sold in markets and food carts throughout the city. But Carroll was queasy. We finally shamed her into giving them a try, and she agreed: not bad.
We were in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico, a mecca for mezcal and mole, and arguably one of the best food and drink destinations in the world. The historic city, nestled in the fertile valley of the Sierra Madre Sur Mountains in southwestern Mexico, is home to a mix of Indigenous cultures who have contributed their rich pre-Hispanic culinary traditions. It’s also a vibrant and beautiful city, named the Best City in the World by Travel + Leisure readers in 2023, filled with UNESCO World Heritage sites, Baroque churches, city parks, bustling plazas, traditional markets, and nearby archeological ruins.
We’d booked a room at the recently opened Otro Oaxaca Hotel, a Zen-like oasis in the thick of the historic center, right across the street from the 17th-century Church of Santo Domingo de Guzman, and one of the city’s most popular plazas. The elegant boutique hotel was a beauty, with brick, adobe, and concrete walls, floating stairways, flickering candlelight, and reclaimed wood walkways leading through open-air courtyards filled with greenery. There’s a restaurant on site, emphasizing fresh, local ingredients; a rooftop terrace with a lap pool and sweeping city views, and a subterranean pool and herbal steam room.
After checking in, we enjoyed our first Oaxacan meal in the hotel’s al fresco restaurant: fresh salads with roasted peppers, pasta with mole negro, and grilled local fish served whole nestled in a puddle of spicy green salsa.
The next day we met up with Luis Enrique Zarate, who was born and raised in Oaxaca, and learned cooking from his grandmother. Zarate leads Culinary Backstreets’ “Earth, Corn & Fire: Tasting the Roots of Oaxacan Cuisine” walking tours.
“This is the beating heart of Mexican cuisine,” Zarate said as we entered the Mercado de la Merced, one of the traditional markets in Oaxaca. It was filled with locals buying fresh veggies, cheeses, and meats, and gathering at tables for hot cups of atole and breakfast tamales. We grabbed a table, and Zarate brought us plates of black bean tamales in dried corn husks, bowls of green chili soup, and cups of the locals’ favorite morning beverage: atole, made with roasted corn, water, and cocoa powder.
After our Oaxacan breakfast, we walked through the market, passing stalls overflowing with whole chickens, hanging sausages, piles of soft (blandas) and crispy (tlayudas) tortillas, buckets of chapulines, balls of quesillo (cow’s milk cheese), and shelves filled with fresh produce.
“This stand is very important to us,” Zarate said, stopping at a stall with buckets of organic, locally farmed corn. An elderly Oaxacan woman, wearing a teddy bear Christmas apron and black hairnet, stood behind the counter. “She boils the corn with crushed limestone adding the taste of alkaline,” Zarate explained. “This is the real flavor of our tortilla.” It’s a technique, Zarate said, dating back to the Aztecs.
Zarate bought a bag of the specially prepared corn and directed us out of the market, through the streets of Barrio de Jalatlaco, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Oaxaca, with colorful murals, cobblestone streets, brightly painted houses, and locally owned shops and cafes. On the way, we stopped at a small, rustic shop and had our corn milled into soft tortilla dough. “These small mills are very important to us,” Zarate said. “Every neighborhood has one.” Next, we took the milled dough to Chiquito restaurant, which was also the name of the owner, who shaped the dough into tortilla rounds, filled each with a lettuce leaf and fried egg, and cooked them on a traditional limestone comal until they puffed up like little pillows. “My grandmother used to say that when a tortilla pops up, someone around is hungry.” We weren’t hungry, and yet we managed to enjoy this ultimate farm-to-table tortilla treat.
Zarate took us to Flor Cacao, an upscale chocolate shop, and through Parque El Llano, one of the main plazas in Oaxaca, a former zoo surrounded by colonial buildings and filled with people of all ages, many lining up at street stalls selling tortillas and tacos, and fruit drinks.
Our final stop of the day, was the busy 20 de Noviembre market, located in the heart of the city and named to commemorate the start of the Mexican Revolution on Nov. 20, 1910. We entered through the El Pasillo de las Carnes Asadas, the grilled meats aisle, a smoke-filled hall lined with puesos (meat stands). The jam-packed, stuffy corridor was enveloped in a haze of propane fumes and BBQ smoke as vendors cooked strips of tasajo (salt-cured and air-dried beef), chorizo, and tripa (small intestines) on small grills. We ordered a sampling of each, grabbed a nearby table, and ate the meats with spring onions, veggies, and salsas wrapped in handmade tortillas.
We ventured further into the market, a chaotic, colorful, and fragrant showcase for traditional Oaxacan food and drink. Women called out urging us to try their secret family mole recipes. We sampled several, all delicious, including a complex mole negro, the most famous Mexican mole. The vendor said it was her grandmother’s recipe, contained more than 20 ingredients, and took three days to make. When we looked doubtful, Zarate confirmed the truth: “She’s the granddaughter of the original owner, and I’ve watched her make it.”
We stopped at a tejate stand, and watched as an elderly woman scooped the frothy drink out of a ceramic vessel using a calabash gourd. Tejate, considered the “drink of the gods,” is made with toasted corn, ground mamey pits, fermented cacao beans, and cacao flowers, which are combined and ground to a paste and then diluted with water. It was served ice cold in a brightly painted gourd, and tasted a little sweet and chocolatey, topped with a thick whipped cream-like foam. We decided it was an acquired taste.
We said goodbye to Zarate, after a long, food-filled day, armed with a further list of places to check out during our visit. We had dinner at Los Pacos, including a sampling of seven of its house-made moles. And we had street food everywhere. Two of our favorites included late-night suckling pig tacos at El Lechoncito de Oro (warning: the salsa especial is on fire!) and chopped chorizo and potato tacos for lunch at Tacos de Cazuela del Carmen Alto. They were both worth seeking out (more than once).
On our last day, we had lunch at Los Danzantes, an award-winning, Michelin-star, farm-to-table restaurant known for its modern, often complex twists on traditional Oaxacan cuisine. We had grilled Mayan octopus, ancho pepper stuffed with huitlacoche, and shrimp tlayudas. And even Carroll enjoyed the prickly pear salad topped with hormigas (ants) with a little worm salt.
If you go:
Otro Oaxaca Hotel has 16 serene rooms, including townhouses, some with private terraces and plunge pool; they feature custom-designed minimalistic furnishings and local artisan textiles (52 951 689 0700, www.otrooxaca.com; room rates from $290 including breakfast).
Culinary Backstreets offers a variety of city tours, guided by passionate and knowledgeable locals, including Earth, Corn & Fire: Tasting the Roots of Oaxacan Cuisine. This walking tour lasts about 5½ hours (www.culinarybackstreets.com/category/cities-category/oaxaca; $115 including all food and drink).
Tour nearby Monte Alban, an ancient Zapotec city founded in the sixth century BCE, with temples, tombs, plazas, pyramids, and more. Other popular sites include Mitla, an ancient archeological site and sacred burial ground, Hierve el Agua, with natural springs and waterfalls, and the Artisan Villages of Oaxaca, including artisans specializing in black pottery, alebrije wood carvings, and textiles. There are also several mezcal tasting tours and traditional cooking classes.
Diane Bair and Pamela Wright can be reached at bairwright@gmail.com