Traveling to Mexico City? What to tip, how to behave, and when to avoid the Metro

In Mexico City, lunch is church, and home cooking with a family will always be better than anything in a restaurant — a locked-in rule. When I first stayed here, with a working-class clan in a three-level cinderblock house in Iztacalco borough, there were approximately six full family meals in a day, including three distinct breakfasts adhering to three distinct points of a morning. I’m not kidding.

If someone invites you to their house to eat, consider the possibility that whatever you are served might end up being the culinary highlight of your trip. You can get a small taste of this when you try comida corrida at a fonda; this is the Mexico City prix fixe custom of affordable, home-style, lunchtime-only restaurants, which appear on almost every other corner in this city, from the wealthiest to the poorest neighborhoods. The meals range from 60 to 150 pesos (about $3.50 to $9) usually. It would be impossible to say, “Go to this one or that,” as convenience — to the office, or just downstairs from your apartment — is the defining factor in one’s allegiance.

Use the markets whenever possible. Every major colonia has one, and some are better than others. Yet each sustains a custom of exchange that goes back centuries, and I wish we had public markets with open stalls and vendors in every city here in the States. In my final few years living in Mexico City full-time, my door for a while was 10 paces away from the entrance to a market, where I could roll out of bed in the morning, walk over in my chanclas and get fresh herbs, cheeses, eggs, legumes, vegetables, dairy and avocados “for today” from independent vendors, small farmers and lifetime butchers and fishmongers. Ten paces! I remember thinking, everyone in the world should live like this.