Mexico City: Street Food Tour with Eat Mexico

When friends heard we were coming to Mexico City, they all wanted to tell us about the amazing street food. “Street food – eat it!” said one email with CDMX recommendations. “Don’t even bother Yelping restaurants; just eat on the street,” said another friend. One person (hi Dana!) recommended a specific street food tour she had taken and loved, so we decided to try it out.

Eat Mexico offers several food tours in Mexico City; we opted for “MEXICO CITY STREET FOOD: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE” because it was in the morning and seemed to offer the most variety. (This post is not sponsored by Eat Mexico, but we loved their service!)

The tour promises you will try 6-7 types of street food and juice, but we actually tried 16 different foods and drinks! The tour began in the Cuauhtémoc neighborhood and also took us through Juarez and a bit of Roma. I know these pictures aren’t the most attractive (I’m not very practiced at food photography, and at the time I was only planning to describe the tour in my Instagram stories, but it was so good I thought it deserved its own blog post—plus I feel generally uncomfortable taking pictures of strangers at their place of work, so it was difficult to get photos of the stands themselves), but here’s a recap of our tour:

We started with breakfast [above left]: a pork tamale with green salsa and a hot drink called atole (we had the rice but it was also available in chocolate). Afterward, we went to a small mercado (market) to sample chicharrones [not pictured] before heading to a local tortilleria, where we watched the first tortillas of the day being made [above center]. Afterward, we sampled the fresh tortillas with salt, salsa and/or nopales (cactus) [above right].

Note: Being from California (and loving Mexican food), Jonathan and I were already familiar with a lot of the food we sampled on the tour. It was still interesting because we learned more about the history of the food and the specific areas of Mexico where the different cuisine originated. The other couple on the tour with us was a British couple, which was fun because they weren’t familiar with many of the foods. They even asked us if we have tamales in the U.S.! (Spoiler alert: Yes. We love tamales in California.) It was neat to get their reactions to the food, and our tour guide asked us both thoughtful questions about the food cultures in our respective countries.

Next up: A fresh juice [not pictured] with a huitlacoche quesadilla [above left]. Huitlacoche is actually corn smut (a.k.a. fungus), which might sound gross, unless you like mushrooms. It’s pretty similar! We could actually see the individual corn kernel shapes in the huitlacoche. This was followed by tacos de canasta (“basket tacos”) – preformed tacos that are ready to hand out on the street upon ordering [above center]. I opted for potato, and Jonathan had the cochinita pibil. We got our tacos at a stand called “La Abuela,” which is run by an 80-year-old man. After the tacos, we tried cemitas, tortas made on a thick bun [above right]. The cemita was Jonathan’s favorite food on the tour!

At the carnitas taco stand [above left], our guide explained you can usually order certain parts of the pig in your carnitas, you can order maciza (the leanest, most popular part of the pig), or you can get a little bit of everything all chopped together: surtida. Of course, we went for the surtida. This stand also had the best salsa bar, with chopped onion, cilantro, habaneros, limes and multiple salsas. Yum! Before leaving the carnitas stand, our guide offered us fruit with chile powder from the stand next door [above center]. The fruit pictured above is in yogurt; the fruit cup we got was simply chopped fruit with chile powder, and unfortunately, it was probably our least favorite sample of the day. Next up: a pamboza [above right], which is like a grilled torta dipped in salsa and filled with chorizo and potatoes. And yes, that’s green chorizo you see on the griddle! In one of the Mexican states, they add herbs to the meat to make it green.

By this time, we were starting to get a little full. (Just a little.) At the beginning of the tour, Jonathan and I had wanted to get two different types of atole so we could try both, and our guide recommended we share one. Honestly, I was a little disappointed. But I have to say – he was right! Sharing is the way to go, especially in the beginning of the day.

Okay … almost done, I promise. 😉 Next was a burrito stand, where our guide explained burritos aren’t actually common in Mexico City. They are from northern states in Mexico (which explains why California has so many!). Our burrito [above left] was made with squash blossoms. We sampled the hottest salsas available with our burrito; our favorite was the tres arboles. It wasn’t actually on the menu, but when the food stand owner saw us eating his habanero salsa, he wanted us to try his “specialty” sauce. Delicious! We also got a Jarritos soda at this stop [above center]: one of Jonathan’s favorite drinks. Up next, we stopped at a seafood stand and got my favorite food of the tour: a pulpo (octopus) tostada [above right]. So good!

Finally, we ended the day with dessert and coffee. By now, it was the scheduled end of our tour (9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.). We visited Dulcería Celaya [above left], which is apparently a well-known candy shop in the Roma Norte neighborhood, and got a few treats to go. Jonathan and I chose sweet-potato-based candy called picones (guava for me, strawberry for him) [above center], as well as a “house special” candy flavored with vanilla. We sampled our treats the next day after breakfast at our apartment, and we loved the house special! Our final stop on the tour was cafechata at Buna, across the street from the candy shop [above right]. Our guide described cafechata as horchata with coffee; it was soooo good. He said Buna is the only café in the city that makes cafechata, so I guess we’ll have to go back before we leave! 😉 I don’t actually know if that’s true, but it probably is the best cafechata in the city, just based on a quick search for other options.

Whew! And that was it. We didn’t even need dinner that night – just some chips and salsa at our apartment followed by mezcal tasting at La Clandestina. We highly recommend the Eat Mexico beginner’s street food tour if you’re ever in Mexico City. It’s only offered on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays (currently), and I would suggest going as early as possible during your trip. We did the Thursday tour, but we arrived in CDMX on Sunday, so it would have been nice to do the tour on Monday and been more knowledgeable and savvy about street food during our whole stay. (Also, I’m pretty sure our guide added in some “bonus” stops along the way, so your menu may differ slightly from ours.)

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