Why Rich Mexicans Eat Well

Fine dining in Mexico is even more of a gastronomic adventure than the street food; we ate in several restaurants that were truly world class.

In Oaxaca everyone seemed to point us to the same places: Casa Oaxaca, Los Danzantes and La Biznaga, all of which served variations on the same thing: traditional Oaxacan mole-based cooking, done to a high level of elegance using nontraditional ingredients like venison, duck and shrimp.

A real find was Zandunga, which is not in any of the guidebooks we consulted but where we met up with Susana Trilling, a friend of a friend who runs a cooking school near Oaxaca. Zandunga serves food of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the least-visited part of Oaxaca State and the only part that is not mountainous. Its cuisine relies heavily on tropical ingredients like plaintains, completely different from what you find in the rest of Oaxaca.

In Mexico City, we visited three high-end restaurants that each, in my book, were worth a special trip.

Azul, in Condesa, specializes in the food of Veracruz, a port city on the Caribbean that naturally features plenty of seafood, rice and tropical fruits. Everything we had was top quality and inventive; I imagine this restaurant is to standard Veracruzan cuisine as Babbo is to Italian.

Merotoro, also in Condesa, takes a different approach. It professes to serve the food of Baja California, but, at least when we were there, took more of a standard international approach with local ingredients. Thus, a salad might feature beach greens found only in Mexico, or a dish of pork jowl with lentils might be made using an Iberico hog raised locally.

The best restaurant in town is generally considered to be Pujol, in the Polanco neighborhood, which is to Condesa as the Upper East Side is to the Upper West Side: richer, more buttoned up, and separated from it by a park.

Here we had two tasting menus, one of seven courses and the other of nine, that featured such dishes as tacos made with ceviche, suckling lamb and chocolate, margarita-flavored sorbet and turkey breast with bananas. If Azul leaned a bit toward the traditional and Merotoro toward the generic international, Pujol split the difference neatly.

It was the most expensive of our meals in Mexico, but including a bottle of wine we still spent only about $125 apiece for a meal that in New York would easily have cost twice as much.