Architecture Through the Ages, Part 6: The Modern Era

Mexico City's interesting architecture continues into the current day:


Especially interesting: the building above is a government office building. What a difference from the United States, where government seemingly tries to be as ugly and inconspicuous as possible.

There are plenty of new private office and apartment buildings around as well:


And odd juxtapositions of eras are common:


Whether they're pleasing to the eye, or jarring, I will leave to you to decide.

Architecture Through the Ages, Part 5: The 1920s

After our food tour, it's time to start walking again, to continue our architectural tour. Mexico City is an Art Deco paradise, especially in the Condesa neighborhood, where we ate so many good meals. Few of the buildings are individually as flamboyant or beautiful as those of South Beach, but there are a great number of them, including small apartment buildings ...


... medium-sized ones ...


... large ones ...


... office buildings ...

... even an abandoned jai alai fronton:


Many of these buildings appear to have been abandoned for years, but don't rush down there expecting to pick something brilliant up for a song: apparently these buildings are often vacant not because no one wants them, but because of tangles in the titles and estate courts.

(And Drink Well, Too)

Mexico has long been known for two alcoholic drinks: beers like Corona and Dos Equis, and tequila. But these days the buzz is about something entirely else.

Tequila's country cousin, mezcal, seems to be getting more attention these days south of the border. This would perhaps be unsurprising in Oaxaca, where much of the stuff is made, and agave or maguey, the plant from which it is made: grows not only in the wild ...


... and in botanical gardens ...

... but even in churchyards:


In Mexico City, too, mezcal seemed to be all over while tequila was laying low. We tasted quite a bit of it over the week, but I honestly can't give you any recommendations: much of the stuff seems to be made by local distilleries that don't have high profiles or international distribution.

I can tell you to look for "reposado" or "anejo" mezcals; these terms indicate that the stuff has been aged for various amounts of time, and therefore has mellowed. Don't buy one with a worm in it (that is a kitschy tourist thing), but do drink your mezcal straight, with orange slices dusted with gusano-worm salt. And if you find one labeled "pechuga," here's what that means: the mezcal was produced with a raw chicken breast suspended over it, which is supposed to subtly alter the taste. And so it did.

(Incidentally, mezcal is made by fermenting the sweet heart of the maguey plant -- after you've chopped off all those spiky leaves -- into a drink called pulque, which is then distilled into liquor. Pulque was considered a sacred drink among the pre-Hispanic peoples of the region, and is still available if you know where to look. It's basically a maguey cider, yeasty and a bit sour.)

The other drink that's all the rage in Mexico now is wine -- local wine. The best come from Baja California, where several wineries have found microclimates in the mountains that work well for grapes ranging from nebbiolo to sauvignon blanc and cabernet sauvignon. These wines are seldom imported into the United States, but if you can find an Ulloa cabernet/petite sirah blend, or a white wine called Silvana, I strongly recommend them.

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.

Why Mexicans Are Overweight

The other thing immediately noticeable about Mexicans as a group is that they tend to be overweight. The reason why is immediately obvious, especially in Mexico City: the abundance and variety of street food available.

It is such a problem that even the Mexico City police force has had to take steps to control officers' weight.

As a foreigner and North American, one might have had a bit of trepidation about trying out some of these places, but we were fortunate to have Ruth Alegria, a local food expert, as our guide. Here are some of the things we saw and tasted during a stroll through the upscale Condesa neighborhood one morning:


In many parts of the city you will find a row of stalls like this, selling everything from tortas (a type of grilled sandwich) to fruit, stews, and of course many different types of tacos:


Most of these places are all business, but one place we went, a takeout joint selling "tacos al pastor" (roughly, tacos made from shawarma) even indulged in a little showmanship:

Why Mexicans Have Wild Hair

One thing I noticed immediately about Mexicans was their hair. Mexican men between the ages of 10 and 40 must have the highest per capita consumption of hair gel in the world:





Even the humblest tamale seller in the street will typically be gelled to the nines. They sell it in big tubs at the market:

And yet, older men (even those who haven't gone bald) seem immune to this style; in Oaxaca, men over 40 typically wore a cowboy hat and brush mustache, while in Mexico City, their hair was more likely to be uncovered but nondescript.

Would love to know what accounts for this stark generational difference.

Tackling the World's Largest City

It's time to set the scene a bit for our tour of modern Mexico City, which may be the world's largest city, with a population estimated at anywhere between 23 and 28 million people.

Yet to look at the buildings, you would think it's only about as dense as Los Angeles: aside from a couple of clusters of office buildings and hotels, most of the city doesn't rise much above three or four stories.

Instead it sprawls out, in all directions, subdivisions visible for many minutes before you take off or land:


From the ground, they seem to drape across every bit of flatland and hillside:


Up close, these are basic cinderblock houses, often unpainted and rarely with any obvious amenities:


But in a country where many rural people still live in thatched wooden shacks and ride donkeys, this must seem like a step up, not to mention a chance to be part of the urban economy.

Moving around the vast city is difficult, to say the least. Tourists are advised not to take taxis, for fear of getting robbed or murdered by the driver or his confederates. And in any case, you don't want to be on the roads, where the traffic has to be seen to be believed.

The central neighborhoods where most tourists go are walkable in size, though sidewalks have a habit of cracking or vanishing without warning, and you take your life in your hands whenever you try to cross the street. (True, there are "walk" and "don't walk" lights, but just because you got a "walk" light doesn't mean there isn't a green arrow somewhere directing traffic right into your crosswalk.) And getting from one neighborhood to another is probably more distance than you want to walk in any case.

Fortunately, Mexico City has one of the best public transportation systems I've ever seen in a third world city. The extensive subway system is modern, of 1960s vintage, and uses the same quiet rubber-tired technology as you see in Paris. At the best of times, it looks like this:



At the worst of times, you can't see the floors or most of the trains because of the crowds. (But hey, at 3 pesos or 21 U.S. cents per ride, at least it's a bargain.)

More recently, they've begun putting in busways, dedicated high-speed bus lanes that New York is also experimenting with. Judging from our experience in Mexico City, this has promise. The center lanes of major streets are cordoned off from other traffic and devoted exclusively to buses, which stop at subway-like stations where riders pay their fare before boarding:



This both speeds up boarding and keeps the bus out of traffic, although it still has to wait at red lights for cross streets to clear. As with the subways, though, this system gets insanely crowded at times.

One quirk of the city's public transportation, in fact, stems directly from that crowding: women- and children-only sections. Apparently, women complained of being pushed and molested in the crowds, so now they get their own entrances to the buses and subways:



It may be a sensible solution to a local problem, but as with the sex- and age-specific want ads, it's a reminder that you're definitely not in the United States of America anymore.