Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
There's carne asada but that's really everywhere in Mexico now.
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I don't remember that in Mexico City.
Also, it's important to distinguish the "tourist experience" and the "everyday experience".
Everyday life in Mexico City is gonna be: some meat with beans and rice on the side, and some maize/corn small tortillas that you use as bread.
That's what the canteen in front of our office served most days. Very little chili (chili sauces is more something they serve in restaurants).
And at home, it's essentially chicken breast, or pork (I used to make stews with chicken and some tropical vegetables from Mexico unknown in Europe). Mexican grocery stores have very little meat offering. Chicken and pork (and not tasty pork like in China). They also sell chorizo, but it's very unlike the Spanish chorizo. In Mexico you have to cook the chorizo.
In general, I tended to overcook all my meat (especially pork), because I didn't really trust their meat.
Where Mexico is good is for fruits and vegetables, but especially fruits. You have an immense variety of tropical fruits in supermarkets, lots of different species of very good mangoes (not the one unsavory species that you can find in European supermarkets). And they have lots of different varieties of avocados (Mexico is the home country of avocados, which is actually an Aztec word, ahuacatl in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs). If you ask them, they slice the avocado for you so you can taste it and see if it's ripe enough and good for you. I was blown away the first time my landlady (an old Mexican women) took me to a supermarket and showed me you could ask them to cut them open for you to check how they are (that would be absolutely IMPOSSIBLE in France, and I believe also in the US... you cut it open, you pay for it... well not in Mexico).
At almost every street corner in Mexico City you can find stalls on the sidewalk that prepare freshly squeezed fruit juice for you on demand (you pick the fruits you want them to mix for you... personally I always ordered orange, pineapple and guavas, the perfect combination I find). That was really great. You can pick one in the morning on your way to work.
But appart from the fruits and vegetables, frankly, as a Frenchman, I was always appalled by the lack of choice in the grocery stores.
And if you live in Mexico, you really have to like corn/maize. I don't really like it, but I can eat it. But it's never as good as a good crunchy French bread (which you can forget about in Mexico, their bread is as awful as in Spain).
Another thing: I cannot recall ever having eaten fish in Mexico City. There really isn't any, despite the fact it used to be a big lake before urbanization of the valley.
And they really eat beans all the time, it's not just a cliché. I've never been that much into beans...
There are a few common odd stuff that can be hard for a foreigner, such as the slimy cactus leaves (which they put in the salad, and which I could eat only very slowwwwly otherwise I would throw up
), or chicken feet in a corn/maize soup that is very popular in the central altiplano (I had it once or twice, but yeah, not the most refined dish around).
And then there were some super good stuff that you can find only in Mexico, like huitlacoche tacos (you can buy them hot in the street markets of Mexico city, but you can also find the huitlacoche in the supermarkets, although when you live in Mexico City, in the central areas, without a car, it's hard to go to the supermarkets, which are located far away, so you most often shop in local grocery stores where they don't have huitlacoche, and the lack of variety in terms of food in those local grocery stores is a bit appalling like I've said).
It's also possible to find some excellent grilled meat tacos with onion and chili that they serve from food trucks here and there. It's dirt cheap and very good. But for me the most Mexican thing of all was to see every morning at the corner from our office these three Aztec-looking women with wrinkled faces cooking large corn/maize tortillas on iron stoves (like old iron barrels reused as stoves) right on the sidewalk. I never figured out what they were used for, as there was only tortillas, no stuffing, and I never bought any from them. Perhaps people buy it like they would buy bread at the bakery in France.
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