My Mexico City is everyone’s now

MEXICO CITY — In the hourlong traffic jam from the airport, I keep glancing out the window, looking for threads of childhood memories.

This is the city where I learned to read and write, where I first went to school, where I first visited a museum, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and first saw the murals of Diego Rivera, José Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros. This is where I learned to roller skate, on the tiled courtyard of our colonial-era apartment building on Calle Genova in the Zona Rosa, and where I learned to ride a bicycle, at Chapultepec Park, and crawled up the pyramids of the Sun and the Moon in Teotihuacan and floated in gondolas down the flowering canals of Xochimilco.

Now, a lifetime later, I am returning to this place. Just minutes after checking into a hotel in Colonia Roma, an eclectic bohemian neighborhood of cafes, galleries and plazas, I head out into this confounding city, to see it on foot, from the ground, to touch it and smell it.

I have a destination, a mezcal dive called La Clandestina. I want to celebrate my arrival in Mexico with my first taste of mezcal, and I had been told that La Clandestina is the coolest mezcaleria in town. I stroll up and down streets. Vendors and policemen, waiters and bartenders offer directions, pointing in every direction, sending me around in circles. Rain is now pouring down. Sidewalks and gutters flood, outdoor cafes and storefronts empty. I am soaked when I come upon a fellow in dreadlocks leaning in the doorway of a dark storefront. La Clandestina? I ask. He grins, obviously expecting the question.

“You’re here,” he says, and waves an arm toward a back room. A couple seated at a corner table glance over at me and go back to their drinks, their faces difficult to make out in candlelight. High-pitched laughter is coming from a foursome throwing back shots in a partly enclosed room. A server appears with a mezcal menu, and the dreadlocked guy pulls up a stool beside me, lines up several shots filled halfway. I wince with every gulp and beg off after the sixth shot. Instead, I order a mezcal Negroni. I sip, pay the tab and manage to find my way back to my hotel, on foot, in the dark, in the rain. The hotel staff tells me the next day I am one lucky girl. I think it’s magic.

Life on the streets

Mexico City comes at you fast, in multitudes, on streets lined with funky bars, glass towers, rundown houses, taco stands, cantinas, designer shops, fancy restaurants, artsy hotels. Life is lived out on the streets, in plazas and parks, in the mercados and commercial strips, in the elite colonias and poor barrios that spread far into the mountains. Few places are as maddening, as beautiful and mysterious, as mystical.

Today, against all odds — drug cartels, kidnappings, killings, corruption — Mexico City is a world-class luxury getaway, bursting with fine cuisine and hotels, salons and exclusive nightspots, the playgrounds of tourists, celebrities and the sons and daughters of the country’s richest families.

Tourism is booming in this megalopolis of 22 million people, which The New York Times called the No. 1 Place to Go in 2016. The most progressive city in Latin America, Mexico City had 6.3 million foreign visitors in 2015, a jump from 4.9 million in 2012, and is home to 700,000 U.S. expatriates, retirees, writers, artists, executives.

Often set against a grim image of poverty and violence, Mexico City vies with São Paulo, Brazil, for the title of richest city in Latin America.

It should have been little surprise that the tourist’s Mexico City largely overlapped with my own, since tourism has subsumed the city in some ways. As I wandered around the historic Centro on a bristling summer Saturday, I pushed my way through crowds of families, couples and tourists, herds trampling down streets encircling the Zócalo, the city’s epicenter, a large stone square built by the Spaniards over the ruins of the ancient Aztec city Tenochtitlan.

Here, on weekdays, the business of the federal and local governments goes on inside magnificent Spanish-era palaces. But on weekends it turns into tourist central.

Sports bars on the side streets of the Zócalo were packed that day with soccer fans. Shoppers shuffled along the Avenida Madero, massing around ice cream stands and taco dives, streaming in and out of discount clothing shops and the Gandhi bookstore. A few blocks away, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, a short line of visitors waited at the ticket booth, young mothers with toddlers slogged up the steep marble staircase to reach the great murals.

Little had changed at the museum since I first saw it as a child. It was still a cathedral, intimidating, august, and other than an arts bookstore behind a glass wall, there were few signs that much time had passed since I was an awe-struck schoolgirl.

Memorable market

Cutting across several streets, I reached the Mercado de San Juan. Dozens of pollerias, open-air poultry stands stacked with freshly killed chickens, lined blocks around the mercado. Inside, I walked by boxes showcasing glossy fruit (those cherries!), spotless vegetables from everywhere in the world, and rare delicacies, like 15 varieties of Japanese mushrooms. After I made a few rounds, recalling the dusty, fly-covered street mercados of my childhood, I saw why the airy, clean halls of Mercado de San Juan draws chefs and foodies.

On the way back to the hotel, I took a detour to Zona Rosa, where I lived as a child. I couldn’t find my old school, the Van Dyke Academy, a cloister of bespectacled nuns and high gates. The neighborhood is now a hive of gay night life, clubs and shops.

Back in Colonia Roma, La Cervecería de Barrio was gearing up for the evening weekend crowd. I grabbed a stool with a view of the Fuente de Cibeles, a replica of the Fuente de Cibeles in Madrid. It’s the neighborhood’s plaza, a traffic circle furnished with crayon-color folding chairs and umbrellas, tables. Bars, cafes and small shops encircle it. Neighborhood regulars, runners and bikers gather around the plaza, a scene common to the city’s moneyed colonias like Roma and its neighbor La Condesa, a quiet and more exclusive enclave of boutique hotels, art deco and California architecture and tree-lined esplanades along historic Calle Amsterdam and Parque Mexico. Colonias Roma, Condesa and Polanco form the city’s fanciest triangle. If Roma and Condesa recall the Marais in Paris, Polanco channels Beverly Hills.

Gastronomic ascension

Great cities usually define themselves through literature and art, fashion, theater, music, diversity. Mexico City has plenty of all that. Now in this millennial city, where the median age is only 27, a new generation of chefs is leading a cultural surge, creating a gastronomic movement and giving the city a new cachet.

“They are visionaries,” Carlos Puig, a columnist for the newspaper Milenio, says over lunch at Aguamiel, a no-frills restaurant in Roma specializing in Oaxacan food. “We’ve always had visionaries,” he says — but this time they are not just looking inward; they have a global vision. He and his wife, Yissel Ibarra, a film producer and documentarian, know their way around the restaurant scene. They agreed that Enrique Olvera, the celebrated, 40-year-old chef at the highly acclaimed restaurant Pujol, is the leader of the Mexican cuisine revolution.

So I went to see it for myself. On a leafy street in Colonia Polanco, Pujol announces itself quietly. The staff speaks in whispers and steps softly around an intimate space of dark gray walls, delicate artwork and candlelight shadows. It has the elegance of a jewel box and the solemnity of a church. The menu arrives in a sealed, parchmentlike envelope, like a royal edict. Couples, small groups of friends and society beauties fill the room. Dishes come and go, more than I can count, more than I can properly appreciate, all exquisitely presented. I am in awe. Nothing like this existed in Mexico City when I was a child, and although I later grew up going to elegant restaurants, Pujol stands in a class of its own even today.

“I think Mexico has had an inaccurate and bad rap until recently,” said Trisha Ziff, a British filmmaker who has lived in Mexico City for 12 years. We were at lunch at Maximo, where an Olvera protégé, Eduardo García, is turning out some of the town’s best French-accented Mexican food.

“Being the recipient of endless attacks creates a strange kind of freedom, a creative anarchy,” she said. “We take risks because we have nothing to lose. This culture takes risks. That’s why it’s so vibrant. It’s the same with food, with music, with fashion. It’s the youth and energy which gives the city its dynamism.”

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