It’s a myth that eating any street food in Mexico City will make you sick.

But if you’re not used to eating on the street here, you shouldn’t just pick any stand. One of the most common questions we get on our Eat Mexico tours is: “How do you choose where to take us?”

Here are the guidelines I use when planning our Eat Mexico tour routes.

1. Pick a street food stand that looks crowded. This means several people standing up and eating in a cluster around the stand. If the stand is empty, and you don’t have a personal recommendation from someone else who’s eaten there, do not eat there.

2. Glance around and see if the stand looks clean. Are there stains everywhere? Dirty plates and napkins? If so, pass. I also pass on places where the food just sits in one big pile, as opposed to clean clay pots, or tupperware or stainless steel containers.

3. Who takes the money? It’s a good sign if the person preparing the food and the person accepting payment are two different people. Smaller stands can’t afford this luxury, so make sure they place a piece of plastic over their hands when receiving cash or change.

4. The food must be freshly prepared. Some stands in Mexico City prepare a lot of food beforehand, and it just sits out. They don’t even necessarily warm it for you — it just goes from the container right into your tortilla. (My one exception here is tacos de canasta, which by definition sit out all day, steaming in a basket. They’re still really good.) These stands won’t automatically make you sick, but they just don’t taste as good. It’s a much tastier experience to watch the taquero make your taco right in front of you, or to watch the older woman pat the masa into a tlacoyo.

5. Feel free to make small talk while you eat, if you speak Spanish. Most stand-owners are nice and they’ll answer your questions, especially if you’re a foreigner. Ask, “Cuántos años llevan aquí, en este esquina?” which means, “How many years have you been here, at this corner?” Many stands have been on certain corners for decades. If you’ve found the tlacoyo stand with the little old woman with the gray braids who says, “I’ve been here 40 years,” you’ve struck gold.

6. Go during peak hours. This helps you get a better idea of which stands are the most crowded. In Mexico City, peak street food hours are generally 10 or 10:30 a.m., or 2:30 to about 4 p.m. (And then perhaps 8 p.m., when folks are getting off work.) Be aware that if you’re searching for street food at 6 or 7 p.m., some stands are closing up for the day, and you’re going to get the dregs of their daily product.

Do you have any tips you use when eating street food, either here or elsewhere? Feel free to share below.

Jesica and I having been mulling over a new tour lately, and we’re both pretty excited about it.

It’s a preview of some of Mexico’s best-known alcoholic beverages: mescal (a distilled spirit made from the agave plant); pulque (the fermented juice of the maguey plant); tequila (a distilled spirit made from blue agave) and, lastly, Mexican wine.

Few people outside Mexico realize that Mexico does indeed produce wine, and a good amount of it. Currently Mexican wine-makers manufacture more than 300 labels, and Mexican wines have won more than 450 medals in contests around the world.

A few weeks ago, we did a test-run for our new Pulque, Mezcal, Tequila & Wine tour. (That’s the tentative name we’re using.) It was lots of fun. Our first stop was the El Encrucijada wine bar in Condesa, where the owner had set out three great wines for us to try: an Entretanto Carignan Syrah from Aguascalientes, a Miguel Tempranillo Cabernet from Adobe Guadalupe outside Ensenada, and an award-winning Santo Tomás Merlot, also from Ensenada.

As we sipped, we talked about the long history of wine-making in Mexico and where wine is principally grown here. I won’t get into too much further detail, but suffice to say everyone had a great time. (If you want to know more, we humbly ask you to book the tour, once we get the details up on the website. Or you can organize a tasting with us.)

Here are a few more pictures from the event. And a question for you: Do you enjoy Mexican wine? If so, what’s your favorite variety?

• To read more about popular, low-cost Mexican wines in Spanish, check out wine mag Vinísfera’s recent article: “Cuál es tu ‘vino de diario’ favorito?”
• To book a tour with us, fill out the form on our Contact page or email us at info@eatmexico.com.
• More details — including the price of our pulque, mescal, tequila & wine tour — will be coming soon!

While the history of ice cream has been well-documented — it’s thought to have originated in China, and was eventually brought to Europe by Marco Polo — the history of the paleta isn’t quite so detailed.

An old Mexican legend says that the Aztec emperors had servants who would bring ice from the Popocatépetl volcano, outside Mexico City. The emperors would eat this ice, mixed with fruits. This sounds exotic but isn’t backed up by written historical sources. What we do know is that during the Viceregal times, the historical name for the period of the Spanish conquest, the Spanish crown regulated and monopolized the ice market. People paid high taxes to have access to it.

After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1810, this taxation was lifted and the ice market opened up. More people had access to ice. Therefore, more people experimented with it.

In the 1940′s, one of the most famous Mexican heladerías opened for business — La Michoacana, a family-run store in Tocumbo, Michoacán. This little ice cream store eventually became the brand that popularized paletas all over Mexico.

Today, it’s almost impossible to travel to a Mexican neighborhood without seeing a La Michoacana paleta shop, or a convenience store that sells paletas over the counter.

Typical flavors include watermelon, lime, mamey, guanábana, mango, coconut, rum with raisins, pineapple with chili powder, cucumber with chili powder, pecan, pistachio or tamarind. Sometimes they are covered with chocolate or nuts, and sometimes they have layers of different flavors.

My all time favorites are the mango with chili powder paleta…

…and the Paleta de Pie de Limón, which I translate as the Key Lime Pie Popsicle. The latter is just like having a key lime on a stick. Not very traditional, but it is so good!

This paleta can only be found at a paletería in downtown Coyoacán. If you ever go to this picturesque part of Mexico City, please don’t miss this paletería with no name in Ignacio Allende street, right between the Farmacia Coyoacán and the Burger King.

Please share with us: what’s your favorite type of paleta?

Taquería Jalisco is a charming fonda-slash-puesto, located next to a parking garage on Rio Lerma.

They offer several types of tacos, but my favorite is their suadero, a tender, fatty cut that comes from the area underneath the cow’s skin. (The definition from Ricardo Muñoz Zurita’s Mexican gastronomic dictionary.) When suadero’s cooked, it’s greasy, crisp, meaty. Topped with a spritz of lime juice and a spoonful of red salsa, it’s very hard to eat just two, which is my usual limit with street tacos. Last time I visited Taquería Jalisco, I ate four.

Really, I’m fascinated with taquerías in Mexico City, and not just because of the taste. It’s the mechanics of it — the precision, the efficiency. The taquero tosses a handful of meat onto the comal, and watches the fat bubble and sizzle. He palms a few barely silver-dollar-sized corn tortillas, scoops up the meat, and tosses it, meat-side up, onto a plastic plate that’s lined with a square of paper. He asks: “Con todo?” and that’s a shortened code for “Do you want cilantro and onions?” The whole transaction — the making of the taco itself, whether you’ve ordered one or four — is done in under 30 seconds. It’s amazing.

My pictorial tribute is up on my personal blog. Oh, and here’s the info on the place, should you ever be in the ‘hood:

Taquería Jalisco
On Rio Lerma, between Rio Sena and Rio Tigris
Col. Cuauhtémoc
They’re open 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. Monday through Saturday.