Mexico City, eaten properly

Most Mexico City itineraries treat food as a stop between sights. Flip that and the week gets easier: build it around meals and the sights arrive on the way to lunch, not the other way round. This is a food-first trip anchored in the city's neighbourhood fondas and its markets, not its reservations-only tasting menus, with one coastal week added on because Oaxaca's cooking doesn't stop at the state border, it just gets closer to the water. Skip the restaurant that needs booking three weeks out. The good stuff here doesn't take reservations, and most of it doesn't take a menu you can read from the doorway either.

Days 1-3 · Roma and Condesa, the fonda circuit

Base yourself in Roma Norte, not because it's fashionable, though it is, but because it puts you inside walking distance of the comida corrida circuit: small fondas that open for lunch only, chalk a set menu on a board out front, and close by 5pm because they've sold what they cooked. These aren't hidden and they don't need to be found; they're the places with a queue of office workers at 2pm and no photos of the food anywhere near the door. Order whatever the woman behind you ordered. Parque México is the reset button between meals, and Mercado Roma is worth a pass for the stalls upstairs, though treat it as a snack, not the meal.

Go slow on day one, genuinely. Mexico City sits above 2,200 metres and the altitude will flatten you faster than jet lag does, so don't stack three markets and a museum into your first afternoon. Evenings belong to the taquería with a line of delivery riders parked outside at 11pm, waiting on orders; that queue is the only recommendation you need. Al pastor from a trompo, not a griddle, is the one dish worth being fussy about, and Condesa has several worth the short walk between them.

Walk or take the Metrobús along Avenida Insurgentes rather than driving anywhere at rush hour; CDMX traffic is real and a fifteen-minute trip becomes fifty on a bad afternoon. Street stalls are cash only almost without exception, so keep small notes on you and don't expect a card machine at the counter that's actually worth queuing for.

Days 4-5 · Centro and Coyoacán, market mornings

Mercado de San Juan is not the prettiest market in the city and that's the point: it's where CDMX's serious cooks buy game, unusual cheeses, and chiles you won't recognise, and it rewards arriving before 10am while the stalls are still being restocked. A few counters will feed you on the spot if you ask; most won't, and that's fine, this one is for looking and buying, not sitting down. Save the sitting down for Mercado de Coyoacán, a few kilometres south, where the tostada counters compete openly for your attention and the tlacoyos are griddled to order.

Centro Histórico earns a day but comes with real friction: the streets around the Zócalo get dense and pickpocket-aware travellers do fine, careless ones don't, and the restaurants with laminated photo menus facing the plaza are pricing for tourists, not feeding locals. Walk a few blocks off the main square instead, toward La Merced, where the market spills into the street and the fondas serving the porters and stallholders are doing the same food for a fraction of the price.

Coyoacán itself is worth the afternoon beyond its market: cobbled streets, the crowds around the Frida Kahlo house that you should book ahead for if you want to go inside, and a plaza that's genuinely pleasant to sit in once the day-trip buses have thinned out toward evening. Go for the food, let the museum be optional.

Days 6-7 · Puerto Escondido, the coast without pausing the meal

Fly from Mexico City rather than bus it; it's a little over an hour to Puerto Escondido and the overland route, while scenic, eats a full day you'd rather spend eating. Puerto runs on the same instinct as the capital, just with fish instead of pork: palapas along the beach at La Punta serve pescado zarandeado and fresh ceviche cooked a few metres from where it was caught, and the honest advice is to walk past the strip closest to the surf breaks, where menus are printed in three languages, toward the comedores a few streets back where they're chalked in one.

Zicatela's break is famous for a reason and that reason is not swimming; the shore break here has a real undertow and a well-earned nickname, the Mexican Pipeline, so watch before you wade in, and ask locally which stretch is safe on a given day. La Punta and Carrizalillo are calmer and better for actually being in the water rather than watching other people surf it.

Puerto Escondido hasn't been paved into a resort the way some Yucatán coast towns have, which is the appeal and the friction in equal measure: moto-taxis are the transit of choice, service runs slower than you're used to, and a fair number of places are cash only after dark. It's the same tension you find in the medinas covered in the Morocco guide, a working town that tourism sits alongside rather than replaces, and it rewards the same patience. Evenings are for mezcal, ideally something from a small palenque rather than a bar-branded bottle, alongside whatever the kitchen grilled that day.

Day 8 · Your own chapter

From Puerto Escondido the week branches and we won't pick for you. Head inland to Oaxaca City if mole and mezcal in their home state matter more to you than the beach; it's a different flight or a long bus, but it's the deeper end of everything you've been eating all week. Mazunte, an hour down the coast, trades Puerto's surf crowd for turtles and a slower, quieter shoreline. Or stay put, skip the extra transit day, and spend it doing the thing this whole trip has been building toward: one more market, one more palapa, one more plate you didn't plan for. The small, cash-first coastal economies that reward this kind of slow travel show up again in the New Zealand guide, on a different ocean entirely, if you want the comparison.