Postcard from Oaxaca
“The beating heart of Mexican food”
When I say postcard ‘from' I should perhaps confess it’s got delayed in transit.
I’m no longer in Oaxaca but back in the UK though with many wonderful memories of this fabulous trip.
I’ll be sharing my insights and experiences with those of you who log on to my online Tequila and Mezcal tasting at 6.30pm next Monday October (duh 🙄 November) 18th. So if you’d like to be part of that and are perhaps thinking about visiting Mexico do come along. (It’s for paying subscribers but you can sign up for as little as £5 a month!)
If you want to join in here are the bottles I recommended in the Guardian piece I wrote back in April. I’ll include some more tips and suggested cocktails in this week’s Friday 5, along with some new wine recommendations which I imagine you’re missing 😉
To continue the lowdown on Oaxaca which is mainly free, apart from my mini restaurant guide below, read on. This post is a little longer than usual ‘cos of all the pix so you may have to finish reading it on your app or your usual browser.
It’s rare when you travel that much hyped places exceed your expectations but Oaxaca did just that. It’s utterly charming - a small(ish), friendly, eminently walkable town, full of brightly coloured buildings, enticing restaurants and cafés but perhaps most importantly, deeply rooted in the culture of its indigenous community.
Oaxaca is the place you go to learn about what our tour guide Luis of Culinary Backstreets described as the ‘beating heart of Mexican food.”
For independent travellers, for whom taking a tour might not appeal, I promise you it’s worth it. We spent 5 hours with Luis, and tasted food we definitely wouldn’t have come across if we’d wandered round on our own.
The highlight was picking up yerba santa (Mexican pepperleaf) leaves and corn kernels* from the small La Merced market. We took the corn to be ground then the resulting flour to be made into tortillas in a small cafe in the Jalatiaco neighbourhood. (Our second breakfast of the day. The first - also at La Merced - consisted of the best tamales I’ve ever eaten.)
*these have to be nixtamalised I.e. soaked in an alkaline solution to make them easier to grind
The other revelation was the taste of the local chocolate which is more frequently served as a drink (with water) than a sweet though we did have an amazing chocolate tasting at Flor Cacao (flor.cacao on insta), a chocolate café in the Plaza San Cristóbal.
In fact Mexico has a huge and varied range of soft drinks including jamaica (hibiscus water), tejate (the slightly curious corn and chocolate-based drink above), atole (another corn-based drink that can be flavoured with apple or pumpkin) and tepache, a fermented pineapple drink so take every opportunity to try them. I’m also captivated by the discovery that there are Mexican soft drink brands called Boing and Squirt.
We ended up the tour with a DIY barbecue experience in the Pasillo de Humo (literally, smoke corridor) in the mercado de 20 de noviembre.
You buy the meat from one of the butchers’ stalls, they grill it for you then you pick up tortillas and whatever you want in the way of salad or condiments to eat with it on one of the tables in the centre. Watch out for the chillies, though. I’ve got a reasonably high tolerance for heat and my head nearly exploded. (Soothed by sucking a wedge of lime!)
It would also be crazy to go to Oaxaca without trying to learn more about mezcal which is the locals’ equivalent to tequila. We took a day out to visit the Lost Explorer distillery (more about this on Monday) and also managed to squeeze in a tasting at the Hembra speakeasy/tasting room which only serves mezcales - that’s the plural of mezcal - from women distillers.
Well worth doing - and they speak English which is a plus if you don’t have much in the way of Spanish. DM them to book via their instagram account @hembra_oaxaca.
With all this focus on food and drink we didn’t get round to the more cultural things we might have done, barring the slightly disappointing Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños though their Day of the Dead installation was really impressive.
We’d have been better by the sound of it to visit the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca or CaSa - the Centro de las Artes de San Agustin - a spectacular arts centre just outside the city. And we should have visited Monte Alban.
Here’s where I recommend you eat (and drink)
(We found the restaurant scene on the whole better - and certainly cheaper - than Mexico City)