For Josué Barona, the Mercado San Juan has always been part of his life: his mother and father both have stalls there, just around the corner from each other, and he has been working among the bustling food stands from a young age. While the stand that the now 35-year-old works at doesn’t really have a name – it is simply number 259 – many know it as Rosse Gourmet, the name he has given to the side of his business that sells edible flowers and micro greens. “We have been selling edible flowers for the last ten years,” he tells us as he counts colorful pansies into plastic containers ready for a big order he was preparing to send out. “Before that, the flowers didn’t exist [for sale] like this in Mexico.”

It is not hubris to say you have the best tortas (Mexican sandwich) in town when you have been serving them for more than 80 years. Take Tortas La Texcocana, which has been serving the delicious sandwiches in Mexico City since the early 1930s – their longevity suggests an unsurpassable skill for sandwich-making. The business was founded by León Sánchez, a Texcoco native, in downtown Mexico City. He started selling sardine tortas to newspaper workers on the street. In 1936, he established a small shop that sold various items, his famous tortas among them. Tortas La Texcocana is in the same venue where Sánchez set up his shop many decades ago.

Initially, it was books that led Fernando Rodriguez Delgado to his interest in cacao. Today Rodriguez runs Chocolate Macondo, a café that specializes in ancient preparations of cacao, but prior to that he was a bookseller, fanatical about reading and fascinated by the history of Mexico. The day that he came across the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century manuscript documenting Mesoamerican culture, was an important one: it would eventually spark his countrywide search to discover the traditions of cacao and seek out ingredients, the names of which he only knew in Nahuatl. Rodriguez didn’t speak this native language of Mexico, so trying to work out the recipes for cacao drinks he found in the codex was no easy task.