A foodie friend of ours took us to El Caguamo – aka K-guamo – for the first time a few years ago, promising us that this was the best marisquería (seafood restaurant) in the city. And since then, it has become one of our favorite downtown stops. For almost 40 years, the Tamariz family has been selling tasty shellfish and seafood on the sidewalk of Ayuntamiento Street, just a couple of blocks away from San Juan market in the heart of Mexico City.

Update: This spot is sadly no longer open. The tianguis, or street market, has been an essential part of Mexican culture since pre-Hispanic times. In Mexico City, every neighborhood has at least one weekly tianguis, most selling produce, fish, meat and household goods, so families can buy all they need for the week in a single place. All of these markets, large or small, have one thing in common: an abundance of street food stands. Many of these vendors move around the city with the markets, and some have become so well-loved that neighborhood residents eagerly await the day of their local tianguis so they can enjoy tasty food served streetside.

Sitting on the boardwalk of Veracruz, about five or six hours east of Mexico City, we watch the blinking lights of shrimp and fish boats in the farthest distance, knowing our next dinner is on its way. A day before, arriving from the bus, all we wanted was especially satisfying seafood, and the hunt brought us downtown, which, in the past, has always provided. Veracruz is a warm harbor, embracing all comers and proposing excellent food and endless dancing into the night on the city’s street corners. Or that’s how we remembered it.

Like other cities around the world, Mexico City has been flooded with big-name chain coffee shops that charge exorbitant prices for a cup of bad coffee. Fortunately, D.F. is a city of contrasts, where good taste in coffee still exists. We set out to find the best coffee shops in town and were surprised by what we found. Our first stop was one coffee shop we have been visiting for several years now, Café Triana, inside Mercado San Juan, the city’s first gourmet stop par excellence. Marilu and Pablo Arana started selling coffee from Veracruz, a city on the Gulf of Mexico with a Caribbean feel, in the aisles of the market until they got the chance to get a booth and start their own coffee shop. Their establishment has since been featured in many national and international media outlets.

Mexican diners offer a place for many in the capital to go for simple eats, often for people struggling to make ends meet. The key is to look for a crowded lunch bar lined with clients downing food before they have to head back to work.

As with so many of the world’s great cuisines, Mexican cooking makes the most of every part of the animal, and for many of us culinary adventurers, beef cabeza, or head, is the source of some of the tastiest meat you can find in a tortilla. We’d been on the lookout for the best tacos de cabeza in the city, and we think we’ve finally found them.

Update: This spot is sadly no longer open. True to its name, Mexico City’s Centro Histórico is full of history everywhere you look. Walking its cobblestone streets guarded by historic buildings, some 500 years old, is always a great learning experience for us. On one of our recent walks through this amazing part of the city, we stumbled upon one building that caught our attention. First of all, there was a sign at the entrance that said that José Martí, Cuban poet, writer, philosopher and revolutionary leader, lived in the building at the end of the 19th century.

In our recent explorations of Mexico City’s Azcapotzalco neighborhood, we were taken to a taquería that was going to “blow our minds,” according to our host. After having some drinks at El Dux de Venecia, the oldest surviving cantina in the city, we headed around the corner to Los Parados de Pepe for a visit.

n the tale of Don Lázaro El Viajero, a Spanish Jew named Lázaro L. Torra, escaping the fascist advance in that nation’s civil war, fled in 1939 to Mexico City – one of tens of thousands that then-President Lázaro Cárdenas invited to find refuge in Mexico amid the black conflict of that war. By 1944 Torra had become something of a restaurateur/maestro, teaching kids in a kinda-working-class, kinda-middle-class neighborhood to speak in English and improve their Spanish and feeding them some decent grub in the same go. (The name of the restaurant, Mr. Lazarus the Traveler, has to do with its proximity to a road heading out of town before the city went all crazy huge and viral.) That was the deal. You got food, but you had to learn something in the process.

Visiting establishments with a lot of history always warms the cockles of our heart – even more so when that establishment is the oldest surviving cantina in the city. El Dux de Venecia didn’t start out as a cantina, but it became a drinking establishment in Azcapotzalco – a farming community that became part of Mexico City in the 1940s – during the Mexican revolution and has remained an important part of the neighborhood ever since.

In recent years, downtown Mexico City’s once grimy Centro Histórico has undergone a remarkable transformation. The government and private enterprises have invested in new infrastructure, pedestrian walkways, parks, hotels and high-end apartment buildings that give the area the look and feel of a district that is part of a modern, dynamic capital city.

The word mole comes from the Nahuatl molli, which means “mixture,” and is used to refer to a number of sauces prepared all over Mexico. There’s some controversy as to which spot is the birthplace of mole (Puebla, Tlaxcala and Oaxaca all claim the prize) and when exactly these sauces were created. What we do know about mole sauces, however, is that they are the perfect culinary example of the mestizaje that took place in Mexico after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores. They combine native ingredients such as chilies, fruits and seeds with elements brought by the newcomers, including nuts, exotic fruits and even bread.

Among the regions of Mexico that are best known for their culinary wealth, Puebla is near the top. Approximately 100 kilometers east of Mexico City, Puebla is the birthplace of chiles en nogada, mole poblano (probably the most recognized Mexican mole worldwide) and cemitas, a knockout sandwich made with the bread of the same name.

Colonia Santa Maria La Ribera, one of our favorite dining neighborhoods in Mexico City, is home to the historic kiosco morisco. Built in 1884, the Moorish open-air pavilion represented Mexico at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1902 and has been in its current location since 1910. Just a few steps west of it sits a nondescript hole in the wall, which figures as prominently as the kiosk in our mental map of the neighborhood. Owner David García Maldonado offers just a few items on the menu, two of which are outstanding: pozole, a broth made from pork and maíz cacahuazintle, or hominy, and goat birria, a typical soup from the state of Jalisco.

Set up along Bucareli, just south of Reforma – two of the city center’s core arteries – only after dark, there is a steady huddle that gathers under a yellow tarp around steam and light bulbs.