It’s almost 2020, and Mexico City continues to be one of the best eating cities in the world. So maybe you won’t find world cuisine the likes of New York or London, but instead you will be bowled over by a deep culinary tradition, genius chefs who were self-taught and a delicious meal waiting on every corner (and we mean every). No “best of” list will ever cover all the deliciousness awaiting you in Latin America’s foodie megalopolis, but here are a few places that we fell in love with in 2019.

Location, location, location is a familiar mantra of New York real estate; invariably it comes to bear on restaurants and other food businesses, too. When e-commerce giant Amazon decided not to build a second headquarters in Long Island City, many food vendors were disappointed, sometimes bitterly, at the loss of a possible 25,000 new customers. With an eye on the lunchtime rush just across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, they wondered, why not in Queens? By contrast, continual development in Flushing, albeit on a much smaller scale, continues to displace many small businesses. The food stalls in the lower level of the celebrated Golden Mall shuttered in late summer for a renovation that was planned to last several months; it seems nowhere near completion.

In Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, there is an old pier with a sorrowful rusting shell of a café poking out over the Black Sea. What had been a dining room is a vacant space that mostly seems to serve as a public urinal, while upstairs a kiosk-sized café serves Turkish-style coffee, beer and snacks with plastic tables and chairs for locals who bitterly recall when the café was one of the most happening spots in Sukhumi. Georgians and Abkhaz dined, drank and danced together at the café, called Amra, until war erupted in 1992, and these friends and neighbors began killing each other. Within a year, much of what had been the capital of the Soviet Union’s “Red Riviera” was destroyed and as the Abkhaz advanced, some 250,000 Georgians were forced to flee their homes, not realizing they would never be able to return.

Underneath the rumble of the 7 train in Corona, Tortilleria Nixtamal turns about 5,000 pounds of corn masa into 50,000 tortillas every single day. Stacks of them fill all the available shelf space in the unassuming storefront, as a lone conveyer belt spits out a continuous single-file row of perfect tortillas. Unlike mass-produced supermarket flour tortillas, or even the average corn tortilla at your local bodega, these are all made from real corn – no preservatives added – and they’re always fresh. Anything over a day or two old is turned into chips. When Tortilleria Nixtamal opened 10 years ago, real-deal fresh corn tortillas were impossible to find in New York, and stores had only recently begun to stock Mexican goods aside from the odd can of Ortega chiles.

You are motionless, stuck in a traffic jam after a long day at work while your stomach growls. You know the rest of the family will be hungry when you get home and that the fridge is empty and sad. Shopping and cooking is out of the question, so you turn onto a Vera side street, zig-zag through one-way lanes to Tatishvili Street, double park, and run into a tiny gastronomic oasis that has been saving lives like yours for nearly a decade. Its name is Tartan. Located in a step-down ground-floor apartment, takeout cafeterias don’t get homier than this. The front room is taken up with a long counter of refrigerated display cases half filled with enough ready-made dishes to lay down a feast when you get home.

When Cleveland-native Andy Husney set out for China at age 20 to teach English, he never would have believed that he would live there for the next decade, or, for that matter, open a Mexican restaurant. Husney initially came in 2012 for a one-year gig teaching English in Shenyang, located in China’s northeast Liaoning Province. But after that wrapped up, inspired by some friends and a desire to experience the culinary history of China, he made his way to Chengdu – recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a Creative City of Gastronomy, the capital of Sichuan province is also one of the capitals of Chinese cuisine.

When Liz Hillbruner moved to Mexico City in 2010 from the United States, she found herself obsessed with tlacoyos, the little football-shaped street eats she saw cooking on griddles around her neighborhood. They were a perfect package of corn dough, wrapped around beans or cheese. As she ate her way through the neighborhood, she simultaneously enrolled in a master course on Mexican cuisine. When it came time to formulate a final project, it seemed only natural to study what was already on her mind. She decided on a map – the Tlacoyografía – a tool for the community and street food-loving transplants to find all the tlacoyo stands in the tlacoyo paradise that is the San Rafael neighborhood.

It wasn’t very long ago that finding a vegan restaurant in Mexico City was like finding a friend on the city’s overcrowded metro during rush hour (read: impossible). In fact, until this decade there were no exclusively vegan eateries in Mexico’s bustling capital. This is not to suggest that vegan options weren’t available, but exploring the city as a vegan could be a tricky business, and veganism was a little-understood concept. So unusual an idea it was, that journalist-cum-chef Mariana Blanco was often called a loser or perdedora by friends who found her animal-free and plant-rich lifestyle to be at odds with what they knew. So when she opened the first vegan restaurant in the city, and indeed the first in Latin America, she called it Los Loosers.

Nine Inch Nails. Metallica. Tool. Rage Against the Machine. The driving beats, shredding guitar solos and iconic howls are attention grabbing to say the least as you meander through the colorful labyrinth that is Mercado de Coyoacán. From its famous tostadas and comida corridas to spiritual cleansings using Santa Muerte magic and all things Frida (it’s located just three blocks from Kahlo’s Casa Azul, arguably the most visited site in Mexico City), the Coyoacán Market is always abuzz with diners and shoppers, as many locals as tourists. In this case, the music is coming somewhat incongruously from behind an array of fresh-cut flowers: lilies, sunflowers, hydrangea, roses, carnations.

Just as moments in time can be captured by a photograph, to savor at a later date, so too can the freshest meats and produce – almost equally as fleeting – be preserved (albeit in a can) for enjoyment later down the line. Only we can’t guarantee that they’ll last as long, given how good they taste. Prevalent in various Mediterranean countries, including Spain, Italy, Greece, France and Portugal, canning offers a sustainable way to increase the shelf life of delicate seafood and sophisticated recipes. And while many associate conservas, foods preserved in cans and jars, with student life or basic survival fare, they are in fact experiencing a golden age in Spain.

The memory of 2017’s devastating earthquake still lingers in the minds of many in Mexico City, but perhaps the biggest challenge the city faced in 2018 was gentrification. Ambitious development initiatives have resulted in safer neighborhoods; however, the cost of real estate has soared, leaving many long-term residents and business owners at risk for eviction, particularly in the Historic Center. Yet chilangos are showing their support for their favorite culinary institutions that are feeling the crunch. Likewise, our DF correspondents revisited some old favorites in 2018, as well as branching out into uncharted territory.

Our trip to Taquería Los Parados in Roma Sur last month began like any other: we gathered up four friends and began the trek to this beloved taco spot. But the dark, moody sky threatened rain, and in anticipation of a gushing downpour, we piled into a cab minutes before the first giant, icy cold rain drops began to pelt down. As was so often the case on July and August evenings in Mexico City, we were at the mercy of the Aztec rain god Tlaloc. Our destination, Los Parados, is one on a short list of taco joints usually shouted at full volume to rally the hungry boozers after a Roma-Condesa bar crawl. On this night, however, it was the taxi itself getting sloshed.

We met Don Tirso in the center of Santa Ana Tlacotenco, one of 12 villages in Milpa Alta, Mexico City’s southernmost delegation, on a sunny and cool morning. The road from village to village in Milpa Alta snakes through fields and around ancient volcanoes, slowly climbing up the mountains that overlook the beast of a city to which it formally belongs. We take a truck to his property, part of a farming cooperative ceded to the campesinos (farmers) following Mexico’s decade-long revolution that ended in 1920, which focused heavily on agrarian reform. In his village, the city’s only rural area covered with forests and farms, his generation of elders is the one that mostly carries the torch of their direct connection to the Aztec past.

Editor’s note: In the latest installment of our recurring First Stop feature, we asked Queens-based food writer, culinary tour guide and consultant Joe DiStefano to share some of his go-to spots in Queens. Founder and publisher of the Queens-centric food blog CHOPSTICKS & MARROW, he authored the recently released book “111 Places in Queens That You Must Not Miss.” Joe has been exploring the borough’s diverse global cuisines for more than a decade and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Gourmet, Food Republic, and Serious Eats. One of the first things I heard when I was putting together 111 Places in Queens That You Must Not Miss, was “There’s too much food.” It was my editor’s not so subtle way of reminding me that I was hired to write an overall guide to Queens, not a tome devoted to the borough’s amazing culinary complexity.

Tacos Beto is not a pretty place. Stacks of soda bottles, enough for weeks to come, serve as a wall that shields customers from the wind blowing down Avenida Dr. José María Vertiz. The plastic tables and plastic stools that surround the bottles seem older than the invention of plastic. A long, dusty awning hanging above the sidewalk seating advertises a brand of soda that Tacos Beto no longer carries, maybe never carried. The only visible beauty encountered at the restaurant sits on the arched wall above the steel fryer, or comal bola – orange and blue paint spell out the words “Tacos Beto – los de cochinada” (“Tacos Beto – the garbage ones”).