Oaxaca, Mexico: The Food Capital of the Americas That Most Americans Have Never Visited

Oaxaca is a city in southern Mexico, capital of the state of the same name. It is widely considered to produce the most complex, historically rooted, and genuinely extraordinary regional cuisine in the Americas. Not Mexico. The Americas. Rick Bayless has said it. Diana Kennedy spent decades documenting it. Anthony Bourdain went multiple times. The food world treats Oaxaca the way the music world treats New Orleans: as the place where something real and irreplaceable is happening that you cannot fully access anywhere else.

Most Americans have never been there. In fact, most are not entirely sure where it is. It sits a three-hour flight from Los Angeles and a two-hour flight from Mexico City, and it is genuinely one of the best food destinations on the planet.

Why the Food Is What It Is

Oaxaca has 16 distinct indigenous groups living within the state, more than any other state in Mexico. Each group brings its own culinary traditions, techniques, and ingredients. Those traditions have layered on top of each other for thousands of years. The result is a cuisine so varied within itself that eating your way through it in a week barely scratches the surface.

The landscape helps too. Oaxaca has more microclimates than any other Mexican state, which means it grows an extraordinary range of ingredients. Coastal regions produce seafood. The Central Valleys grow vegetables, corn, and chilies in dozens of varieties. Up in the highlands, cooks use herbs that don’t exist anywhere else. All of this feeds into a kitchen that has never had to import character from somewhere else.

Corn is the foundation. Oaxacan cooks use it in forms that bear almost no resemblance to what most Americans picture when they hear the word. The nixtamalization process, soaking dried corn in an alkaline solution before grinding it, produces a masa with depth of flavor that packaged tortilla flour cannot replicate. This masa goes into tlayudas, tamales, memelas, and dozens of other preparations, each with a different texture and application.

The Seven Moles

Oaxaca is called the Land of the Seven Moles, and this is not marketing. Seven distinct mole preparations come from Oaxaca, each with a different flavor profile, different ingredients, and different occasions for serving.

Mole negro is the most famous and the most complex. It contains over 30 ingredients, including multiple varieties of dried chilies, chocolate, plantain, and spices, cooked together over a long time into a sauce of almost impossible depth. Making it properly takes days. The version you get at a serious Oaxacan restaurant tastes nothing like the jarred mole paste sold in the US. The two share a name and almost nothing else.

Mole coloradito, mole amarillo, mole verde, mole chichilo, mole manchamanteles, and mole rojo each have their own profiles, their own ingredient lists, and their own stories. For example, mole verde uses pumpkin seeds, tomatillo, and herbs for a completely different texture and taste. Manchamanteles, which translates roughly as “tablecloth stainer,” includes chorizo and fruit alongside its chilies. Each of these is a complete tradition in itself rather than a variation on the same theme.

Tlayudas, Chapulines, and the Mercado 20 de Noviembre

A tlayuda is a large, slightly crunchy tortilla, about the size of a medium pizza, cooked on a clay comal over fire and topped with black bean paste, Oaxacan cheese, meat, and salsa. Netflix’s 2020 poll of the best street food in Latin America voted it number one. It is not a burrito, not a tostada, not anything you already have a mental category for. You have to eat one to understand what everyone is talking about.

The Mercado 20 de Noviembre in Oaxaca City is where you go for this. It is an indoor market in the center of the city with rows of women cooking over charcoal grills, smoke in the air, and plates of food that will rearrange your understanding of what a market can be. You pick a grill, sit down, and order. The meats come from vendors in the adjacent market. The cheese is Oaxacan quesillo, a fresh string cheese with a flavor and texture that bears no resemblance to the shrink-wrapped version sold under the same name in the US. The whole experience costs about five dollars.

Additionally, chapulines are roasted grasshoppers, seasoned with garlic, lime, and chili, and they show up everywhere: on top of tlayudas, in guacamole, in tacos, sold in bags at the market. They taste like very crunchy, intensely savory chips. The hesitation wears off after the first bite for most people, and then the main emotion is irritation that you cannot buy them at home.

Mezcal

Oaxaca produces somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of all mezcal in Mexico, depending on the year. Mezcal comes from agave, and the production process is radically different from tequila in ways that matter enormously to the final product.

Tequila uses one specific agave variety, blue agave, and produces it industrially. Mezcal, however, uses dozens of agave varieties, many of them wild. Most small producers still roast the agave hearts in underground pits over wood and stone before fermenting and distilling. The roasting is where the smokiness comes from. The specific agave variety, the soil it grew in, and the individual producer’s process all shape the flavor of the final bottle. As a result, mezcal is more analogous to wine than to most spirits.

Some agave varieties take 7 to 9 years to reach maturity before harvest. Wild varieties like tobalá can take 25 to 30 years. A mezcalero who plants tobalá today will not live to bottle what he planted. The slowness of that is built into the drink.

The best mezcalerías in Oaxaca City serve it by the pour, from small producers, with tasting notes and provenance information. Mezcaloteca on Calle Reforma is one of the most serious, with a curated selection focused on small-batch producers. Los Amantes on Murguía is more atmospheric, with live music in the evenings. Neither requires a reservation on most nights, which is one of many reasons Oaxaca still feels like a place that belongs to the people who live there.

What Else Is There

Beyond the food, Oaxaca is one of the most visually beautiful cities in Mexico. The centro histórico sits in a warm terracotta and jade-green palette, the streets are manageable on foot, and the craft tradition is extraordinary. The black clay pottery called barro negro comes from a nearby village called San Bartolo Coyotepec. Meanwhile, the weavers of Teotitlán del Valle produce rugs using natural dyes and designs that descend from pre-Columbian patterns. The Día de los Muertos celebration in late October and early November is one of the most significant in all of Mexico, with an intensity and depth that the tourist versions in Mexico City or Guadalajara do not replicate.

Furthermore, Monte Albán, the ancient Zapotec city built on a flattened mountaintop overlooking the Oaxacan valleys, sits a thirty-minute drive from the city center. It is one of the most impressive archaeological sites in Mesoamerica and gets a fraction of the visitors that Teotihuacán attracts.