April, 2023 · 5 days
I went to Oaxaca to eat and to drink mezcal. I came home with ceramics I still use, a woven bag I still carry, and candles that smell like the city, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a place.
It's the rare city that's worth the trip for the food alone and then turns out not to be about the food alone.
Getting There from the Pacific Northwest
It isn't easy, and I won't pretend otherwise. Most routes go through Los Angeles or Mexico City.
Take Mexico City. The flight from there to Oaxaca is just over an hour, and if you can spare the nights, break the trip and stay in the capital on the way down or back. It turns a long travel day into two short ones and you get a second city out of it. This is the single best piece of advice in this post and it's the one people skip.
Walking the Centro
The historic center is the reason to come. Colonial buildings in yellow, pink and terracotta, cobblestones, a courtyard or a mezcaleria or somebody's studio behind every other wooden door.
You don't need a map and you don't need a car. The zócalo is your anchor and everything works outward from it on a grid built for people. We'd leave in the morning with a loose plan and lose it by ten, which is my favorite way to be in a city.
Evenings the zócalo fills up. Live music, families out walking, people dancing. The indigenous heritage here isn't a museum exhibit, it's the thing the city is currently made of, and you feel that most at night when everyone is outside.
Mezcal
Oaxaca is where mezcal comes from and it's treated the way good wine is treated elsewhere. Not a novelty, not a shot.
A tasting here is less about drinking than about learning what you're drinking. Agave varieties, production methods, why a bottle from one village tastes nothing like a bottle from the next one over. You'll also learn to slow down, because locals sip it, usually with orange and sal de gusano, as something to talk over rather than something to get through.
The Food
Seven moles isn't a marketing line here, it's just what's available. Breakfast is an event. The markets have things in them I'd never seen.
What makes it work is the range. Market stalls doing tlayudas, which are roughly Oaxacan pizzas on enormous tortillas, sit alongside restaurants reworking the same regional cooking into something new, and you can eat extremely well at either end. Mercado Benito Juárez and Mercado 20 de Noviembre are where to start.
The Villages and the Day Trips
The city could hold you for a week but the valley around it is half the reason to come.
Monte Albán sits on a hilltop just outside town, Zapotec ruins with the whole valley laid out below. Hierve el Agua has the petrified waterfalls. And the artisan villages each do one thing: black pottery in San Bartolo Coyotepec, woven textiles in Teotitlán del Valle, where I watched someone grind cochineal on a stone to get the red.
This is also where the shopping is, and Oaxaca's shopping is genuinely different from souvenir shopping. Carved alebrijes, embroidered textiles in Zapotec patterns, ceramics worth the cost of shipping home. I'm still using ours.
The Short Version
Stay · Grana B&B, Escondido Oaxaca Eat · Criollo, Levadura de Olla, plus Mercado 20 de Noviembre Drink · Mezcaloteca Do · Monte Albán, Hierve el Agua, Teotitlán del Valle, the zócalo after dark Bring home· ceramics, alebrijes, embroidered textiles, candles Getting there · route through Mexico City and stay a few nights on one end Getting around · walking in the centro, a driver or tour for the valley
I've been back in my head more or less constantly since. The ceramics are on the shelf, the bag is by the door, and the candles are nearly gone.
Planning a trip to Oaxaca? Book with me.
