Mexico City (Jan 2026)

So many of our friends have raved about Mexico City. I have never been and G had only been once as a teenager, so we were eager to check it out. What an amazing city! Cosmopolitan, with museums and restaurants that rival New York, and broad tree-lined boulevards that could be Paris, but all with Mexican color and flavor. Repeatedly we heard the claim that CDMX has more museums than any other city, which certainly seems plausible. And there are so many great restaurants on every level from street vendors to Michelin stars.

Air Connections and Logistics

Aeromexico (who code-shares with Delta) offers direct flights from LAX to MEX several times a day. With two hours time difference (most of Mexico is on Central Standard Time with no daylight saving time), and a flight time a bit over 3.5 hours, it's a fairly easy flight. The airport is a little ways out of town, and could be a 20-40 minute or longer drive, depending on traffic. Airport taxis are booked at a kiosk where you pay in advance a fair fixed price. In town, we were told cabs can be untrustworthy, but Uber worked great all around town and at super bargain prices by LA standards. (For some reason, I was unable to book an Uber from the airport, although I was able to reserve an Uber for our ride back to the airport.)

Accommodations

Mexico City is a sprawling city with a bunch of different neighborhoods, so you'll want to zero in on a neighborhood to stay in. Roma and Condesa are two popular choices, next to each other, and both very central. They have a lot of quiet tree-lined streets between broad boulevards and lots of parks and cafes. We chose to stay at the Hotel Villa Condesa, a grand 20th century townhome mansion converted into a boutique hotel. It is a good value compared to some of the more expensive places in that neighborhood, with a very spacious suite, and a lovely courtyard dining area with breakfast included and lunch or dinner on offer. The place definitely has its devotees, as we met interesting people cross-table chatting at breakfast, several of whom were repeat / regular guests here.

Day 1 - Arrival

We opted for a leisurely travel day, leaving the house late morning, taking an afternoon flight, and arriving in Mexico City to our hotel in time to settle in and catch a neighborhood dinner.

Day 2 - Centro Historico Our first full day in country, we didn't want to be pinned down to any specific plan, so we just took that day to walk around the Centro Historico. We started at the Zocalo, the huge main public square where you often see demonstrations or celebrations, though when we were there it was filled with an art exhibit of painted prickly pear cactus sculptures. On one side of the plaza is the Metropolitan Cathedral, a classic grand cathedral that dates from the first arrival of the Spanish. Behind the cathedral is the Templo Mayor, the archeological remains of the grand Aztec temple that dominated that location before the Spanish came. After a lovely lunch at the Casa de las Sirenas overlooking the cathedral, we wandered over to the Palacio Postal. It seems funny that everyone recommends that you must see the Post Office, but it really is true, you must see it. Built in 1907, the interior especially is just Art Nouveau opulence. Some of the rooms are now a charming museum of postal history, stamps, and preserved offices. Right around the corner is the Palacio de Bellas Artes, a performance and exhibition space for fine arts. It was begun in the early 1900s with a full head of Beaux Arts splendor on the outside, but then construction stopped for a few decades and the interior was completed in the 1930s in Art Deco splendor. It contains an amazing permanent collection of murals including Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo. A dazzling feast for the eyes. From there, we just relaxed a bit in the Alameda, the large central park, before wandering into a few more museums and churches in this enchanting part of the city.	Dinner at Rosetta Rosetta is a Michelin 1-star restaurant in the Roma Norte neighborhood. Set in a early 20th century villa, dining tables are distributed around different rooms in the villa, and the lovely dishware gives the feel of being in a home. The food takes traditional Mexican inspiration, but elevates it with refined modern technique and innovation.
Day 3 - Luis Barragán Architecture Tour, Museo Nacional Antropología Luis Barragán was the Frank Lloyd Wright of Mexico, a 20th century architect with several important works around Mexico City. The Traveling Beetle is a Mexico City tour company with a passion for architecture and design, using architecture students and classic VW beetles to conduct their tours. On a friend's recommendation, we did the Luis Barragán Half-Day Tour, which included the Convent of the Cappuchines in Tlalpan and the Casa Pedregal, as well as a stop at the Espacio Escultorico, a large landscape scuplture in an eco-preserve on the UNAM campus. Our tour guides' passion for architecture was evident, and it was quite interesting to learn about Barragán's life and his unique style, very focused on natural light and expansive spaces connected by compressed passages. Traveling Beetle offers shared tours and private tours. We opted for the private tour, which picked us up at our hotel. The half-day tour left us enough time to hop over to the Museo Nacional de Antropología (MNA) for a tasting of its highlights. We had been told that one could spend a full week just at the MNA, which its dazzling collection covering the breadth of Mexican history and culture. The Hall of the Mexica (Aztecs) contains the iconic Aztec sun stone, in the center of a vast hall full of larger-than-life sculptures, artifacts, and displays from the Aztec people, and the 13th-15th century city of Tenochtitlan (precursor to Mexico City). The Hall of the Maya contains an equally impressive collection of Mayan sculpture and artifacts from an even older time, and an outdoor space off of that hall has portions of relocated Mayan temples.	Dinner at Pujol Pujol is a Michelin 2-star restaurant that regularly appears on lists of the world's top restaurants. Pujol takes traditional Mexican inspiration, elevated with refined modern techniques, to the level of that second Michelin star that is earned through a choreography of front-of-house staff serving, and obvious labor of countless people in the kitchen.
Day 4 - Xochimilco Farm Tour Xochimilco, in the south of Mexico City, is a district famous for its vast network of canals, going back to the time of the Aztecs when much of Mexico City was a giant lake. Today, Xochimilco is famous for its canal boats, many of which are party cruises. We chose a tour from Culinary Backstreets, which does foodie-focused tours. Their Urban Eco-Reserve of Xochimilco full-day tour starts with an exploration of pre-Columbian foods at a local market, and then takes a canal boat to learn about the ancient farming traditions, and visits one of those farms for lunch. This was also highly recommended to us. (Alas, we didn't actually get to do this, because I got food poisoning, and spent this day in bed in our hotel room. Thus, no pictures from this day. But this is what we would have done on our ideal itinerary.)	Dinner at Contramar Everyone says that you must go to Contramar, a not fancy but very buzzy restaurant in Roma Norte that is all about the seafood: tostadas, ceviches, and their signature pescado a la talla, a grilled red snapper with a smoky red salsa on one side and a fresh green persillade salsa on the other. Alas, the night we were meant to go here I was sick in bed in our hotel room, so we have no pictures to share. I just leave it here as a placeholder for a recommended itinerary.
Day 5 - Coyoacan Bike Tour, Frida Kahlo Museum Everyone says that the Museo Frida Kahlo (also called the Casa Azul) is a must-see, and that you should book your tickets in advance, as the limited timed entries sell out. We opted for a Frida Kahlo Bike Tour of the Coyoacan neighborhood, which included entry to the museum. We would highly recommend this tour. The bike ride part was gentle and easy, all flat, short distances between stops, but a great way to see the neighborhood. While we learned some about Frida Kahlo on the bike tour, we also learned a lot about this neighborhood, and about the history of Mexico City, which was very interesting and provided good context for understanding Frida. The tour also included a snack stop (churros and atole or horchata) and a lunch stop in the bustling mercado. At the end the tour delivered us to the Frida Kahlo Museum, which is the house where she lived most of her life. While it has a few of her artworks, it is more about her life, including family photos, some of her wardrobe, her furniture, and such. After the tour, we had time to pop over to the Museo de Arte Moderno to see a few more of Frida and Diego's works.	Dinner at Páramo Páramo is like a Mexican izakaya, a place that you go to eat some really good tacos while drinking with your friends. Speakeasy-like, it has barely any signage, and no street presence, just a door to a stairway that leads to the buzzy upstairs space. They'll take some reservations earlier in the evening, but after 7:30, it's just first come first served, and plenty of people waiting for this hot spot.
Day 6 - Teotihuacan Pyramids One of the must-see sights is the Teotihuacan archeological site featuring a couple of large pyramids amidst several other structures. We planned to get a good overview of the whole site via an early morning Teotihuacan Hot Air Balloon Flight, and then explore the place on foot afterward. We booked the well-reviewed Volare tour on TripAdvisor / Viator. Alas, the weather gods did not smile on us, and our morning was fogged in and never quite lifted, so the balloon flights were canceled. The company was very professional about it, offering a full refund to just go back to the city, or to allow us to stay and explore the pyramids on foot just for the cost of the transportation (Teotihuacan is nearly an hour out of town and they had picked us up in the city). We chose the latter, and exploring the pyramids on foot still made for an excellent day. (I would definitely recommend Volare, as I believe they made the right call for safety and customer experience, and we will probably try again if we go back.)	Dinner at Baldío Baldío in the Condesa neighborhood, just a short walk from our hotel, turned out to be one of my favorite dinners. Earning a Michelin "green star" for sustainable food practices, they are very focused on sourcing food mostly from the chinampas (island farms in the canals of Xochimilco), grown sustainably using traditional methods, cooked so as to get as close to zero waste as possible. Vegetable stalks and leaves are cooked along with their roots. The heads and tails remaining from fish filets are rendered down to create a fantastic umami boost to moles. Many things are fermented, and they offer a great non-alcoholic beverage pairing featuring quite a variety of kombuchas and other ferments. The concept is intriguing, and happily the execution looks and tastes fantastic too.

Day 7 - Head Home

We opted for another leisurely travel day, leaving the hotel late morning, taking an afternoon flight, and getting home early evening.

Reflections and Recommendations

Six nights is a decent amount of time to get a "tasting menu" of Mexico City that will definitely leave you wanting more. Like New York or Paris, you could spend anywhere from two days to two hundred days here and not be bored. This was a great intro to the city, and I wouldn't do anything different if I had it to do over (except of course not drinking sketchy eggnog peddled by nuns). For foodies, if you want to hit the top restaurants, start thinking about making reservations 2-3 months ahead. A number of them do OpenTable. Even more of them will take reservation requests via WhatsApp messaging, and sometimes you can get a jump on the official OpenTable advance booking window by asking nicely on WhatsApp.

Notes on Cost

For two of us, excluding airfare and souvenirs/purchases, we spent a total of $5,405 for our 6-night vacation in Mexico City, including lodging, food, taxi/Ubers, and tours, which is about $900/day for the two of us. That broke down to:

• $1,523 for hotel (average $254/night) for a large suite in a boutique hotel,
• $2,092 for food (average $350/day), but with huge variability and some seriously high-end expensive dinners. Dinner at Pujol accounted for nearly half of that entire food cost. Take that out, and we averaged $223/day. One could still dine quite well for half that cost or even less.
• $210 for local transportation (average $35/day), including a $50 transport out to the Teotihuacan pyramids
• $1,330 for tours and entry fees (average $222/day) (includes two pricy tours that we didn't get to go on, but I priced this as if we'd been able to)

The international air was $965 for the two of us on Delta, booked 4 months ahead. In general, I’d say Mexico City prices felt inexpensive compared to LA. While accommodation can be expensive in the most desired neighborhoods, restaurants seemed generally 30-50% less than LA prices for comparable quality, and Uber felt like 70-80% off.