Oaxaca: Mexico's Capital of Slow Food and Slower Mornings
In Oaxaca, breakfast can take two hours and no one apologises for it. A food-focused slow travel guide to one of Mexico's most extraordinary cities.
The tlayuda arrives on a plate the diameter of a bicycle wheel. Black beans, quesillo, tasajo, chapulines (toasted grasshoppers, which you eat), and a salsa made from chillies you can smell from across the room. It costs 80 pesos. It takes 40 minutes to eat because it should take 40 minutes to eat — because eating it quickly would miss the point of everything this city is trying to tell you.
The Mercado Benito Juárez at 7am
Every serious Oaxacan morning begins at the market. Not for tourists (though tourists are welcome) but for the locals who come to drink tejate — a pre-Hispanic drink of toasted corn, cacao, and mamey — from clay cups, who eat enfrijoladas at plastic tables with their families, who buy the dried chillies (at least seven varieties, each with a distinct flavour profile and purpose) that will become the week's moles.
The market is a classroom in Oaxacan food culture. Go before 9am. Take notes. Ask questions in whatever Spanish you have — the vendors are patient and generous with information.
The Mezcal Education
Mezcal is to tequila what single-malt Scotch is to blended: artisanal, specific, and varied in ways that mass-market production flattens into nothing. Oaxaca is mezcal's home. The best education is a visit to a small palenque (distillery) outside the city — ask your accommodation to recommend one that is genuinely small-scale, not a tourist operation.
What you'll learn: mezcal is made from roasted agave hearts, which explains the smoke. Different agave varieties (espadín, tobalá, cuishe) produce dramatically different flavours. The production process, entirely by hand and animal-powered in small operations, takes months. Drinking it slowly, with salt and orange rather than lime, is the way.
Time in Oaxaca
Oaxacan time operates differently. Not in the clichéd "manana culture" sense — things get done, appointments are kept — but in the sense that no meal ends before it is finished, no conversation concludes before it has found its own conclusion. The city has not decided to be efficient. It has decided to be present.
Oaxaca teaches you that the quality of a meal is measured in how long it took to be eaten, not how long it took to be made.
