She appeared out of nowhere, the teenage girl making , a few blocks from the in Mexico City, that grand square surrounded by a warren of winding streets.
We had spent an afternoon wandering awestruck around the . In the heart of the city, the Templo Mayor – the Aztec temple that marked the ancient city of Tenochtitlan – sits alongside the Palacio Nacional, a destroyed and then rebuilt by the Spanish conquistadors. On the Calle de Donceles, bookshops spilt dusty volumes. The light: the sepia of a fading polaroid. We fretted about speaking to the driver in our broken Spanish. About making it back to our Airbnb before dark.
We turned a corner and there she was, the teenage girl making gorditas. She ladled a corn tortilla into hot oil until it was golden and puffy. She filled her creation with coriander, diced onion and tomatillos. With all the verve of a ballet star, she stuffed it with . Chopped pork rind, hot from the , perfumed the air with smokiness. It yanked me into the here and now.
The gordita, I later learned via Google, was conceived in the pre-Hispanic era, when Indigenous communities first used masa corn flour to make tortillas. A good gordita, which translates as is crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, a pocket thick enough to sandwich beans and cactus. Chicharrón and . This braised goat marinated in fiery adobo originated before arriving in Mexico City, where over cook carnitas, plate , pour . Each vendor performs her own choreography. Each stand, adorned with a cheery, hand-painted sign, follows the rhythms of the city. It's a roving, shifting universe of regional Mexican cuisine.
The welcome sight of a stand selling gorditas in Mexico City. Source: Neha Kale
I had come to the city nursing a loss. And like any food writer, I had done my research. I would start each day with concha, that cloud-like Mexican bread topped with sugar and cinnamon. I would track down the city’s best , the ubiquitous shawarma taco that arrived in Mexico via Lebanese migrants. I would wake up before dawn and Uber to , a family-run eatery known for guisada, a homemade stew laced with chillies.
But we turned left, instead of right in . We waited on the four-lane , lulled by a taxi driver playing Spanish love songs. We did eat al pastor in the neighbourhood we were staying in, where elegant cafes and crumbling mansions drew us back like a beacon. Each day, I consulted the Mexico City itinerary I had compiled like a life raft. Each day, the city had other plans.
The city's streets offer a roving, shifting universe of regional Mexican cuisine. Source: Neha Kale
“The seemingly anarchic chaos and confusion of the city’s traffic had always intimidated and even terrified me: octopus intersections and roundabouts like wide Demolition Derby arenas, cars densely crisscrossing simultaneously from all directions,” writes . In the Guatemalan American writer learns to drive in his late wife’s hometown by choosing a page from the Guía Roji, a local street directory that mapped the city’s 6,400 neighbourhoods, reliably delivering him somewhere unexpected.
Each day, I consulted the Mexico City itinerary I had compiled like a life raft. Each day, the city had other plans.
In Mexico City, you delay the reservation. You forget, in the efforts of navigating a city of 22 million people, about catching a cab during peak hour to that cantina across town.
There’s an iconography of the city that is captured endlessly on travel blogs. The pastel-coloured streets of . Terracotta pots in a leafy courtyard. A frothy . You can enjoy these things, by uploading them to social media for posterity. But in chasing the idea of the city, you are confronted with your own limits. In the face of failed plans, you choose serendipity instead.
In our eagerness to know everything, to map out our plans down to the algorithm, we presume that we should know everything – that in a week, in a place, we can get to the heart of it, distil our lives into a series of curated experiences. But what would happen if we embraced the sustenance that arrives without warning, surrendered to culinary chance? In Mexico City, I had hoped to visit the four museums, and murals I dreamed about. Eat mythical dishes that existed in my imagination. Somehow, the magic of a gordita, savoured on a street corner when I least expected it, would turn out to be just enough.
