Our Mexico City food tour experience with Sherpa Food Tours. This is hands down the best way to dive into Mexico’s incredible cuisine, with local tips on where, what and how to eat, while exploring one of the city’s funkiest neighbourhoods, Roma Norte.
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Why take a food tour in Mexico City?
In my opinion, food tours are the best way to get to know a new city. You get to wander around a new neighbourhood with a local, learn about history and culture in a relaxed, non-stuffy way AND get to sample the best local cuisine.
Food is an inseparable part of Mexican culture and it truly is one of the greatest cuisines in the world. So much of Mexico’s history, diversity and traditions are embedded in its food, and it is actually part of the UNESCO World Heritage list for ‘intangible cultural heritage’.
Getting to know Mexico’s food is getting to know its history and it’s modern day culture. Mexican people love food, and eating is a genuine cultural experience here – not just for sustenance!
Mexico City is one of the greatest foodie destinations on the planet and it is the central hub for cuisine all around the country. In Mexico City, you can sample every kind of regional Mexican food, from Oaxacan mole to northern barbacoa and everything in between.
But as a visitor in this gigantic city, it can be difficult and overwhelming to know the best spots. Even I feel overwhelmed when it comes to finding the best places to eat in CDMX, and I’m a career travel blogger! This is just another reason why a food tour is such a good idea.
I highly recommend organising a tour for your first day in the city, so you get the full benefit of your experience, new foodie knowledge and your guide’s recommendations for the duration of your stay in Mexico City, and Mexico overall if you’re continuing your travels.
About Sherpa Food Tours
Sherpa Food Tours is a global food tour company, connecting travellers with various cities around the world through food. They use local guides to showcase the culinary scene, sharing inside tips on the best local cuisine and hidden gem restaurants that most travellers won’t experience.
They offer tours in the UK, Europe, Mexico and Argentina, aka some of the best foodie destinations in the world! They pride themselves on small, intimate experiences with a maximum of 12 participants on each tour, with a local guide.
The tours are suitable for solo travellers, couples, friends and families of all ages. The guides do a great job of bringing together their groups, and it’s a fun way to meet other travellers and share a common passion – FOOD.
We have previously taken a tour with them in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mexico City is one of their newer destinations, and we jumped at the chance to join them again when we returned to the city for our second visit, with my Mum in tow for her first time ever in Mexico!
They offer three different food tours in Mexico City:
- 🇲🇽 Local foodie adventure: Sherpa’s flagship tour in Mexico City, this is the tour we took. It’s designed to give you an appreciation for the depth and variety of Mexican cuisine, from tacos to fusion dishes, incorporating regional specialities from across the country.
- 🌮 Gourmet taco tour: they have actually just started offering this tour since our visit and it looks fantastic. If you’re anything like us and tacos are the epitome of Mexican cuisine for you, this tour is the go! You’ll learn about all the different types of tacos, trying everything from traditional options to Michelin-recognised fusion tacos.
- 🍽️ Private food tour: if you’re a bigger group, you can customise your own private foodie tour based on your interests.
All the tours take place in the popular neighbourhood of Roma Norte, which is undeniably the foodie hub of Mexico City. There is an insane concentration of taco shops, cafes, fine-dining restaurants, street food carts and everything in between in this neighbourhood, it’s actually overwhelming to know the best spots to choose if you have limited time – enter Sherpa!
Sherpa can cater to vegetarians, gluten-free and lactose-free travellers on their Mexico City food tours if you advise them at the time of booking.
Sherpa Food Tours Local Foodie Adventure
- 💰 Cost: $99 USD
- 📅 Schedule: afternoon and evening departure, 12:00 pm or 5:00 pm
- ⏰ Duration: 3 – 3.5 hours
- 🌮 Food tastings: 10+ food and drink samples from 5+ locations
Sherpa are a pretty big name in food tours around the globe, and even though they’ve only been operating in Mexico City for a short time, their flagship tour has more than 500 5-star reviews on Viator. They’re doing something right!
This is the tour we joined. It’s a 3 – 3.5 hour experience, wandering around Mexico City’s coolest neighbourhood, Roma Norte, with a local guide a small group of other travellers, sampling all kinds of Mexican food and drink, and getting a crashcourse in Mexico’s history and culture.
Sounds pretty good, right? It is!
This tour runs every day of the week, and there is usually an early afternoon departure (lunch) or an evening departure (dinner). We opted for the evening, 5:00 pm, tour as I think this is a great way to spend a night in the city! You can save the day for sightseeing, and make good use of an evening that might otherwise be wasted.
🇲🇽 Book your Mexico local foodie adventure here
Sherpa Food Tours Gourmet Taco Tours
- 💰 Cost: $70 USD
- 📅 Schedule: morning and afternoon departure, 11:00 am or 4:00 pm
- ⏰ Duration: 2 – 3 hours
- 🌮 Food tastings: 5+ food and drink samples from 4+ locations
This taco tour is a brand new experience from Sherpa Food Tours, and they have just started running these experiences at the time of writing.
If this tour was available when we visited, we probably would have chosen this one. I know I’m not supposed to play favourites and I should love all Mexican food, but tacos are my absolute favourite.
They are literally the perfect food group with a bit of meat, a bit of veggies and a bit of carbs. You can order as many or as few as you like depending on how hungry you are, they’re cheap, they’re served fast, and they come in such a diversity of flavours.
This tour takes you on a journey through Roma Norte, sampling different varieties of tacos, from the famous Michelin-recommended ones, to the traditional street-side taco shops.
🌮 Book your gourmet taco tour here
Our Mexico City food tour experience
This was mine and Brayden’s second visit to Mexico City, so we already knew the amazing foodie experience we were in for. It was my Mum’s first visit, though, and we loved watching her taste the cuisine and dive into the city’s foodie culture with fresh eyes.
Our tour with Sherpa was literally the first thing we did in the city. Our flight landed at 12:00 pm, and by 5:00 pm, we were meeting our guide and getting stuck in!
I’ve already mentioned this, but I do highly, highly recommend making a food tour the first thing you do in the city. It’s such a great way to orient yourself, get tons of tips and tricks on not only the best places to visit, but also what to order and how to eat it – which isn’t necessarily obvious, especially if this is your first time in Mexico, or Mexico City.
I’m not going to specifically name all the places we visited on the tour, so as not to wreck the surprise! Plus, the tours do change locations frequently, to share the love with lots of different local restaurants and food spots.
Stop 1 – barbacoa tacos
We met our guide Alisa and the rest of our group outside the front of the first restaurant. We were 10 in total, 7 other travellers plus the 3 of us, which was a really nice and manageable size.
Alisa introduced herself, gave us a run-through of how the evening was going to work, and we also went around and got to know our fellow travellers.
I don’t know if it’s just my tendency to always get excited about the first stop, but the tacos we ate at our first stop were my favourite! Not just of the food tour, but after more than a week of tasting tacos all over Mexico City!
A Michelin-recommended taco shop, specialising in barbacoa de res, or beef barbacoa. The owners are originally from Monterrey in the northern state of Nuevo Leon, and they’ve brought their traditions to CDMX and developed a cult following in the process. The barbacoa was so juicy, and every bite was bursting with flavour.
We also had the option to have a beer or an agua fresca. Directly translating as ‘fresh water’, it’s a very typical Mexican drink that is non-alcoholic and not carbonated, but comes in a variety of fruity flavours. We had fresa y maracuya – strawberry and passionfruit – which was delish!
Another one of the reasons I love taking food tours is that they always come with a side of history and culture, without being overbearing. The Sherpa food tour in Mexico City was no exception.
Between our first and second stops, Alisa led us to a very unique part of Colonia Roma, La Romita. Formerly the Aztec village of Aztacalco, this little pocket of Roma feels as though you’ve stepped into a time portal. This was the perfect backdrop for Alisa to give us a brief history of Mexico City (or Tenochtitlan, its Aztec name), and it was a great crash course.
Stop 2 – cochinita pibil from the Yucatan
One of the great things about this tour was the diversity of food we tried, with specialties from all over Mexico! If you’ve only got time for a short trip in the city, you’ll still be able to sample some of the famous regional cuisine from other states in Mexico, none better than cochinita pibil from Yucatan (in my humble opinion!).
Cochinita pibil is a type of pulled pork dish, slow-cooked with an explosion of spices and flavours like citrus and achiote. Both Brayden and I LOVE cochinita pibil, and we’ll take any opportunity to eat it, in any form!
On this occasion, it was in a taco, with the obligatory pickled red onions to accompany and a great selection of habanero salsas of all different flavours. Music to our eyes as spice lovers, but not to worry if you’re not – Mexican food isn’t all spicy, and generally the spice comes from the salsa, which you add yourself if desired. Alisa also explained all the salsas and pointed out which were mild and safe for non-spice lovers.
We were again offered a beer or an agua fresca, which was a pleasant surprise. We’ve been on food tours where only 1 or 2 drinks were included, but we had one at every stop. I’m obsessed with aguas frescas, so of course I had another, and it was a flavour very typical of Yucatan agua de chaya. Chaya is a spinach-like plant that is typical in the Yucatan Peninsula, which was popular in Mayan times. The drink tastes better than it sounds and is refreshing for a spicy mouth.
Stop 3 – Veracruz cuisine
Our third stop was another cosy local spot, with a gorgeous aesthetic, with a blooming pink bougainvillea out the front strung with fairy lights. Every restaurant in Roma is just cool, from a tiny taco street stand to a fine dining restaurant, everywhere is inviting!
This restaurant specialised in food from Veracruz, which was something totally different for us.
We had the tastiest horchata I think I’ve ever had here. Horchata is a common variety of agua fresca, but this one is made with rice milk and spices, so it’s a bit more milky as opposed to fruity and watery. This version had a dash of condensed milk, which, as a sweet tooth, was heavenly.
We also tried a huejutleña, which is kind of like a fusion of a Mexican gordita/quesadilla and a South American arepa. It’s a maiz (corn) dough stuffed with cheese and dried chillis, served with a few different salsas that were so delicious and very different from any we’ve tried before.
Stop 4 – farm-to-table restaurant
Until this point, we had stopped at taco shops or smaller local restaurants for snacky bites, but that changed at our fourth stop.
We stepped into a gorgeous restaurant inside a restored mansion, with a stunning internal courtyard filled with plants and stained glass windows. Specialising in farm-to-table cuisine, utilising only locally-grown produce, with an ever-changing menu to cater for seasonal availability.
We shared a few different dishes here, family-style. The food was fusion-style, blending Mexican flavours with international cuisines. My favourite thing we tried here was a plantain gnocchi with blue cheese sauce – TO DIE FOR!
So creamy and delicious, I’m not usually a gnocchi fan, but the plantain (a starchy cousin of the banana used in Latin cooking) was 10000 times tastier than the traditional potato gnocchi.
We also tried nopal ceviche (cactus ceviche) and fideo seco (dried noodles), which were really unique flavours.
Our drink here was the beloved michelada! Mexicans adore these drinks, which are essentially beer cocktails. The most common mixes beer with lime, Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce, with the glass rimmed with spicy tajin aka chilli powder. We sampled a lighter version, simply with lime and a salted rim, to give the beer a slightly different flavour.
Stop 5 – tastes of Oaxaca
Our final stop of the tour was another beautiful restaurant, housed in a restored mansion from the Porfirio era (a Mexican president/dictator who loved European-style architecture).
I already mentioned that each region of Mexico has its own typical cuisine, none is more beloved than Oaxaca, which is what we got to try at this restaurant.
The state is a popular stop for tourists in Mexico, so chances are you may be visiting and get to sample the food straight from the source, but if you’re just visiting Mexico City, this is an excellent way to try what many believe is the country’s best food.
We started with one of Oaxaca’s more outrageous foods, chapulines! These grasshoppers are toasted with garlic, chilli, lime and salt and are surprisingly not too bad. They’ve got a nice crunch and are a great accompaniment to guacamole. Alisa did encourage all of us to try at least one on its own, though! We had sampled them before and don’t mind them at all. Because they’re crispy, the texture doesn’t feel yucky. My Mum happily tried two of them on their own before mixing some into her guacamole.
You can’t talk about cuisine in Oaxaca and not mention mole, and of course, we got to sample some on our Mexico City food tour! Alisa did a better job than I can of explaining the significance and complexity of mole sauce, one of Mexico’s most iconic dishes.
We got to sample mole chocolate and mole verde (chocolate mole and green mole) with fresh blue corn tortillas. I’ll admit, I’m not the biggest mole fan. It’s not my favourite part of Mexican cuisine, but Brayden loves it, and I’m so glad my Mum got to sample it, as she wasn’t visiting Oaxaca.
We also had some very very yummy chicharron quesadillas (like a crunchy pork skin) with blue corn and we also got to try the most typical agua fresca, jamaica, which is made from dried hibiscus flowers.
No food tour would be complete without something sweet, and our grand finale was a pastel de tres leches (three milks cake). I’ll admit, this isn’t my favourite Mexican dessert, but it is very popular. It’s essentially a sponge cake soaked with three different types of milk – evaporated, condensed and whole milk.
After five stops, more than 10 dishes and five drinks, it’s safe to say we were absolutely stuffed! We wrapped up the evening with Alisa sharing her favourite places to eat around the city and general tips for enjoying CDMX. I left with a note full of recommendations (and a very full belly!).
What to wear and bring
Come with an empty stomach! Seriously, don’t eat before your tour. If you’re doing the daytime one, I’d skip breakfast, and if you opt for the evening one as we did, skip lunch.
Wear comfortable clothes and shoes that are weather-appropriate. You’ll be in and out of restaurants and wandering around Roma Norte outside throughout the tour. Also, no matter what time of year you’re visiting, be prepared for a bit of rain. Even outside the typical wet season, Mexico City often has brief afternoon/evening rain showers, and it did rain during our tour (and no, I didn’t have my umbrella).
I strategically wore a long jumpsuit with no waistband to keep my stomach totally free to fit in all the food we sampled!
We had drinks included at every stop, but bring along a reusable water bottle, cash to tip for your guide if you had a good experience, and a phone and/or camera to capture all the yummies you eat.
Mexico City food tour: Worth it?
A Mexico City food tour is a must-do, and we had a wonderful experience with Sherpa Food Tours. You’ll walk away with so much new knowledge and understanding of Mexico’s history, culture and most importantly its cuisine – especially if this is your first time in the city.
I guarantee you’ll try things you’ve never heard of before, picked up some local insights on other specialties to order, and have a list of excellent restaurants and taco shops to return to throughout the rest of your trip.
It’s great value for all the food and drinks you get to sample, and you literally can’t go wrong with a day of eating and drinking delicious Mexican cuisine and wandering around what I think is the best city in the world.
Make sure you plan this for the very start of your Mexico City itinerary.
🇲🇽 Book your Mexico City foodie adventure here
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