The city's gourmet market, where chefs buy and where you can eat crocodile, ant larvae and very good cheese at the same counter.
Mercado de San Juan is where Mexico City’s chefs and restaurants buy, and it has been a market since the sixteenth century in one form or another.
It is not large and it is not a street market. It is a covered hall of specialist counters, and the range is extraordinary.
What is sold
Exotic meats — the market’s speciality and its reputation. Crocodile, wild boar, venison, ostrich, rabbit, and depending on the season and the counter, more unusual things again.
Insects — Mexico has eaten them for millennia and it is not a novelty here. Chapulines, grasshoppers toasted with lime and chilli. Escamoles, the larvae of the Liometopum ant, harvested from agave roots, pale and buttery and often called Mexican caviar. Gusanos de maguey, agave worms.
They are seasonal, expensive and genuinely good.
Cheese — a serious selection, Mexican and imported. Mexico’s own include queso Cotija, Oaxaca string cheese, and queso de bola from Ocosingo.
Charcuterie, Spanish hams, truffles, imported produce, and every chilli dried and fresh that Mexico grows.
Seafood flown in from both coasts, and a raw bar or two.
Eating there
Several stalls function as small counters — La Jersey for cheese and Spanish ham with a glass of wine, and others doing tortas, ceviche and tapas.
You can also buy from a few counters and have one of them assemble a plate. This is normal and encouraged.
The market shuts in the late afternoon and is at its best mid-morning.
The other markets
Mercado de la Merced, east of the Zócalo, is the opposite: enormous, chaotic, wholesale, and one of the largest traditional markets in the Americas. It is where the city’s food actually comes from. Go for the scale; watch your pockets.
Mercado de Sonora beside it sells herbs, ritual objects, candles and brujería supplies, alongside a live animal section that many visitors find distressing.
Mercado de Coyoacán for tostadas — the seafood tostada counters are an institution.
Mercado Medellín in Roma Sur, with a strong South American and Caribbean presence from the neighbourhood’s migrant communities.
Mercado de Jamaica for flowers, spectacular around Day of the Dead.
Practicalities
Open daily, roughly morning to late afternoon; Sundays are shorter.
Cash. Prices at the exotic counters are high and are worth asking before committing.
San Juan de Letrán metro is five minutes away.
More Food & Drink
Tacos al Pastor
Pork on a vertical spit with a pineapple on top — a Lebanese method, a Mexican result, and the best thing to eat in the city.
Pulquerías and Cantinas
A fermented agave drink that predates the conquest, and the century-old bars where the city still drinks it.