MEXICO
Oaxaca City 2023 - Day 1
Happy New Year to the occasional person (?) who reads my blog! Last year for Thanksgiving we headed down to Mexico for a wedding of a friend in Cancún. It was a ton of fun and we loved day drinking at the resort. Like usual we’re going to skip over that and get into the interesting part.
I’d heard a lot about Oaxaca before planning this trip. My partner had been before and loved it. I’ve been to Mexico a few times but never anything with as much of an emphasis on culture, arts and food.
Apparently Oaxaca City has only been in the public eye for maybe a decade or so. Before 2000 it was relatively unknown and not economically strong. However, mezcal became really popular and Oaxaca City grew in popularity as a “little known” place to visit. Of course over the years it’s now quite famous for its foodie culture and mezcal production.
We were staying in the Jalatlaco neighborhood. It’s a short walk to the action of downtown but generally speaking it’s more residential.
For our first stop, we went to Sabina Sabe which is a pretty famous bar and grill. I’d seen it before on Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix.
So we had mezcal cocktails, ceviche, mole amarillo, shrimp aguachile and chapuline (cricket) taquitos.
As you can see the presentation was lovely and the food was really good. It may have also been a huge relief to eat something besides resort or airport food for a change.
Yes the brown bits you see sticking out of the taquitos are crickets. If you don’t get any legs, you basically can’t tell what they are and they’re incredibly delicious. They spice them and they’re nice and crunchy. This was my first foray into seriously eating bugs but I pushed through.
One hiccup with our trip was that with all the resort pool-side day drinking, I ended up getting sick. I had a sore throat on this day and had to take it really easy on the drinking. For our next trip though I want to really lean into trying different mezcal cocktails and going to a mezcal distillery.
Another thing to account for in Oaxaca is all the food is SO FILLING. Plan to be stuffed to the brim from dishes that seem or sound really small. I wish we had known to pace ourselves a bit more with food.
Finally after dinner we stopped by a pharmacy for sunscreen and meds and headed to the airbnb to crash.