The Best Restaurants in Mexico City for 2026
Eighteen of the best restaurants in Mexico City, grouped by the kind of night you are planning, from the two-star tasting rooms to a starred masa counter with no menu.
Mexico City is the most interesting place to eat in the Americas right now, and the range is the reason. In a single day you can sit through a multi-course tasting menu in a converted Polanco house, eat a sope pressed to order at a masa counter with a Michelin star and no printed menu, and finish in a Porfirian mansion in Roma where the kitchen is still sending plates at one in the morning. The 2026 Michelin guide made the spread official: ten of the eighteen restaurants below hold a star.
What follows is not a ranking. It is organized around the kind of night you are actually planning, because the difference between a two-star tasting room and a seafood lunch that closes at eight is not quality, it is intent. Book the wrong one for the wrong evening and the best kitchen in the country will still feel like a mistake. Here is how the city's best rooms sort themselves out.
The Two Tables to Book First
If you are planning a trip around one dinner, it is one of these two, and both need lead time measured in months.
Pujol is Enrique Olvera's flagship on Tennyson and the single restaurant most responsible for the modern Mexican fine dining movement. It holds two Michelin stars and has spent years on the World's 50 Best list. The kitchen serves a multi-course seasonal tasting menu built around Mexican ingredients and technique, rewritten as the seasons change. The constant is Mole Madre: a mole that has been fed and aged for years, plated against a fresher mole and eaten with tortillas. A separate counter runs its own taco omakase tasting alongside the main dining room. The room is quiet, and the floor team explains without lecturing.
Quintonil is the other two-star table, run by Jorge Vallejo and Alejandra Flores in Polanco since 2012. The name is a wild amaranth green, which tells you where the cooking sits: Mexican produce handled with restraint and a great deal of technique. Long-running signatures include the charred avocado tartare with escamoles and a cactus sorbet that closes the meal. The dining room seats about 42 and is deliberately plain. It is the quietest of the city's top tables and the easiest one to hold a conversation in, so the Polanco crowd keeps coming back.
The Chef Rooms of Roma and Condesa
This is where the city's cooking is most alive, and where the rooms are small enough that a week's notice is not always enough.
Rosetta occupies a Porfirian townhouse on Colima, opened by Elena Reygadas in 2010 and holder of one star. Reygadas was named the World's Best Female Chef in 2023. The cooking is Mexican with global influences, built for sharing, among them cabbage tacos with pistachio puree and romeritos and a sweet potato tamal with buttermilk sauce and salsa macha. Guests come in past a tiled entryway and a staircase wrapped in plants; it is routinely called one of the most romantic dining rooms in the city.
Maximo Bistrot is Eduardo Garcia's one-star corner room on Alvaro Obregon. Garcia, known universally as Lalo, buys daily and the menu follows, so regulars ask what came in that morning. French bistro technique underpins it, Mexican producers supply it. Arrive early for the bar: head bartender Priscila Moreno took the 2026 Michelin Guide Mexico Exceptional Cocktails Award.
Em is Lucho Martinez's one-star restaurant on Tonala, an evolution of the Emilia he opened at the same address. The kitchen works a contemporary Mexican line built on seasonal, local ingredients, with a lot of seafood. Service runs Monday through Saturday from 6 PM to 10 PM, which makes an early sitting easy to pair with drinks elsewhere in Roma afterward, and the restaurant is closed on Sunday.
Esquina Comun started as a supper club Ana Dolores Gonzalez and Carlos Perez-Puelles ran out of a rented apartment. It now occupies a covered Condesa rooftop with seven tables and one Michelin star, serving a tasting menu portioned for two that moves with what the kitchen has that week. Service runs Thursday through Sunday only, so the week's capacity is genuinely tiny.
Gaba runs two lives in one small Condesa room: a low-key cafe by day, a chef-driven restaurant after dark. Chef Victor Toriz leads the kitchen at his first restaurant of his own, and Michelin gave it a star in the 2026 selection, singling out the offal. It is the best-value starred table in the city at this level.
The Long Lunch
Mexico City eats late in the afternoon and takes it seriously. These rooms close in the early evening, which is the point.
Contramar has been the defining long lunch in Roma Norte since Gabriela Camara opened it in 1998. The menu has barely needed to change: tuna tostadas with chipotle mayonnaise and fried leeks, then pescado a la talla, butterflied and painted red with chile adobo on one half and green with parsley on the other, grilled over coals and eaten with tortillas. Service stops at 8 PM. This is lunch, not a night out.
Nicos has been in Claveria, well north of the tourist circuit, since 1957. Gerardo Vazquez Lugo trained as an architect and chose his family's kitchen instead. The signature is sopa seca de natas, a nineteenth-century convent recipe of crepes layered with shredded chicken, raw milk cream, tomato and poblano. The wine list is one of the deepest in Mexico and a mezcal cart works the room.
El Cardenal has been the city's benchmark breakfast since 1969. Hot chocolate, fresh baked bread and nata, the thick raw milk cream, are the order most first-time guests are pointed toward.
Rooms That Turn Into a Night
RosaNegra is the Masaryk flagship that turned dinner into a full evening: pan-Latin sharing plates, a resident DJ and live percussion that build through the night. It runs to 2 AM every day.
Blanco Colima occupies a restored mansion from the end of the Porfiriato and was among the first places in Roma to argue that avant-garde food, a serious bar and a late-night crowd could share one address. Oriental arches, Romanesque columns and gold detailing spread across several salons, an open patio and an upstairs room, each with a genuinely different mood.
Tori Tori is the reference Japanese name in the city, and the Temistocles house is its landmark: a steel lattice facade by Michel Rojkind wrapped in vegetation, interiors by Esrawe Studio. The flagship reopened after a renovation that opened the terrace to the street and thickened the planting, with chef Marcelo Hisaki at the pass. Ask for the terrace-garden when you book.
Ticuchi is Olvera's agave bar in the building that housed the original Pujol. The room is dark, low-ceilinged and cave-like, a deliberate contrast to the glass and marble of the surrounding streets. Mezcal and small-batch distillates are the reason to go; the kitchen's Mexican small plates are not an afterthought.
Cantina La No. 20 is the Polanco branch of a Mexico City cantina group, on Andres Bello a block off Masaryk, built around a long bar backed by bottles. The cooking follows the traditional cantina style, handled with care, and the tequila and Mexican wine list runs past 300 labels, worth working through with the staff. The room runs to 2 AM Wednesday through Saturday.
Worth Leaving the Circuit For
Sud 777 sits in Jardines del Pedregal, deep in the volcanic rock south of the city and a long way from Roma. Edgar Nunez has run it since 2008 and it holds one star. The kitchen works closely with small growers, vegetables lead the plate more often than protein does, and the low glass pavilion wrapped in planting and water feels as much like a garden as a dining room.
Masala y Maiz is Norma Listman and Saqib Keval's one-star room in Colonia Centro, tracing the real trade routes that carried ingredients between Mexico, South Asia and East Africa. Service is daytime only, noon to six, closed Tuesdays. The owners built the hours around not making staff work late nights.
Expendio de Maiz is the great equalizer: a starred masa counter on Avenida Yucatan with no sign, no printed menu and no reservation book. The cooks tell you what came in that morning and send a rolling sequence of tortillas, sopes and huaraches until you say stop. Cash only. It is the cheapest star in the city and one of the best meals in it.
Booking in Mexico City
Each restaurant on this page books through its own platform button on its MyRSVP page, whether OpenTable, Tock or SevenRooms, the same system the restaurant uses for its own guests. A few, including Expendio de Maiz and El Cardenal, take walk-ins or a phone call. Each restaurant's page has its booking link and hours.
Build a custom itinerary with our concierge team. Pair the venues mentioned above into a single concierge-confirmed evening. See the full Las Vegas events calendar for every upcoming DJ and pool party across the city.
Keep reading
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- The Best Seafood Restaurants in Mexico City (2026) · A landlocked capital more than 2,200 meters above sea level eats some of the best seafood in the Americas. The ten rooms we carry, led by Contramar, and how to time each one.
- The Best Steakhouses in Mexico City for 2026 · Mexico City has four distinct steak traditions running side by side. Here are the thirteen rooms we carry, sorted by which tradition each one belongs to.
- The Best Tacos in Mexico City for 2026 · The taco experiences in Mexico City worth planning a night around, from the world's first Michelin-starred taqueria to the current one-star taqueria and the masa rooms behind them.
- Mexico City Nightlife Guide (2026) · Mexico City is not a bottle-service city, and pretending otherwise ruins the night. The real luxury evening here is dinner-led: a long table, then a rooftop, then a club table placed by hand.
- Every Michelin-Starred Restaurant in Mexico City for 2026 · Mexico City holds eleven Michelin-starred restaurants in the 2026 guide and we carry every one, including the two that take no reservations from anyone.
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