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.
Mexico City sits more than 2,200 meters above sea level, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest coastline in either direction, and it eats better seafood than most cities built on a harbor. That is not a paradox so much as a logistics achievement. Fish and shellfish come up daily from Ensenada and the Baja Pacific, from Nayarit and Sinaloa, and from the Gulf, and the best rooms in the city have spent decades building the supply lines to make that reliable, not occasional.
It also produced a specific kind of restaurant. The Mexico City seafood house is a daytime institution: tostadas, aguachiles and ceviches to start, a whole fish over coals for the middle of the table, cold wine or beer, and a lunch that runs past four in the afternoon because nobody has anywhere better to be. A handful of rooms have learned to carry that into the evening. These are the ten seafood restaurants we carry in Mexico City.
Contramar: the institution
Contramar has been the defining long lunch in Roma Norte since 1998, when Gabriela Camara opened it as a coastal seafood house in a landlocked city. It is also one of the highest-demand restaurants in Mexico City by any measure you care to use. The room is bright and high-ceilinged, tiled white and blue with skylights and a covered terrace, and it fills from noon with locals, visiting chefs and out-of-town diners who planned the trip around a table here.
The menu has barely needed to change. Tuna tostadas with chipotle mayonnaise, sliced avocado and fried leeks are the plate everyone orders first. Pescado a la talla arrives butterflied and split down the middle, one half painted red with chile adobo and the other green with parsley, grilled over coals and eaten with tortillas. Around them sit aguachiles, ceviches, shrimp for peeling and a fig tart that regulars treat as compulsory. This is a daytime restaurant - service starts at noon on weekdays and 11 AM at weekends and stops at 8 PM - so plan it as lunch or an early dinner, not a night out.
Entremar: the same kitchen, uptown
Entremar is Gabriela Camara's Polanco seafood house, run by the Contramar team and carrying essentially the same menu. It is the quieter of the two addresses, which is precisely the appeal: identical cooking, shorter waits and a location that suits a business lunch better than the scrum on Durango. Tuna tostadas arrive first at most tables and the pescado a la talla is the dish to order for the group. The room is bright and low-key, white and blue with plenty of daylight, tables turn quickly, and the whole thing is built around midday. There is no dinner service, so aim for lunch.
Caracol de Mar: sea and country
Caracol de Mar is Camara's third Mexico City seafood restaurant, now in a house on the corner of Campeche and Saltillo in Condesa, where a wooden spiral staircase climbs to an upstairs dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows and a vaulted ceiling. The restaurant calls what it does alta cocina de mar y campo. The menu is deliberately unstable, rewritten around what the boats and the farms deliver, with contemporary Mexican technique and a light Peruvian accent: ceviches and aguachiles that lean hot and citric, a tuna tostada dressed with furikake, fish al pastor tacos, charcoal-grilled octopus. It holds a Bib Gourmand in the Michelin Guide Mexico, and the wine list and cocktail program are built for long lunches.
La Docena: the raw bar that stays open
La Docena started in Guadalajara and brought its oyster bar and wood grill to the corner of Alvaro Obregon and Frontera in Roma Norte. The format is simple: a long iced bar of oysters and clams landed from Mexican coasts, and a grill working through octopus, whole fish and beef. Chef Tomas Bermudez oversees sourcing, working with local producers, the Mexican Pacific, organic vegetables and grass-fed beef. The group has been recognized on the Latin America's 50 Best Discovery list. The room is loud and bistro-styled, the weekend brunch runs well past midday, and it is one of the few Roma dining rooms still serving at a genuinely late hour - which makes it a reliable second stop as well as a dinner booking on its own.
Campomar: Nayarit zarandeado on Masaryk
Campomar brings the Pacific coast of Nayarit to the middle of Avenida Presidente Masaryk. The family business started in 1979 in Ixtlan del Rio and grew through Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, Leon and Puerto Vallarta before reaching Polanco. The signature is zarandeado, the Nayarit method of grilling fish and shellfish over charcoal with a chile and citrus marinade, finished with roasted pineapple, purple onion and a chipotle sauce - it is what the room smells of and what most tables order, applied to whole fish and also to oysters, shrimp, salmon and octopus. Weekend lunch is the busiest service by a distance.
Lampuga: the Polanco terrace that turns into an evening
Lampuga Polanco is named after a Pacific current and has spent years selling that idea on Anatole France: cold wine, a long terrace and fish that tastes like it arrived that morning. The kitchen builds around seasonal catch handled with technique and a light hand - the crab cake is the plate regulars order without reading the menu, with tuna tostadas, spicy shrimp pasta and jaiba suave teriyaki behind it. Below the terrace, Lampuga runs a lower-level vinyl bar called Zona de Medianoche, a speakeasy-style room that is the venue's best-kept feature for a late night. From Thursday to Saturday service runs to one in the morning with records playing, which is when Lampuga stops being a lunch spot.
Zanaya: the quietest table in the Reforma corridor
Zanaya is the seafood restaurant of the Four Seasons Mexico City, and its best asset is the setting: a terrace, a patio and an interior dining room set around the hotel garden on Paseo de la Reforma, so the traffic disappears the moment you sit down. It is one of the very few genuinely quiet outdoor dining rooms in the Cuauhtemoc corridor. The kitchen cooks Mexican Pacific - ceviches and aguachiles leading, then whole fish, grilled catch and shellfish handled simply with regional chiles and citrus. It works across the whole day, which is unusual for a hotel seafood room: breakfast from seven, a business-fixture lunch, and a Sunday brunch that has been a city institution long enough to draw more outside guests than hotel residents.
Bellopuerto: cold plates and a late bar
Bellopuerto Polanco is a Polanco cocina de mar, tucked onto Julio Verne a few steps off Masaryk. It keeps things light: ceviches and aguachiles anchoring the menu, plus tostadas, octopus, grilled fish and shrimp, generous salads, and a cocktail bar that runs late through the back half of the week. The room is compact and dog-friendly with sidewalk tables on one of Polanco's quieter restaurant streets. It fills from one in the afternoon for the Mexican comida and keeps going until midnight Wednesday through Saturday.
Cabanna: the beach club that moved to Masaryk
Cabanna Polanco is Grupo Los Arcos at its loosest - a beach club transplanted into the city, built in 2012 around Pacific seafood, colourful drinks and a soundtrack that climbs as the afternoon goes on. The strength is raw and cold: aguachiles, ceviches, tostadas and tiraditos, plus grilled fish, shrimp and botanas built for the middle of the table, with micheladas, cantaritos and oversized shareable jars carrying equal weight. It pulls a young Polanco crowd that arrives for comida in the early afternoon and stays into the evening, and Thursday through Saturday run latest, closing around midnight.
Puntarena: coastal cooking in the corporate belt
Puntarena is Federico Rigoletti's coastal Mexican project, and the Bosques de las Lomas room inside Plaza Parque Duraznos is the original that set the template: wood tables, heavy planting and a long raw bar. The kitchen starts the menu cold, with tostadas including tuna and a choricera style, ceviches and tiraditos, then moves to grilled dorado, black cod with miso and salmon teriyaki. It is one of the few serious seafood rooms in the city serving breakfast. Weekday lunches skew business, weekends skew family.
How our Mexico City partner books it
Restaurants and rooftops on MyRSVP book through the venue's own reservation platform, using the booking button on each venue page. For this category the timing matters more than the platform: Contramar, Entremar, Caracol de Mar and Campomar are lunch restaurants first, and the weekend midday services are the hardest tables in the city to walk into. La Docena, Lampuga, Bellopuerto and Cabanna are the four that will still be serving late. Nightlife tables are the exception to all of this - club tables in Mexico City are coordinated directly by our Mexico City partner.
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
Plan a night in another city
Browse all MyRSVP editorials · Back to home