The Dish on Mexico City's Markets
Two Champion Eaters Pursue the Ultimate Quesadilla and Other Delights

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 7, 2008

A cartload of bagged white corn kernels blocked the narrow aisle. A woman in an apron danced to salsa rhythms, shimmying her hips seductively. Half a dozen guys with shopping bags stood stalled and frowning.

I'd hit gridlock in the diffuse light of El Mercado de la Merced, Mexico City's super-size, bigger-than-life, positively steroidal central market.

"Just push," my friend Nick urged behind me.

Timidly, I jammed my hip into the small of a man's back, and presto, we all popped through the bottleneck like a cork launched from a magnum of champagne. Far from being angry, the man seemed grateful.

I'd come to La Merced in search of the perfect traditional-market quesadilla. I've been eating in Mexican markets for years, swooning over piles of cilantro-flecked shrimp at the archetypal Tostadas Coyoacan in the market near The Post's bureau in southern Mexico City and gorging on all manner of grilled pork tacos. There may be no better way to get to know this city, and my visitors and I have never had even a hint of stomach upset. But I'd never nailed the consummate quesadilla, a ubiquitous dish, a foundational Mexican treat made all the more complex by its utter simplicity.

I needed help. And that's why I called Nick Gilman.

I call Nick the "professional urban dweller." A transplanted New Yorker, he has lived most of the past 20 years in Mexico and knows this city's hidden nooks like no one I've ever met. Last year, Nick self-published a book about his obsession, "Good Food in Mexico City: A Guide to Food Stalls, Fondas and Fine Dining," that has developed a kind of cult following in the foodie world. He's always up for the game.

I set a fast pace in La Merced, weaving past fragrant stalls piled with garlic and epazote, the pungent Mexican herb that is said to have taken its name from the Aztec words for "stinky animal." But Nick is loitering.

"Look at these!" he calls out, cupping to his nose a strange mushroom that looks a bit like a chanterelle but denser. "French people would go crazy! So inexpensive."

A few more steps and we are running our fingers through mounds of chipped wood that the proprietor promises will make a tea that cures ulcers, kidney problems, nerves, insomnia, high blood pressure and . . . low blood pressure.

"What kind of wood?" I ask.

"Secret," the man says, retreating to the back of his stall.

I might have stuck around to press him (I am a reporter, after all), but I catch a whiff of grilling meat. We must be close to the hidden quesadilla stand Nick has been telling me about. I press on.

That's when I meet Gerardo Ramirez. He nods approvingly as I plant myself on a plastic stool next to the counter at "Antojitos Doña Celia" (Doña Celia's Snacks), a five-stool stand at the western edge of the market's main building. The handwritten menu offers quesadillas with brains, quesadillas with stewed pork stomach and quesadillas with pickled pork fat. I am feeling adventurous, but not that adventurous. I opt for a squash-flower quesadilla, and it doesn't disappoint. Nick chooses a quesadilla made with huitlacoche, an inky black corn fungus that smells of truffles and earth, and I'm grateful he lets me have a big bite.

Folded over, my quesadilla is 10 inches long, seared on a comal (a flat, cast-iron cooking surface) and blue, made from blue corn. Inside, the chewy white Oaxacan cheese -- think string cheese, but not as dense or as salty -- oozes to the edge of the tortilla. The squash flower has been toasted lightly on the comal, but not so much that it loses its clean, refreshing glint, a nice complement to the hint of salt in the cheese. I top it with Gerardo's salsa, a silky puree of red chilies, onions and garlic.

"The secret is the cheese: There are only one or two places in the whole city where you can get the real stuff, the real Oaxacan stuff," Gerardo tells me. But I can barely focus. I was in quesadilla nirvana, far from the under-grilled tortillas of my past, from the barely melted cheese, from the watery salsa.

Nick snaps me out of my dreamlike state. He wants more, and I am happy to be pulled along.

We pick our way through the thicket of stalls, winding around stacks of banana leaves being sliced up for tamales and battalions of young women shaving the spines off the paddle leaves of nopal cactus, which Mexicans saute until they are soft and have the gooey texture of okra. We stop under an orange tarp for rib-meat tacos with a plank of grilled nopal sticking out the ends, but we don't linger long.

We loop down the stairs of the subway station that pops up in the center of the market. Three stops later, we are tracking toward the San Juan Market, Mexico City's swankiest, a place where French diplomats contemplate the giant "chocolate" clams and housekeepers loaded down with bags trail after finely coiffed Mexican society matrons.

We beeline for the market's southwest corner, Stall No. 283. There, behind a basin-size ceramic bowl, Manuela Serrano swirls a long spoon through a smoky, simmering pot of something mysterious and wonderful.

Serrano, a restaurant-trained chef, is here every Saturday morning. The smart crowd knows to show up early or they'll miss her pozole, a rich, chili-infused broth with strands of stewed chicken meat and marble-size kernels of white corn that resemble hominy.

There are all kinds of pozole: green pozole, white pozole, Jalisco-style red pozole. But Serrano's is the deepest red I've ever seen.

"It's like paint," Nick coos as he scoops another spoonful.

We might have lingered, but not this afternoon. We are rolling and still ravenous. In the market center, we stop to see José Juárez, who charmed my parents last Christmas with his endless samples of fine imported cheese. Juárez is always surrounded by regulars who know they can practically make a meal out of the hunks of bread and cheese he doles out at no cost, and the oaky Spanish wine he pours.

Juárez, who is developing a new generation of artisanal Mexican cheesemakers by giving classes at a local creamery, cuts me a hunk of Mexican goat cheese. My tongue lingers on a creamy, salty morsel that tastes more like a first-class brie than the goat cheese I'm used to.

"The French, the Swiss -- this is just as good," he crows, and he's not far off.

Warmed by Juárez's charm and by the heat of the pozole, you would have thought we'd had enough. But there was more eating to do.

We head for the chic Roma neighborhood and its Medellin market, an airy, light-filled space so named because it specializes in Colombian and other regional fare, along with the Mexican classics. We race past the Peruvian Inca Cola and the Colombian empanadas, then settle in at La Morenita Ostionera, a favorite that has grown in the past five years from a mere stand to a full-fledged restaurant with waiter service and more than a dozen tables.

La Morenita has its own version of a quesadilla, but it's nothing like the one at La Merced or like any quesadilla we'd get in the States. We select a shark-meat quesadilla. It arrives in a deep-fried shell. The mild meat is chopped, sauteed simply in a fish broth with grilled onions and garnished with chopped tomatoes and white onion chunks. One other thing: It has no cheese. Go figure. We throw in shrimp seviche for good measure.

I'm tucking into my second quesadilla when something whizzes just past my ear. I look up and see a man with a 100-pound side of beef slung over his shoulders. I realize that the thing whizzing past me was a cow's hoof.

"Well, we are in a market," Nick says, shrugging.

We're both champion eaters, but finally it appears we've reached our limit. We rise and head for the door, but an ice cream man catches my eye. He stuffs a scoop of rum-raisin ice cream, creamier than anything I've ever had in Mexico, and sweet, made in the style of his native Cuba. I am transported to Havana, one of my favorite cities.

I down it in minutes and think back on our day. We've eaten grilled quesadillas and fried quesadillas, tacos, pozole, seviche and ice cream, not to mention all Juárez's cheese samples. And it cost a grand total of $22 for both of us. I once paid that much for a single vodka tonic in Miami. I consider our culinary marathon, and I feel, suddenly, like a professional urban dweller . . . and very, very full.