Dua’s List: The Best Of Mexico City’s Food, Drink & Art Scene

Heading to Mexico City? Come hungry, bring your curiosity and leave plenty of room in your itinerary. Few cities offer such a rich mix of food, art, architecture and nightlife, with something to appeal to just about every kind of traveller.

And who better to show you around than our founder, Dua Lipa? Here, she shares 12 of her favourite spots across the Mexican capital, including the restaurant she makes a beeline for as soon as she touches down.

Máximo Bistrot feels like the kind of restaurant that anchors the city cuisine-wise. The cooking here is technically brilliant but it never feels cold or distant. Farm-to-table done with personality. The bone marrow preparation alone is worth it.

Em is Lucho Martínez doing what he does best, which is taking Mexican ingredients seriously and making something completely original from them. It’s probably the most exciting cooking with vegetables I have experienced.

Tormenta gets my vote for best local drinks and pastries – try the sodas for tastes you won’t find anywhere else.

Hanky Panky is a speakeasy-style cocktail bar that is absolutely worth the slight effort of getting through the door. The mezcal cocktails are some of the best I've had anywhere. Small, intimate and very much a place for later on in the night.

Le Tachinomi Desu is a Japanese standing bar in the middle of Mexico City, which sounds unusual, but it works. Excellent sake and really good snacks – one of those perfect little surprises that CDMX always delivers.

Club San Luis is exactly where I want to end a night in Mexico City. It’s a proper club. The music gets good, the crowd is there for it and there’s this specific energy in the room that's hard to describe – you just have to feel it.

Museo Tamayo is one of my favourite contemporary art museums in Latin America. The building is beautiful and the collection goes from Tamayo himself through to international contemporary work. It’s also never so crowded that you can’t actually look at things properly.

The Frida Kahlo Museum is her house and everything in it is still as she left it. Her art is obviously iconic but being inside that space and understanding where she actually made it makes you see the work differently.

Casa Luis Barragán is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it looks like a place where a genius lived. The way light moves through those spaces at different times of day is extraordinary. It’s architecture as emotion. One of my favourite places in the world.

Tacos del Valle is the one you go to late, when the night has been long and you need something delicious. It’s my favourite late-night taco situation in the city. The suadero is my go-to.

Pujol is simply one of the best restaurants in the world. The mole madre has been cooking for years and such a perfect representation of Mexican cuisine.

I get straight off the plane and go straight to Contramar. I love the aguachile, the tuna tostada, a mezcalita de jamaica, the vibe – just everything. Start there and build the rest of the day around it. Everything else in Mexico City makes more sense after being in Contramar.

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