Food

What to eat

Food is the quiet reason to enjoy Aguascalientes. It punches well above its sightseeing weight, with a genuine regional specialty, a strong market culture and a real coffee scene. Eating well here is easy and cheap if you follow the locals off the plaza. This is a city where the food is more memorable than the monuments.

The dishes to plan around

• Gorditas de horno. The local obsession and the one thing you must eat. Unlike the fried gorditas elsewhere in Mexico, these are baked corn pockets, dense and faintly sweet, stuffed with chicharron, beans, picadillo, requeson or rajas. Buy them from a dedicated gorditas shop or a market stall, not a sit-down restaurant. A few pieces run cheap, roughly 15 to 30 MXN each (approximate); this is a snack, not a splurge. Eat them in the morning or early afternoon when they are freshest out of the oven.
• Birria and barbacoa. Weekend morning food here, slow-cooked and served with consomme and fresh hot tortillas. Saturday and Sunday before noon is the window. Follow the local queue rather than a sign.
• Menudo. The weekend hangover cure, ladled out at the market halls on Saturday and Sunday mornings. An acquired taste, but the real local breakfast.
• San Marcos fair food in April. During the feria the streets fill with churros, buñuelos, grilled everything and enormous portions. It is its own eating scene for three weeks and then it is gone.

Where to eat

• Mercado Juarez and Mercado Teran. The two central market halls are the honest, cheap way to eat: gorditas, tacos, menudo, birria, fresh juices and licuados. Go before 2pm while the counters are busy and the food is freshest. A full market meal is inexpensive, roughly 60 to 120 MXN (approximate), about the price of a couple of coffees back home.
• A dedicated gorditas shop for breakfast or a mid-afternoon snack. These are scattered citywide; the good ones have a midday queue. This is the sit-and-order-at-a-counter meal, not a restaurant experience, and that is the point.
• Restaurants around Plaza de la Patria. Fine for a proper sit-down dinner but priced for the location, roughly 200 to 400 MXN a head with a drink (approximate). Convenient rather than special.
• Neighborhood taquerias and birria spots off the center. This is where the value and the flavor actually live. A taco run costs a fraction of the plaza restaurants and tastes better.
• Independent cafes off Calle Pani. The local coffee scene is genuinely good and a block or two off the square, where students and workers sit.

Order this, not that

Do not settle for a plaza-terrace lunch just because the table is in front of you. Skip the tourist-priced set menu on the square and walk five minutes to a gorditas shop or a market counter with a local line. The rule of thumb: street and market food is very cheap and excellent, a mid-range restaurant dinner lands in a modest range, and only the April fair pushes prices up. When the queue is local, join it. As always, verify current prices on the ground.