Food is the reason Real del Monte is worth the trip, and almost all of it comes down to one folded, crimped hand pie. Come hungry, pace yourself, and eat across several shops rather than filling up at the first one.
The paste
The paste (say “PAHS-teh”) is the town’s entire identity — a crimped, half-moon baked pie the Cornish miners brought in the 1820s and Hidalgo has thoroughly made its own. The original is potato, minced meat and a little leek, and it’s still the one to start with because it tells you whether a shop’s pastry and seasoning are any good. From there the range is enormous:
- Savoury: mole verde, tinga, chicken, frijol (bean), rajas con queso, picadillo.
- Sweet: pineapple, blackberry (zarzamora), apple, cajeta, arroz con leche (rice pudding), crema.
Do the obvious thing: eat several across different bakeries, savoury first, sweet for dessert. Each runs roughly 25–45 MXN (approximate), so a proper tasting is genuinely cheap — three or four pastes and a coffee is a full, warm lunch for pocket change.
Where to eat them: the paste bakeries cluster on and around the streets off Plaza Juárez — Hidalgo and the lanes down toward the market. The well-known names like Paste Real and Los Pastes are reliable and consistent. But the smaller independent ovens a block back, down toward the Mercado Municipal, are where locals go for a hotter, cheaper one straight off the tray. Both are legitimate; the independents just move faster.
Order this, not that: ask which pastes came out of the oven most recently and get one of those, rather than pointing at the prettiest sweet one under glass. A hot potato-and-meat straight from the tray beats a lukewarm gourmet filling every time. Save the sweet paste for last — it’s dessert, not the main.
Beyond pastes
- Comida corrida at the fondas ringing the Mercado Municipal — a set lunch of soup, a main, tortillas and agua fresca for a modest fixed price (roughly 90–130 MXN, approximate). This is the honest midweek meal locals actually eat, best around 2 pm when the guisados are freshest.
- Barbacoa, Hidalgo’s signature — lamb slow-cooked in a maguey-lined pit, sold on weekend mornings in tacos with a cup of consomé (the rich broth). Go early; the good stalls sell out before lunch. Order it by the taco with plenty of salsa and a squeeze of lime.
- Coffee and hot chocolate matter more here than you’d expect in a cold, damp town at 2,700 metres. The cafés around Plaza Juárez are built for warming up between pastes — a hot chocolate with a sweet paste is the correct way to end the day.
- Pulque, the fermented maguey drink, is the old highland pour; a couple of cantinas near the centre serve it. If the plain sour version is too sharp, ask for a curado (flavoured with oats or fruit).
Meal timing
There’s no rigid ritual here, but the rhythm is: pastes anytime from mid-morning, barbacoa early on weekends before it runs out, comida corrida in the early afternoon, and hot chocolate whenever the fog gets into your bones. The town eats early and closes early — don’t count on a proper dinner in the pueblo itself. For that, Pachuca is 30 minutes down the hill. See the Hidalgo hub and our things to do to build the rest of the day around the food.