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Where to Eat in Mexico City's Roma Norte Without Eating Only Tacos

Roma Norte has become the place everyone Instagrams their brunch. Good news: the real food is still there if you know which doors to open. Here's where to eat in Roma Norte, Mexico City — past the photo spots.

Planning the trip? Start with the how to spend 3 perfect days in Mexico City — it lays out exactly where to go, and when.

Roma Norte is the neighborhood everyone means when they say Mexico City has “gotten cool.” Tree-lined streets, art-deco buildings, specialty coffee, the kind of brunch place with a line of people in nice linen. And if you’re working out where to eat in Roma Norte, Mexico City, the algorithm will funnel you straight into that brunch — pretty plates, English menus, prices creeping toward what you’d pay back home.

Here’s my hot take after a lot of meals in this neighborhood: the brunch is the least interesting food in Roma Norte. The good stuff — the stuff locals have eaten for decades — is still right there, often two doors down from the photogenic café. You just have to want it more than the photo. Let’s go past the brunch.

Cantinas are old-school Mexican drinking-and-eating institutions, and Roma Norte still has real ones. The deal at a traditional cantina: you order drinks (a beer, a tequila, a michelada) and they bring you free botanas — little plates of food — that get more generous the more you drink. It’s a long, boozy, gloriously slow midday meal and it’s how locals actually spend a Friday afternoon.

Cantina Covadonga on Puebla is the grand old example — a cavernous room full of domino players and waiters in white jackets who’ve worked there longer than you’ve been alive. Order a few drinks, let the botanas come, get a plate of the chilaquiles or a caldo, and stay for three hours. It’s not a brunch experience. It’s better. A whole afternoon for what one fancy avocado toast costs elsewhere.

Everyone tells you to eat tacos. Obviously eat tacos. But the torta — the Mexican sandwich on a crusty telera or bolillo roll — is the lunch locals grab and it’s gloriously overlooked by visitors. A milanesa torta (breaded fried beef or chicken, avocado, beans, pickled jalapeños, the works) from a good counter is one of the great cheap meals on earth, maybe 60–90 pesos.

Hunt the torta counters and the cemita spots (cemitas are the Puebla-style version, sesame roll, with papalo herb if you’re lucky). There’s a deep bench of them around the edges of Roma Norte and into adjacent Doctores. Point, watch them build it, eat it standing up. That’s the move.

And for tortas ahogadas — the Guadalajara “drowned” torta swimming in a spicy tomato sauce, eaten with a spoon and a lot of napkins — find a Jalisco-style spot and commit. It’s chaos. It’s wonderful.

Here’s a thing tourists in landlocked Mexico City never expect: the seafood is fantastic, flown in fresh, and Roma does it beautifully. Contramar is the famous one (technically just over the line but everyone counts it for Roma eating) — the tuna tostadas and the grilled fish are genuinely worth the hype and the reservation. It’s a long, glamorous, festive lunch and yes it’s a splurge.

But for the everyday version, head to the Mercado Medellín on the southern edge of Roma. It’s a covered market full of produce, Latin American groceries (lots of Colombian, Cuban, Argentine stalls — Medellín is the immigrant-flavored market), and food counters. The seafood tostadas and ceviche tucked into the market stalls cost a fraction of Contramar and are honestly almost as good. Go hungry, follow the locals to the busiest counter, get a tostada de pulpo or camarón and an agua fresca.

The market is also where you escape the linen-brunch crowd entirely and remember you’re in a city of 22 million people who eat extremely well for very little money.

I’m not a monster. Get the tacos. For tacos al pastor — the marinated pork shaved off a vertical spit, with pineapple — Roma and neighboring Condesa have plenty of trompos spinning after dark. The rule everywhere in CDMX: go to the busy taquería, eat at the stand-up counter, and order al pastor “con todo” (with everything — onion, cilantro, salsa, the slice of pineapple). Three or four tacos and a Jarritos and you’ve spent maybe 80 pesos.

The mistake isn’t eating tacos. The mistake is eating ONLY tacos and missing the torta, the cantina botanas, the market tostada, the late-night quesadilla from a comal on a street corner. CDMX is a city where you should be eating five small meals a day from five different kinds of place. Roma Norte makes that easy — you just have to look past the first pretty café you see.

Morning: skip the influencer brunch, get a guava concha and a café de olla from a panadería. Late morning: wander to Mercado Medellín for a seafood tostada. Afternoon: settle into Covadonga for the long cantina lunch and let the botanas roll. Night: al pastor at a busy trompo, then a nightcap somewhere with no English menu. You’ll have eaten across the whole social spectrum of the neighborhood and spent less than one Contramar bill.

Roma Norte didn’t lose its soul to the hipsters. The soul’s just behind the second door, not the first one with the line of people photographing their food.

Walk past the brunch. The good lunch is two doors down, and it’s been there the whole time.

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