The Best Places to Eat and Stay in Mexico

Candles strung through courtyard trees and a retractable roof overhead put the room somewhere between outside and ceremony before you've ordered a thing. Azul is a Mexican restaurant where the chef has spent a career documenting traditional recipes, and the menu reads like that research made edible: cochinita pibil, black mole from Oaxaca, classic guacamole. No experimental flourishes, no modernist detours, just regional comfort food cooked straight.

Set in a historic building on the edge of Coyoacán's main plaza, Los Danzantes is a contemporary Mexican restaurant that draws a steady crowd of locals and travelers alike. The kitchen leans into regional technique, and some dishes have held their spot on the menu for over two decades, which in this city is its own kind of argument. A sister restaurant operates in Oaxaca under the same name but runs its own entirely separate menu.

The carved wood bar anchoring the dining room is ornate enough to stop you mid-sentence, and the courtyard beyond it makes Ensenada feel very far from the rest of Baja. This is a full-service Mexican restaurant from a duo who've been fixtures of the local scene forever, pouring Valle de Guadalupe wines alongside classic cocktails. The kitchen keeps things unfussy but sharp, and the crème brûlée rotates daily, sometimes finished with fig leaves from the garden out back.

Huichol embroidery, Puebla talavera tiles, and mirrors from Tlayacapan cover the walls of this sit-down Mexican restaurant in the Centro Histórico, the remnants of an old fountain still standing in the entrance hall. The kitchen revives pre-modern recipes with a light contemporary hand, and the taco tasting menu, which ends on something sweet, is a genuinely unusual way to eat your way through it. A Michelin Selected restaurant that earns its place in any serious Mexico City itinerary.

The spa is built around a cenote, a natural underground pool the ancient Maya considered sacred, which sets the tone for this wellness resort buried in the Yucatán jungle about 25 minutes from Mérida. The 40 casitas each come with a private pool; the restored hacienda villa adds its own spa suite and gym. Jorge Vallejo of Quintonil oversees the restaurants. One of the World's 50 Best Hotels, and holds two Michelin Keys.

Villas sit either in the treetops or on coastal cliffs above the Pacific, each with a private plunge pool and round-the-clock butler service, which tells you exactly what kind of resort this is. It holds a Michelin 3 Keys and ranks among the World's 50 Best Hotels. Enrique Olvera runs the clifftop restaurant. The spa brings in traditional healers for indigenous ceremonies, because a plunge pool apparently isn't enough.

Waiters who wade into the surf to deliver drinks to guests mid-wave set the tone for this Forbes Five Star, Michelin two-key resort on its own quiet spit of coast above Puerto Vallarta. Fifty-two acres of jungle and white sand, two private beaches, and a range of pools give the place the feel of a small principality. Casitas, suites, and villas all face the water, and the beach-boho aesthetic is consistent enough that you won't feel shortchanged by your room tier.

Each private villa opens directly onto a lagoon, with a pool large enough that you'll forget the resort has a beach at all (it does, a short boat ride down the canal). This Forbes Four Star, Michelin 2 Key resort in the Mayakoba enclave blends Asian hospitality with Mayan surroundings, and the mangroves, herons, and occasional crocodile do most of the decorating. Rates start around $500 a night, which buys you a convincing illusion that Playa del Carmen simply doesn't exist.

Thatched roof, open air, a grove of trees overhead, and a menu that traces its flavors back to the chef's grandmother's kitchen. This outdoor Mexican restaurant in Barrio de Xochimilco leans into Oaxacan tradition without getting stuck there, folding mole coloradito into stuffed plantains and keeping the comal near the entrance busy with memelas and tetelas. The Michelin Guide has it on their list, which means the secret is out on the oasis.

Black-and-white parquet floors beneath an art gallery roof set the mood at Bruna, a Mexican-fusion restaurant in Guadalajara's Lafayette neighborhood where the decor is flamboyant and the tables are hard to get. The chef pulls from street food stalls and family recipes, running much of it through a wood-fired grill. Habanero ice cream with cactus jelly for dessert is the kind of move that earns a spot on Mexico's Best 100 Restaurants list.

Stacks of mesquite wood line the walls like shelves in some pyromaniac's library, doing double duty as decor and a clear statement of intent. This live-fire contemporary restaurant in San José del Cabo runs a shareable menu of vegetables, seafood, and what the kitchen cheerfully calls "black market" meats, tongue and sweetbread among them. A tasting menu is there if you want the full tour. Bring your hands; the food expects them.

The cooking here comes from Tabasco, not the tourist version of Mexican food but a regional tradition most visitors never encounter. Carmela y Sal is a fine dining room where the chef mines her home state for dishes that feel personal rather than performed. The space is warm and modern, the staff genuinely attentive, and the menu roams into territory broccoli with black piquin chili has no business being this interesting in.

The walk to get here is half the experience: you swing past lounge chairs and an oceanfront walkway before landing at this open-air contemporary Mexican restaurant inside the Chileno Bay Resort. The kitchen ranges across Mexico's regional traditions with some South American pull, so the menu has range without feeling scattered. A ceviche riff with octopus, pork belly, and plantain tortillas gives you a sense of how it thinks.

Dinner here happens under a canopy of Edison bulbs and actual trees, with candles on the wood tables and incense in the air, all of it concrete and calm inside a UNESCO heritage guest house. Enrique Olvera is a name worth knowing, and he and chef Luis Arellano run a tasting menu rooted in traditional Oaxacan recipes and local ingredients. The birds are not ambient sound; they live here.

An omakase counter in the middle of Oaxaca, where a chef fuses Japanese technique with local ingredients in ways that manage to feel neither forced nor like a gimmick. Kampachi arrives with nixtamalized papaya; an eel handroll gets a smoky-sweet agave pulp dressing. The menu runs light, but the combinations stick with you. Fellow travelers tend to fill the seats, since locals haven't quite caught on yet, which means walk-in odds are better than they should be.

A live-fire kitchen sits open-air at the center of everything here, on a timber platform shaded by trees on a Baja wine country estate. Drew Deckman runs a contemporary Mexican kitchen with a serious sustainability streak, the kind where soft-shell crab meets Pilsner foam and short rib arrives legitimately hearty. The setting, strung with cafe lights over the vineyard, does a lot of the work before the food even arrives.

The terrace seats fill first, tucked under awnings and ringed with plants, but the back row on the first floor overlooking Plaza Uruguay runs a close second. This is a seafood restaurant in Polanco where the pescado a la talla arrives split down the middle, one half red sauce, one half green, and looking almost too composed to eat. The aguachile comes in red or green too, and the red is not a suggestion.

A bull's head greets you at the door, which is one way to make the menu clear before you've even sat down. This is a Spanish tapas bar in Polanco, modeled on the kind of place in Madrid where nobody eats alone and the anchovies come on toast with oil and tomato because they don't need to be anything more complicated than that. Classic patatas bravas, gambas al ajillo, flan, everything sized for the table.

Grilled bread arrives with bone marrow butter served in the bone, dusted with hibiscus salt, and that sets the tone for everything that follows at Lumbre. This contemporary Mexican restaurant near San José del Cabo's art walk runs on live fire and a kitchen that likes to pull apart familiar dishes and reassemble them as something new. The chile relleno alone has opinions. Selected by the Michelin Guide and named to Mexico's Best 100 Restaurants.

Down a dirt road past a fence hung with wine bottles, this open-air restaurant in Baja's Valle de Guadalupe wine country is anchored by a large fire pit where cast iron and open flame do all the heavy lifting. The menu follows a loose arc, oysters first, then a protein, then sharing plates that use the whole animal or fish. The cooking is rooted in local sourcing and fire, and the chocolate cake at the end earns the trip on its own.

A long dirt road through pepper fields is your navigation, and finding Tenoch feels like part of the deal. This open-air contemporary Mexican restaurant sits inside a resort in Todos Santos, serving seafood and produce pulled largely from the surrounding land. The kitchen's ideas are more serious than the breezy palapa vibe suggests, and the mole alone makes a case for the detour.

Each of the five "casas" here is themed to a different Mexican art form, textiles or painting or cooking, and guests can take a workshop in whichever one they pick. It's a sprawling adults-only all-inclusive resort on the Riviera Maya, 900 suites deep, with access to eight Xcaret parks folded into the rate. The Forbes Four Star property leans into curated craft over swim-up-bar chaos, which is either a selling point or a warning, depending on your vacation personality.

A new-build resort in a city where colonial stone walls are the whole aesthetic is a bold move, and Live Aqua pulls it off with AoMa Estudio's colonial-meets-contemporary design and modern art threaded throughout. The largest hotel in town, it holds a Forbes Four Star rating and draws expats and visitors who want serious amenities: a fine-dining room from celebrity chef Eduardo Palazuelos, a Casa Dragones tequila lounge, and generous outdoor spaces.

Private cabanas with a dedicated coconut cocktail attendant set the tone at this luxury Caribbean resort on the Zona Hotelera strip. The water really does run that improbable shade of blue, and the beach makes it easy to lose a full day without trying. Families and couples both seem equally at home here, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. Kempinski holds a Forbes Four Star rating.

The dining room at this Four Seasons Tamarindo restaurant sits on artificially built clifftops above a run of infinity pools, with the Pacific spreading out beyond. The menu, shaped in collaboration with Elena Reygadas, pulls local Mexican ingredients through French and Italian technique. Order something, then spend most of dinner watching the horizon do its thing.

A 40-floor tower on the Paseo de la Reforma, the Sofitel plants its French flag firmly in Mexico City and then, to its credit, actually looks around. The rooms lean into the view through floor-to-ceiling windows, with warm modernist interiors and automated curtains softening the high-rise drama. Downstairs there's a wood-fired Mediterranean-Mexican kitchen and a French-meets-Mexican rooftop bar, which is exactly as audacious as it sounds. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Canals thread through the mangrove forest right up to your room, so the line between resort and jungle stays genuinely blurry throughout your stay. This is a large luxury resort just north of Playa del Carmen, with nine pools, a Forbes Four Star rating, and enough complimentary activities, paddleboarding, catamaran tours, mezcal tastings, yoga, to keep a planner busy or an avoider pleasantly distracted. The adults-only infinity pool gazes out over the canals and mangroves, which is as good an argument for day-drinking as any.

A boutique luxury hotel in Roma built from bricks shipped over from England for the original Bank of London & Mexico director, which is an origin story that takes some nerve to live up to. The name is about as much brick as you'll find; inside, the palette runs to soothing neutrals and Belle Époque bones refreshed with parquet floors and Deco mirrors. Rooftop suites have private patios, and there's a spa, a gym, and several bars and restaurants on site. Michelin awarded it one Key.

The Alexander sits inside Torre Virreyes, the inverted-triangle skyscraper that looms over Bosque de Chapultepec like it won an architecture argument. This 26-suite hotel holds a Michelin Key and leans hard into international luxury: Italian furniture, Swedish bath products, Bang & Olufsen sound systems, and a caviar bar that apparently no one thought to open in Mexico City before now. Floor-to-ceiling windows keep the park and skyline permanently in frame.

Eighty-six acres of mangrove forest and cenotes separate this all-inclusive resort from the idea of roughing it. Grand Velas Riviera Maya runs three distinct areas, each with its own pool, from a jungle-wrapped multi-tier affair to an adults-only oceanfront option, plus a white sand beach for anyone who finds the pools too convenient. The contemporary-tropical design leans modern rather than thatched-palapa, and the food and drink situation is serious enough that you might forget you pre-paid for it.

Floor-to-ceiling sliding doors frame the Sea of Cortez from every room at this Forbes Four Star resort on the Baja Peninsula, which opened recently enough that the towels still feel new. The Riviera-inspired buildings use natural stone and earthy tones so the whole property reads as landscape rather than interruption. Three restaurants, an open-air spa, and several pools fill out the days for guests who came to do absolutely nothing, efficiently.

Eight suites above a concept store in a 1920s Roma Norte townhouse, La Valise earns its Michelin Key by doing the opposite of everything the big hotels are doing. Each suite has its own logic: one has a leather swing on the patio and a terracotta dog sculpture inside, another rolls the bed out onto an open-air terrace. The aesthetic is genuinely designed rather than decorated, which in a boutique hotel of this size is a meaningful distinction.

A four-room boutique hotel inside a turn-of-the-century mansion in Roma, which is the part of Mexico City where people go to feel like they're in Lisbon. Each room has its own name and character, the style is contemporary without announcing itself as such, and the concierge seems to have a standing reservation at every worthwhile table in the neighborhood. The Michelin Guide awarded it a Key.