The myths and realities of gentrification in Mexico City. Should you still visit?

I noticed a slight social shift on the second or third time I sat down for a quick catch-up meal with a fellow bilingual person in Mexico City.

If the people sitting at the table next to us were native-born locals, they’d invariably shoot a scowl upon hearing us skip between English and Spanish in conversation (the way I and many others speak anywhere in Mexico or the United States). A few times, upon leaving, our neighboring patrons didn’t offer a word in our direction. The silence was heartbreaking. Why?

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Because in Mexico City it is a custom to say “Enjoy your meal” — “Buen provecho” — to the strangers still dining next to you. As normal as shaking hands or a kiss on the cheek to say hello, the greeting transcends class lines.

I was pretty stunned. The other tables assumed we were totally uncultured or undeserving of their greeting. In summer 2025, it was pointedly uncool to be perceived as a “gringo” in the capital of the former Aztec Empire.

The restaurants of Mexico City are experiencing a dynamic and ambitious renewal that is attracting food lovers from around the world. Yet the buoyant mood is marred by skyrocketing housing costs and anti-gentrification protests decrying the booming population of “digital nomads,” a.k.a. remote workers, and their effect on neighborhoods long identified as foreigner-friendly.

As a former resident and frequent visitor, I’ve found that much of the discourse about this moment feels a bit warped from reality. I hear many people in Los Angeles wonder aloud if it is still possible to dine and drink ethically — or at least more conscientiously — as a short-term visitor.

Of course it is, and I encourage it, especially for Angelenos. The taco, after all, is our primary unit, too.

Yes, Mexico City locals are resentful that some of their most storied neighborhoods are now seen as playgrounds for short-term residents who live with dollars and don’t pay local taxes. Cultural and social changes in the Roma-Condesa corridor are unmistakable, especially in restaurants. Servers looking for work are practically required to be bilingual. Menus in English are now everywhere, which was not always the case. And restaurants have proved eager to hike up prices in the digital nomad zone. After all, anyone swiping a U.S. credit card would consider an inflated price in Mexico still affordable compared to back home.

The real estate, hospitality, tourism and restaurant industries are doing great in Mexico City, where rents have increased by as much as 45% in some areas since 2020.

(Eunice Adorno / For The Times)

And yes, gentrification’s effects on the housing market are real. Since 2020, rents have increased by 27% in the city overall, according to the Inmuebles24 Index, and as much as 45% in the most sought-after neighborhoods, in some private industry estimates.

The city’s now home to tens of thousands of short-term rental units. In the areas most identified with foreigners, there’s a free-for-all dynamic, initially encouraged by the city, where any living unit feels under threat of being flipped into an Airbnb. The governments of President Claudia Sheinbaum and Mayor Clara Brugada have made feeble initial attempts to rein in the spree.

Michelada cups in Lagunilla market. (PJ Rountree / For the Times)

A view from the entrance of restaurant Al Andalus. (PJ Rountree / For the Times)

There’s one key caveat to the so-called gringo effect: Culturally speaking, it exists in a bubble. The changes are occurring mostly in a handful of areas, not “whole swaths” of a city of 22 million. There are 1,812 official colonias in the city limits — the digital nomad zone is effectively a teardrop.

Roma and Condesa didn’t get trendy starting in 2020 either. The Beats loafed around these barrios in the 1950s; expats and artists have been in the mix ever since. One of the first bars identified with the modern “hip” era of Condesa was La Pata Negra, a wine and tapas place the size of a big closet, which opened in 2003.

Conflating a few neighborhoods with a whole megacity is also misleading, considering that Mexico has been rapidly Americanizing for at least three decades or more. Pizza, burgers and wings are as common in working-class neighborhoods as taquerías and pozolerías. The country’s biggest employer? Walmart de México.

If the talk about salsas made milder to appease gringo palates is being pinned to taquerías in Roma and Condesa lately, that doesn’t mean it is happening in the thousands of other taquerías operating in Mexico City.

Yet the fears boiled over this year when it became apparent that gentrification trends were spilling over into neighboring Doctores, Obrera and Centro, where my former apartment building was bought out and is reportedly being flipped into a short-term rental building.

In response, affected locals are organizing themselves in roundtables and online groups, pushing the boundaries of housing activism in Mexico, according to Tamara Velasquez Leiferman, a Rutgers University researcher and Mexico City native who studies gentrification.

Sympathetic newcomers are also attempting creative methods to ease the impacts of their presence. “The nomads are not paying taxes. So this creates this imbalance, and you see graffiti that says, ‘Tax the gringos,’” Velasquez said.

“Actually, there’s already a group called Gringo Tax,” she added, referring to a movement that proposes funneling resources to displaced people from gentrified communities. “There’s a tremendous amount of political pedagogy around this topic right now.”

The July 4 protests broke out after an open town hall at a Condesa park. Images of masked fringe participants harassing diners at sidewalk cafes and smashing storefronts seemed shocking compared to the water-gun methods of overtourism protesters in Barcelona, Spain.

The July 4 protests against gentrification broke out after an open town hall at a Condesa park.

(Yuri Cortez / AFP via Getty Images)

Zoe Mendelson, a writer and author living in Mexico City since 2014, has been an active voice in debates about gentrification. She ruffled feathers in a recent Substack essay that pondered her own role in the phenomena. (“An old lady in my corner store told me to go back to my country the other day,” she wrote. “I get it.”)

“I think the anger is really understandable,” said Mendelson. “And also, they were not hurting people. It was completely blown out of proportion.”

Beyond the July 4 outburst, activists have developed “a really substantive discourse and platform, in understanding the gringos are somewhat a symptom and not a cause,” she added, referring to housing crises globally and the unchecked role of real estate conglomerates.

The counterarguments to the protests, of course, come from those who’ve gained economically from the onslaught of digital nomads. Real estate, hospitality, tourism and restaurants are doing great. Even if they’re not paying local taxes by living here, some newcomers argue, they are contributing to the economy anyway by spending their dollars around town.

Eventually, in casual conversation, many Mexicanos may admit they see shades of gray in the issue, amid the context of broader changes in Mexico City, as one resident told online news platform Channel 5: “It does affect us economically, but I believe that, in general, the city benefits, because it is forced to improve itself.”

A food lover’s paradise

I often say I lived in Mexico City five years longer than I intended to because of the food. With abundant agricultural territory directly against the edges of the urban sprawl, every ingredient here tastes hyper-fresh and seems to ooze with flavor. The city and its food are almost one and the same.

This high-altitude valley is the central node of a region that’s given the world ingredients now regarded as universal: corn, squash, tomato, vanilla, chocolate and turkey, to name a few. Domestication occurred thousands of years ago, culminating in the canals and agricultural chinampas at the height of the Aztec Empire. Spanish and Indigenous civilizations have collided for 500 years and form a tremorous culinary syncretism, picking up influence along the way from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and later the United States.

Eventually, native locals may admit they see shades of gray in the broader changes happening in Mexico City.

(PJ Rountree / For The Times)

Today, the urban landscape is saturated with options: taquerías, bistros, steakhouses, fondas, sushi bars, cantinas, American diners, Sichuan hot-pot halls, burger huts, pizza parlors, Argentinian or Brazilian grill spots, every chain imaginable along with fine Mexican restaurants with proud histories. There is not enough lifetime to taste them all.

And more seem to be opening every week, said Ana Paula Tovar, a local writer and food columnist for the newspaper El País.

“It has a quality that few cities have in the world, where you can eat deliciously at the street level and in fine dining,” Tovar said. “It was eventually going to explode, in this sense, because you simply eat really well here.”

The primary language is street food: A genius cook preparing home-style quesadillas, tlacoyos, tacos or tortas on a corner or inside a market. In the 21st century, with globalization in full swing, new interpretations on Mexican cooking are emerging in bold and exacting kitchens like Masala y Maíz, offering a cutting-edge take on what its fans sometimes dub “migration cuisine.”

Here, you can eat food by cooks trained at the best restaurants of New York or Paris, using the most exquisite native ingredients like ant larvae (escamoles), corn fungus (huitlacoche) and heirloom maize cared for by human hands for generations, from every corner of the country.

The magic is that even after all that, a food enthusiast might still find that the sidewalk taco devoured late one night actually was better than the nine-course tasting menu you had a few hours earlier.

Kuku poussin, or baby fried chicken. (Eunice Adorno / For The Times)

The pattice gordita, both at Masala y Maíz. (PJ Rountree / For the Times)

For visitors aware of the fraught moment, one way to help, native residents said, is to try and be a bit less stereotypically “American” as a tourist — that is, incurious or entitled.

Locals complain that some newcomers seem to expect total U.S.-style amenities and services upon arrival, while brushing off time-honored city customs. Quirks on ordering, acquiring change, addressing servers and strangers, and tipping still govern daily interactions (when paying a check, ask the server to add 15% — “Con el 15” or “Agregue el 15” — before your card is run).

All require at least a polite effort at speaking Spanish. “At the end of the day,” Tovar said, “this isn’t Cancún.”

Don’t let anyone else’s checklist dictate your experience either. Or the crowds.

Many locals find it mind-boggling that anyone would wait in a line out the door at a place like Orinoco, a Monterrey-style taquería chain, or the Roma location of Mi Compa Chava, a popular Sinaloa-style marisquería with hourlong waits. Both are perennially crawling with hip foreigners. A better, more authentic taco might be had at old-school joint El Jarocho nearby, Tovar said. And the original location of Mi Compa Chava in Coyoacán is just as bustling, but without extreme wait times.

And if you can’t get a table at seafood superstar Gabriela Cámara’s Contramar, it’s “not a problem,” Tovar said. “You can go to Entremar [a sister restaurant], and it is the exact same quality, and you will eat just as well. You’ll also see another barrio, Polanco, which is also having a revival right now.”

A taco stand on Avenida Insurgentes.

(Manuel Velasquez / Getty Images)

If you’re hankering for ever more “authentic” culinary experiences, simply follow your nose. Ask around. Use your intuition. And avoid herding — like at the unforgivable two-hour lines for the famous tortas de chilaquiles on Alfonso Reyes in Condesa.

“Don’t keep going to the fourth-wave cafe that’s exactly like the one you see in Brooklyn,” Velasquez said. “Go to the corner fondas, taquerías, puestos, have a garnacha, not just restaurants by Enrique Olvera or places with avocado toast.”

Mendelson, on the other hand, suggested a somewhat radical alternative to prevent contributing to gentrification in Mexico City. Don’t venture away from the trendy zones. Rather, confine yourself there, thereby reducing the potential that the process spreads elsewhere, she argued.

“I tell them to move to an already really gentrified area,” Mendelson said of bright-eyed newcomers. “Don’t move to Santa María la Ribera” or other neighborhoods fiendishly tagged as up-and-coming in Mexico City. “I think it’s less harmful.”

Stay in hotels, Velasquez suggested, not in a unit that was once someone’s home.

“And don’t complain about the heat of the salsas,” she added, offering a final tip. “It’s Mexico. It is what it is.”