There Are No Nachos in Mexico

I am the most popular person in Oaxaca, Mexico, and all it took was a fistful of green onions.

I'm standing in the Mercado 20 de Noviembre, this southern city's central market, being buffeted by catcalls and charcoal smoke."Oye guapo, ven aqui." "¿Vas a comer? ¡Come con nosotros!" To the dozens of people selling fresh meat and tending live fires, the onions in my market basket mean just one thing: I'm here to eat.

Now it's just a matter of where.

Everyone has an opinion. A man in a Def Leppard shirt flexes his biceps. A young girl grabs my hand. A woman my mother's age whistles seductively. I go with the musclehead, who puts away his guns and uses a giant cleaver to chop off a few pieces of air-dried beef called tasajo, plus a chunk of chili-rubbed pork. He tosses both onto a wood-fired grill and then buries my onions and a few chile peppers directly in the embers before fanning the flames.

While the meat sizzles, a tiny old woman with skin like a sun-dried tomato sells me a stack of warm tortillas from a wicker basket. Then she snatches the fan from the brawny butcher and takes over the cooking. She calls out to a crew of young girls in aprons, and a cascade of condiments materializes before my eyes: a pile of fresh radishes; a bowl of thin, burgundy-colored salsa; a scoop of guacamole from a mortar the size of a bathtub. "Listo," she finally declares when she sees a nice char on the beef. It's lunchtime.

All of this costs less than 10 bucks for two people (cervezas included) and tastes as good as anything I've eaten in months. This is how real Mexican food comes together: quickly, fiercely. Each ingredient is simple, fresh, and assertively flavored. And the aftermarket upgrades are left to me. Want more heat? Take more green salsa. Want to cool it down? Try a slather of guac and a squirt of lime juice. More texture? That's what the raw onion is for, senor.

There are no taco kits here, no enchiladas gasping under a layer of yellow cheese. There is fire, there is meat, and there are vegetables. If an 80-year-old woman with arthritic fingers can prep my meal with a butter knife and cook it on a makeshift grill, then what's my excuse for not enjoying this kind of cooking in my own kitchen?

I have none, and if it means eating this well, I'm willing to do whatever it takes. What follows is a four-pronged attack for turning my kitchen (and yours) into the finest Mexican joint this side of Tijuana. Vamanos.

Step 1: Learn from the locals

Mexico, beyond anything else—the sugar-white sands, the Cuervo-soaked nightclubs, the political dissent—is a place to eat. During my first 36 hours after landing in Mexico City, I ate seven pork tacos, three grilled-beef tacos, two chorizo quesadillas, and two fluffy Mexican sandwiches (called tortas) stuffed with avocado, salsa, and crispy shards of pork. I also had a bowl of tortilla soup, a bowl of spicy black-bean soup with poached eggs, and a scoop of fresh corn ice cream. And I washed all that down with seven Bohemias and three shots of Cazadores 100 percent agave. Salud!

And I never once looked at a menu. I didn't even eat at a restaurant until day three. It was all going according to plan.

I've always been one of the millions of men in the United States who rank Mexican among their favorite cuisines. Over the years, I've caught fleeting tastes of the real thing: a rich, steamy bowl of posole in the Yucatán; a memorable mole in the central market in Oaxaca (pronounced wa-HA-ka); a perfect carnitas taco on a street in Rosarito. These specialties have ruined the Mexamerican food I once cherished. Even my own mother's hard-shell tacos are a fading remnant of my innocent and less-discerning past.

That's why I'm in Mexico, eating six meals a day from carts and market stands. Minutes after my arrival, my cabbie, a wiry, excitable man who talks about organ-meat tacos with a savage look of want in his eyes, tells me simply, "Stay out of restaurants. The real food of Mexico is in the streets and the markets."

My plan of attack involves a meandering 6-hour stretch of highway connecting three of the country's most important cities: Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca. Among these three culinary hotbeds, the best of Mexican cuisine is shared: stuffed chilies, towering sandwiches called cemitas, tamales, and more varieties of mole (pronounced MOH-lay) than even the locals can count. And not one of these edible treasures requires the intercession of a waiter or, for that matter, the investment of more than a few pesos.

"For me it was never about eating in the restaurants of Mexico," says Susan Feniger, chef and owner of Border Grill in Santa Monica and Las Vegas. "Locals all know that the best food comes from the markets. That's where you find the finest ingredients and the people who know what to do with them."

Real Mexican cuisine divides along regional lines. Depending on which part of the country you're in, something as simple as a taco can take on a few dozen iterations. But after trying tacos filled with everything from simmered cactus to fried worms, I can say that none affords the simple pleasures of the tacoal pastor.

Al pastor—"in the style of the shepherd"—has close cousins in the Greek gyro and the Lebanese shawarma. Thin slices of chile- and-garlic-rubbed pork are impaled on a spit and spun over an open flame. Perched atop the spicy pork tower is a whole pineapple, which bastes the meat in a tart stream. A talented taquero can construct a perfect taco in a single sweeping motion, using his right hand to shower thin slices of the juicy pork onto the warm tortilla he cradles in his left. Each taco is then anointed with a translucent slice of pineapple and a sprinkling of raw onions and cilantro, and served with a battery of different salsas—from mild and smoky to incendiary. Tacos in Mexico are small—four bites, max—so on my first night, by the time I've dusted several of these sweet-spicy treasures at a dimly lit stand in the Zona Rosa, the capital's hippest borough, I have salsa and meat juices running down my forearms.