Pacific Coast Food & Traditional Cuisine

The Pacific coast eats fish, and inland from it the cooking becomes some of the most complex in Mexico.

On the shore it is straightforward and excellent: seafood grilled, fried or cured, with lime, chilli and coriander, eaten at a palapa with your feet in the sand. Tuna, dorado, snapper, octopus and shrimp are the staples, and the preparations are simple because the fish is fresh.

Inland the picture changes. The sierra behind this coast holds two of Mexico’s great regional cuisines — Oaxacan, with its seven moles and its mezcal, and Michoacan, whose traditional kitchen was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010 as representative of Mexican cuisine as a whole.

Two coastal specifics are worth knowing. Coconut is everywhere, from the water to the oil to the spirits. And the Manila galleon left traces — the tuba drink tapped from palm sap, and techniques that arrived from the Philippines and stayed.

Pescado a la talla is the coast’s emblem: a whole fish butterflied, painted with red chilli adobo on one half and green on the other, and grilled over coals. It comes from the Guerrero coast and is served with tortillas to build your own tacos.

Aguachile, raw shrimp in a fierce liquor of lime, green chilli and coriander, served immediately — sharper and hotter than ceviche and originally from this coast.

Tiritas from Zihuatanejo: strips of raw fish in lime, onion and chilli, and nothing else. Simplicity as a virtue.

Carnitas from Michoacan — pork slow-cooked in its own fat in a copper pot until it shreds, then crisped — and the copper pot itself is a Michoacan product.

Mole from the Oaxacan sierra, of which the black is the most elaborate: thirty or more ingredients including several chillies, chocolate and burnt tortilla.

Also: tlayudas, the large crisp Oaxacan tortilla; pozole, which Guerrero makes green with pumpkin seed; and coconut desserts along the whole shore.

Beach palapas are the coastal institution: open-sided restaurants on the sand where the fish is bought that morning and the menu depends on what came in. Order what is fresh rather than what you had planned.

Municipal markets in every town sell cooked food upstairs and produce below. Oaxaca’s coastal markets carry the sierra’s chillies and chocolate down to the shore.

Michoacan’s carnitas are a Sunday morning business — a whole pig, a copper cazo, and a queue — and the town of Quiroga is the reference point.

Street stalls are the default and are generally safe; the busy ones turn over fastest.

Coconut is sold at the roadside everywhere — split for the water, then the flesh scraped out with a piece of the shell.

Tap water is not drunk anywhere; purified water is universal and free at most accommodation.

The Pacific coast grows no wine — it is far too hot and wet, and Mexico’s vineyards are in Baja and the high central north. What this coast has instead is agave spirits and one drink that exists almost nowhere else.

Mezcal from the Oaxacan sierra behind this coast is the significant one: agave hearts roasted in earth pits lined with hot stones, crushed, fermented and twice distilled, giving the smoke that defines it. Dozens of agave species are used, many wild, and a village palenque producing a few hundred litres a year is the traditional scale. Tequila comes from Jalisco, immediately inland from Puerto Vallarta, and is mezcal’s regulated cousin made only from blue agave.

Raicilla is the Jalisco coast’s own agave spirit, long made informally in the sierra above Vallarta and only recently given legal protection.

Tuba, the lightly fermented sap of the coconut palm, arrived with Filipino sailors on the Manila galleon and is still sold from buckets on the Colima and Guerrero coast.

Tejuino, a fermented maize drink served cold with lime and salt, is the everyday refreshment.