From al pastor tacos built on seitan to three kinds of mole served side by side, Mexico City is doing something to plant-based food that almost no other city in the world is doing in 2026.
I’ve been writing about vegan food for a few years now, and most travel pieces follow the same script. London. Berlin. Bangkok. Lisbon. The same handful of cities keep rotating through the top ten.
Mexico City is the one that genuinely surprised me.
It’s not just that the food is good. It’s that the food is good on its own terms, without trying to be Berlin or Brooklyn or anywhere else.
Two pieces of data tell the story better than I can.
First, Mexico now has the most fully vegan restaurants of any country in Latin America, with 512 dedicated spots, according to a joint 2025 ranking from Veganuary and HappyCow.
Second, Mexico City was the only major global city HappyCow flagged as still growing through 2023 and 2024, while London, Berlin, Los Angeles and Amsterdam all saw vegan listings drop. HappyCow’s founder Eric Brent called it, plainly, “an exception.”
That word stuck with me. While the rest of the vegan world has been quietly contracting, this one city kept opening doors.
In 2024, it landed on HappyCow’s global Top 10 most vegan-friendly cities for the first time, at number eight, alongside Ho Chi Minh City as the other newcomer. London and Berlin still hold the top two, but the conversation is shifting south.
Here’s the thing nobody told me before I started reading into this: Mexican cuisine didn’t need to be “converted” to be vegan-friendly.
The Mayas and Aztecs built their daily diets around corn, beans, squash, chilies, tomatoes, nopales (cactus paddles), and dozens of native herbs and seeds. Meat was occasional. Dairy didn’t exist in this part of the world until the Spanish brought cows.
Nixtamalization, the ancient process of soaking corn in lime water to make masa, is still how every real tortilla and tamale in the country starts. That technique is hundreds of years old, and it has zero animal products in it.
So when a Mexico City chef pulls strands of seitan off a vertical trompo to make al pastor tacos, they’re not really inventing something new. They’re going back to a plant-first tradition that was always sitting underneath the meat.
If you only have one day, spend it in Roma Norte. It’s leafy, walkable, full of art deco buildings, and packed with the kind of small kitchens that have been quietly redefining what vegan Mexican food can look like.
This one is a Mexico City institution. It’s been running for more than a decade, originally as a street stall, now also with a small sit-down spot a couple of blocks away.
The menu is built around the kind of food working-class taquerías have always served: al pastor, suadero, chorizo, beans, scrambled tofu in red sauce. Everything is plant-based, but nothing about it tastes like a compromise.
What I love most is the price. Most tacos sit around 25 to 40 pesos. This is food meant for everyone, not just travellers with foreign salaries.
A short walk away, this baby-blue facade hides one of the most ambitious vegan seafood menus I’ve come across anywhere.
Their aguachile verde uses button mushrooms in place of raw shrimp, marinated in lime, ginger and habanero. The coctel de palmitos (hearts of palm shrimp cocktail) is the dish people come back for.
There’s also a fish empanada filled with a vegan seafood stew so close in texture to the real thing that I had to ask twice if it was actually vegan.
Walk into Gracias Madre and you can feel the shift in tone. This is a brighter, more design-forward space, with bold posters on the walls about food choices and Mother Earth.
It’s been open six years. The name is a thank-you to the planet, and they back it up with a 10-taco menu that actually rewards exploration.
Two things to order: the choriqueso (house vegan chorizo melted into stretchy plant-based mozzarella, scooped into tortillas), and the taco de birria, a slow-braised soy strip with a deep, broth-soaked flavour that is genuinely close to the goat-meat original from Jalisco.
The vegan cheese pull here is something else. I’ve had a lot of plant-based mozzarella, and I have never seen one stretch like that.
Mole is the dish most people think can’t be done plant-based. The traditional version takes 20+ ingredients, hours of toasting and grinding, and often relies on lard or chicken broth.
Na Tlali, tucked into the quieter San Ángel neighbourhood, makes three kinds of mole, all vegan, all served on the same plate.
Eating all three side by side is a kind of crash course in why mole is sometimes called Mexico’s national dish. And the fact that nothing on the plate uses animal products feels like a small quiet victory.
If you’re someone who likes to experiment in the kitchen at home, our plant-based recipes section has a few mole-style ideas that won’t take all day.
I have to mention this part, because the food story doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Roma Norte and Condesa, the same neighbourhoods that hold most of the best vegan restaurants, have become flashpoints for protests against gentrification since the pandemic. Locals have been pushed out by short-term rentals and rising rents, much of it driven by foreign remote workers.
A few small things actually help:
None of this is hard. It just requires showing up with some awareness, which is something a lot of people are now bringing to their travel and food choices more generally.
One of the reasons Mexico City stands out, honestly, is the price.
You can eat very well as a plant-based traveller on around 250 to 400 pesos a day in food costs, which works out to roughly 12 to 22 US dollars. A street taco is about 25 to 40 pesos. A full mole plate at a sit-down vegan restaurant might run 220 to 320 pesos.
Compare that to London, Berlin or New York, where a single vegan main now regularly clears 18 dollars, and you start to see why people are flying to CDMX specifically for the food.
I came expecting tacos. I left thinking about how rare it is for a city to be this excited about its own food.
In a lot of places I’ve travelled, vegan food still feels like a parallel scene. A different room, a different crowd, a different aesthetic. In Mexico City, it’s woven into the same streets, served at the same kinds of stalls, eaten by the same kinds of people.
That’s the bit that genuinely moves me. Not the global rankings, not the growth numbers. The fact that you can stand at a street corner in Roma Norte at 9pm and order a plate of plant-based tacos from someone who has been making them for ten years, and nobody at the counter thinks of it as unusual.
If you’ve been curious about eating more plant-based but find the whole idea a bit overwhelming, our gentle beginner’s guide to a vegan lifestyle is a good place to start. No pressure, no rules, just one thoughtful step at a time.
And if you’re booking a trip, save room for the mole.
