Culinarily speaking, 2023 was irreverent and loud. It tasted like salty melted cheese, fried beef, hot sauces, sour lime-flavored water, tropical fruits, and beer – lots of hoppy beer. While Oaxaca’s top restaurants kept it classy and stylish, the groovy craft beer bars, as well as the buzzing market and street food stalls told a frantic story of crowded seats, euphoric clients and scrumptious food and drinks. This year’s Best Bites include recipes, dishes or drinks that proved to us there are no limits or assigned spaces for gastronomic evolution. In the realm of food, true culinary art knows no distinction and no matter where they come from, flavors will be flavors.

Driving east from Oaxaca City, Mexico, into Santiago Matatlán – the town of about ten thousand souls that’s known as the “World Capital of Mezcal” – one’s vista is suddenly dominated by the color green. Across the landscape of gently rolling hills, enormous patchworks of planted agave fields supply the eye with an entire spectrum of verdure, from sage to emerald to jade. The large, spiky magueys, as they’re also called, are everywhere you look, their dusty shades contrasting with the brighter green of the grasses and cacti also dotting the region’s slopes. But we’re not here for mezcal. Instead, different agave beverages are on the menu today: fresh aguamiel and lightly fermented pulque, harvested daily on this land by fifth-generation owner Reina Luisa Cortés Cortés of A&V La Casa del Pulque.

Throughout Mexico, both foods and drinks are centered around corn, a tendency that’s most evident in Mexico’s wide variety of antojitos, or “little cravings,” small, portable snacks featuring some variation on the corn tortilla – of which the taco is undoubtedly the most well-known globally – antojitos are one of the joys of Mexican cuisine, and vary impressively across the country’s 32 states. In the southwestern state of Oaxaca, there’s no shortage of delicious antojitos – at breakfast, soft, steaming tamales wrapped in the region’s abundant banana leaves are the name of the game, while night owls have ample opportunity to crunch into a tlayuda, a giant tortilla folded over lots of shredded, mozzarella-like quesillo cheese, then griddled over hot coals until crispy on the outside and molten on the inside.