An Evening In Mexico City That Changed How I Think About American Loneliness

A dispatch from Mexico City, where an evening that began with a closed door ended in sacred candlelight and song.

I offer all my news writing, investigative reporting and news analysis for free. The following is a personal essay from the Diary in Exile series chronicling my move out of the USA, available only to paid subscribers.

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Parque Hundido Luis G. Urbino, in Mexico City. (“Sunken Park” named for poet Luis G. Urbino)

Mexico City — It started with a hair appointment.

Earlier this week, killing time before the salon, I wandered into a cafe called Corazón Contento — Happy Heart — in the Mexico City neighborhood of Insurgentes San Borjas in the quietly middle-class Benito Juarez borough and ordered the menú del día. Ten dollars. Three courses: soup, entree, dessert, coffee, and the agua fresca of the day. This is the comida corrida, one of Mexico’s great egalitarian institutions, the midday meal priced so that office workers, students, and grandmothers can all sit down to the same table. It was delicious, and it was ordinary, in the way the best things here are ordinary — which is to say, unremarkable to everyone but the newcomer, who cannot believe her luck.

My Menu of the Day ten-dollar three-course lunch at Corazon Contento. Savory vegetable soup, a spicy “Aztec Casserole” that was like stacked green chile chicken enchiladas, canteloupe agua fresca (like juice but lighter). It also came with coffee and a pastry at the end.

I wanted my son to taste it. So the next evening we walked back.

The cafe was closed. We had arrived, I realized, at American dinnertime, which is to say at the wrong time, all of 5:30 p.m., because the comida corrida belongs to the Mexican clock — the long midday meal between two and five — and the city was gently informing me that I am still running on the wrong operating system. Little did we know that this error of ours would lead to one of the most magical and life-changing evenings we’ve ever experienced.