Mexico City · 4 stops · every stop verified in live map data · ends near a bed
Four rooms in the old centre, three of them inside a few streets of each other and the last one out at Garibaldi where the mariachis wait. Every founding date on this road has moved under examination, including one the owners themselves have given up on.
Two warnings. La Faena is off this road because the health authority sealed it on 23 January 2025 and nobody can show us it has reopened, so it sits in the bonus below rather than in the middle of your evening. And the last stop is Plaza Garibaldi, which is a policed island with Tepito immediately behind it. Book a car door to door both ways, do not walk the seven hundred metres back to the Centro at night however short it looks, stay on the plaza rather than the streets around it, and do not leave a drink standing.
Dionisio Mollinedo came up from Villahermosa and opened this on 12 October 1912, in a seventeenth century house that had been a dairy. A fire gutted the main room on 13 April 1999 and they were back open by 27 July. Diego Rivera held his wedding banquet here in 1922, and in June 1936 the governor elect of Veracruz was shot dead at one of the tables. One correction to what we used to print: there are no nuns' recipes. The convent is the building across the street, and the mole paintings on the wall are by Carlos González and date from 1946. Order the enchiladas Tacuba and a Coctel Tacuba beside them.
est. 12 October 1912, burnt and rebuilt in 1999 · daily 8am till 10.30pm · verified Aug 2026
2 · The Detour La Ópera
Two French sisters called Boulangeot opened it as a pastry shop in 1876, on a street that no longer exists. Our 1895 for the move here cannot be right: the boulevard itself was a Porfirian creation of about 1901, and the record has La Ópera on it by 1905. The bullet hole in the ceiling has a metal ring round it so you can find it, and it is folklore with a traceable author: a writer put the Villa story in a newspaper column in 1989, the clipping went on the wall, and the cutting became the evidence. Villa was teetotal and disliked cantinas. Eat the caracoles al chipotle and drink a tequila derecho.
a pastry shop from 1876, on this street by 1905 · Mon-Sat 1pm till midnight, Sun till 6pm · verified Aug 2026
3 · The Anchor Bar Mancera
The 1912 we printed is the date the owners themselves have abandoned. They found a Hennessy stained glass panel, worked out it faced the last house Porfirio Díaz lived in before his exile in 1911, and now think 1900. That is inference rather than paper, so take both loosely. Our old copy had dominoes clacking under the chandeliers and no source describes dominoes here at all; what is here is a piano, karaoke and a Cuban orchestra. Ask for a bull de Perita, named for the woman who has been behind this bar longer than most of the customers, with the fried cheese.
a cantina here by 1912, and the house now argues 1900 · from 2pm, till 10pm, later Fri and Sat · verified Aug 2026
4 · The Last Call Salón Tenampa
Juan Hernández came from Cocula in Jalisco and opened this on the plaza in 1925 with a mariachi from his home town. It did not invent mariachi in this city, whatever anyone says including us: by Tenampa's own reckoning the music arrived about 1905, twenty years earlier. What it did was anchor it. From the thirties one band played the stage inside and another played the square outside, and the police harassed them for it until Cárdenas ordered it stopped in 1940. That is why the mariachis are out there at all. The room you stand in was enlarged in 1976. Tequila derecho and the quesabirrias.
est. 1925, and the mariachis outside are the overflow · from 1pm till 2am, 3am Thu to Sat · verified Aug 2026
🎁 The stop we have pulled, and why. La Faena is a cantina at Venustiano Carranza 49-B, in the same building as Bar Mancera and about nine metres from its door, full of bullfighting costumes and posters in tall glass cases. On 23 January 2025 the health authority sealed it, and the notices across the doors read suspension of activities for sanitary risk. Staff said at the time that the business had been handed to a cooperative of the waiters and bartenders because the owners could no longer meet the payroll. The national business register still carries it, which is suggestive but not proof, and nothing dated from 2026 says either way. The collection was last seen in the room in 2024. If you are passing, look. Do not plan an evening on it.
Fly in via MEX. The live map shows every pub, bar and restaurant around the route, compiled from OpenStreetMap and Google with live ratings.