La Valenciana, which, according to photos on the wall, has existed in various locations since 1911, serves a daily buffet of soup, rice, and three or four main dishes. Last time I was there, I had mole de olla (a soup with meat, potatoes, and vegetables), tinga de pollo (chicken in a tomato-based sauce), fried perch, and grilled beef. Miguel, a sad-eyed elderly waiter with a trim mustache, must have the genes of a Jewish mother: He kept egging me on to eat more, as if worried that I was suffering from malnutrition.

Waiters are sometimes indignant if they believe you haven’t shown sufficient attention or respect. During two and a half hours at a cantina called La Autentica, a companion and I consumed—apart from an avalanche of tequila and beer—cream of chile, beef broth, steak tartare, chiles stuffed with cheese, and an enormous pork shank that, once picked clean of its meat, appeared to be a lost dinosaur bone. After coffee, I asked for the check. The waiter, a wounded expression on his face, asked, “So soon?”

Roberto Santibanez, culinary director of the Rosa Mexicano restaurant chain, says that in cantinas one can find Mexico’s “real food.” In fancy restaurants, he explains, chefs try to make Mexican food “sophisticated” —when in fact it already is. “The real, deep flavors of Mexico—in cantinas, taco stands, and markets—work as my inspiration,” he says. “There you find cooking with passion and tradition, without the fear of strong flavors that many upper-class, snobbish Mexicans suffer from.”

When I first visited Mexico City, before I lived here and made friends, what I most liked about cantinas was that I was never alone in them. All I had to do was belly up to the bar and order a drink in halting Spanish, and in a few minutes comrades would emerge. Even when I understood only half of what my hosts were saying, we always reached some kind of concord. Frequently they would give me souvenirs: an old coin, a keychain, an amulet. Once, a stupendously drunken man offered me his wife. She demonstrated her eagerness to consummate the proposition with a squeeze of my thigh and a smile, the seductiveness of which was undercut by the absence of several crucial teeth. I refused with as much courtesy as possible, after which the man removed from his neck a string that held an emblem of Mexico’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe. I felt safer accepting this gift.

On the last night of one of my first trips, I was approached by a man who looked like Groucho Marx in his waning years. He invited me to join him for a drink. His name was Carlos, and he had a companion, Samuel, a man in his 40s with a ruminative air. Samuel immediately began to talk about jai alai, a sport that was popular at the time. He told me that as a young man he had played professionally, but an accident had cut short his career. I asked him what he did for a living.

“I’m a psychologist,” he said.

“Do many people go to psychologists in Mexico City?” I asked, explaining that in New York it was practically as common as brushing your teeth.

“I have many clients,” said Samuel. “Mexico City is a good place for a psychologist, because it’s a factory for crazy people.”

Carlos then asked me if I would bring him back to New York. “I’m an old man,” he said. “Let me spend my last days there with you.”

I tried to discourage him. New York, I explained, was hardly as glamorous as it appeared in the movies. This didn’t deter the old man. “Hear me out,” he said.

I explained that I lived in a one-room apartment. He again went into his song and dance about wanting to spend his last days in New York. “Hear me out,” he repeated.

I told him that Mexico City seemed more relaxed than New York, but this provoked a string of curses. “Hear me out…” Finally, my compulsion to tell the truth was eclipsed by an urgent desire to shut him up. So I told him I’d take him to New York.

His face illuminated as if from an inner current.

“Hecho?” he asked. Really?

“Hecho.”

“Por Dios?” Swear to God?

“Por Dios.”

He took my hand and placed his forehead on it, as if I were the village priest (if not the pope). Immediately the old man began to crow obnoxiously about his impending trip. He removed his necktie—an object Samuel dated from the Stone Age—and gave it to me.