MEXICO CITY— The clock behind the bar at El Nivel, the oldest cantina in Mexico City, runs backward, an apt metaphor for the spiritual condition of two of its clients on a recent Friday afternoon. Fiftyish, with rumpled, crooked smiles on their faces, they sat with their arms around each other’s shoulders, not only as a gesture of solidarity but also to keep from falling to the floor. There were more than a dozen empty glasses on the table. One said to the other, in a voice loud enough to be heard through most of the cantina:

Seas Domínguez
O no me chingues,
Estás pedo.

This is vulgar, specifically Mexico City slang. A literal translation would make no sense, but the gist was that his friend was staggeringly drunk. The friend removed his arm from the other man’s shoulder, dismissed him with a wave, and rose to go to the bathroom. As he stood, most of the cantina’s patrons—art students and ponytailed post-hippies, middle-aged boulevardiers in antique suits, bureaucrats who would not bother to return to work that afternoon, neighborhood layabouts—scrutinized him with morbid curiosity to see if he would actually arrive at his destination.

Miraculously, he made his way in a more or less straight line. Yet just before he got to the WC, he tottered and dropped to the floor like an elevator cut from its cables. A long-suffering white-jacketed waiter pulled him to a standing position and escorted him back to his seat, where the waiter would continue to serve him drinks.

Although Mexico City cantinas are mostly no-frills establishments, lit by fluorescent bulbs and with mounds of cigarette butts on the floors, they have as much personality as London pubs, Paris cafés, and New York bars—and not only due to the performance art of their most intoxicated clients. Cantinas have history—El Nivel opened its doors in 1855. They have tradition—Mexicans are used to drinking in them, while European- or American-style bars are fewer and often located off hotel lobbies.

There is also entertainment, in the form of itinerant musicians whose talents vary wildly, many of them more interested in cadging drinks than in playing. At Tío Pepe, decrepit troubadours play guitars and sing for the customers, who are mostly middle-aged men in suits and ties getting progressively smashed. One afternoon at Tío Pepe, I saw a dwarf with a straw hat and a sparse beard sit on a high stool and sing incantations of passionate love in the nasal tremolo of a Munchkin. He turned out to be Margarito, a down-on-his-luck film comedian whose career would soon be resuscitated on TV.

In a far-from-egalitarian city, cantinas are the most democratic institutions. Anyone who can afford the price of a drink is welcome. The best ones attract a heterogeneous crowd: Bureaucrats in polyester suits, sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied by extravagantly made-up women who are clearly not their wives. Guys with thick mustaches and muddy boots who appear to have just gotten off a turnip truck from Sonora. Smooching couples. College kids, wearing nose rings and huaraches and sporting elaborate tattoos. Men with crew cuts who could be drug dealers, undercover police officers, or both. An evident minority of foreigners, teachers, journalists. On Saturday afternoons, some cantinas attract entire families, including toddlers and grandparents.

Perhaps what best distinguishes cantinas from bars in other cities is that they’re great places to eat—free with the price of drinks. No city I know is as generous to its drinkers as the D.F (Distrito Federal). During the traditional lunchtime (between about 2 and 5 p.m.), as long as you keep ordering booze, you’re rewarded with botanas, the Mexican equivalent of tapas. While the portions aren’t huge, there are frequently five or more different items available. Sometimes the abundance, variety, and quality of the offerings are stupefying. For example, recently at La Mascota (where an annoying waiter insistently tried to raffle off bottles of cheap rum and domino sets), there were seven dishes. I tried the pancita (a spicy tripe soup), stewed pork shank, chicken in green sauce, and meatballs in chipotle chile. They would have kept it coming, but I cried uncle.

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.

At this point a sinewy man with a mustache tottered over to our table and asked if we would let him buy us a round of drinks. We accepted and invited him to sit down. He drank a shot of tequila in one gulp.

This man, who called himself Héctor, stole Carlos’s eyeglasses, which prompted the old man to threaten to kick him in the balls. After finally returning the eyewear, Héctor gave me a seething look.

“He likes to fight,” whispered Samuel. “But don’t worry. I like to fight, too. I will protect you.” He took my hand and demonstrated the firm grip he’d developed as a jai alai player.

Héctor continued to glare at me. I wondered if a conflict would indeed emerge. To my surprise, he removed his wristwatch and gave it to me. Even by the generous standard of cantinas, this seemed like an extravagant gift. I began to make a speech about how beautiful it was, but I couldn’t possibly accept it.

“Take it,” Samuel said.

“Muchísimas gracias,” I said. 

I felt better a moment later when Héctor produced another watch from his pocket and unemphatically dropped it into a glass of soda water. This gesture seemed so defiant, impertinent, and baroquely inexplicable that I took off my own watch and gave it to him. Soon after, it undoubtedly found itself marinated.

Before I left, Samuel gave me a note that, to my surprise, was written in English. It said:

When you remember this night
you will think about this life.
Its night or is the life.
Do you understand?

For the best places to say salud, and other diversions in Mexico City, click here. "Where Everybody Knows Your Nombre" originally appeared in the January/February 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from Culture+Travel available on ARTINFO, click here.