Coyoacán takes its name from the Nahuatl for the place of coyotes, and two bronze coyotes still drink from the fountain at the centre of Jardín Centenario. The neighbourhood sat apart from Mexico City for centuries, a village of orchards and canal traffic absorbed only when the capital's grid finally reached it. That late absorption explains the cobblestones, the low painted walls, and the fact that Coyoacán Food Tour tours still move at walking pace. Food here was never a staged attraction. It was the municipal economy. Mercado de Coyoacán has anchored Calle Ignacio Allende since the 1920s, a steel-framed hall of narrow aisles and painted signage. Its reputation rests on tostadas: stacked discs of fried corn loaded with ceviche, pata, tinga and crab, sold from a central island of counters that rarely empties. Around it sit esquites in styrofoam cups, tlacoyos pressed on comales, mole pastes weighed by the kilo, candied fruit in glass jars. Flower vendors occupy the Allende entrance. The produce aisles still supply the neighbourhood's own kitchens, not only its visitors. Two squares, Plaza Hidalgo and Jardín Centenario, form the civic hinge. Every Coyoacán Food Tour tour itinerary bends around them, because the churro windows, the carts of nieves, and the sixteenth-century arcades all sit within a few hundred metres. The Casa de Cortés and the Parroquia de San Juan Bautista face the plaza; Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul stands four blocks north on Londres. The district's culinary geography and its cultural geography are the same map. What matters today is continuity rather than novelty. Vendors here work family concessions; recipes pass sideways between stalls rather than down from chefs. A tour gastronómico en Coyoacán reads as fieldwork in that economy: corn nixtamalised overnight, salsas ground in volcanic basalt molcajetes, pulque poured from plastic jugs in cantinas that predate the mercado. Nothing on the stalls announces itself as heritage, yet the continuity is measurable in the generations standing behind each counter. The neighbourhood itself charges nothing to enter; the Coyoacán Food Tour is simply the guided reading of a public space that happens to be edible. Monday is the quiet day, when the market's rhythm slows and the shutters stay down.