By the time we arrived in Oaxaca, the sugar skulls were still up. Día de los Muertos had just passed and the city hadn't fully let go of it yet. Elaborate skeleton figures still hung in doorways and draped across market stalls, grinning in that particular way that only Mexican death iconography can manage: joyful and unsentimental at the same time. But the Christmas lights were already going up alongside them. Not replacing the altars. Just layered on top. By the time we left nine days later, the skeletons were mostly gone and the tinsel had taken over — and in between, we got this brief window where both things existed at once, which felt like a lot of Oaxaca in miniature: ancient and present, sacred and commercial, never quite what you expected.

I travel with multiple food allergies. Gluten and wheat primarily, dairy, several others from the FDA Top 9. I'm also allergic to chocolate and cacao, which makes Oaxaca — one of the great cacao regions of the world, where chocolate is not an ingredient but an ancestry — its own particular kind of bittersweet.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about traveling with serious food allergies: it is an act of faith every single time. You research before you go, you build a mental map of where you think you'll be safe, and then you land and the map shifts and you figure it out in real time with your nervous system running slightly hotter than it should. You learn to read menus the way archaeologists read ruins — not for what's there, but for what's underneath. That low-level anxiety that lives just below the excitement? Every gluten-free traveler knows it. I'd been nervous about Mexico. I left wanting to come back immediately.

This is what nine days of gluten-free, dairy-free travel in Oaxaca actually looked like.

Why Oaxaca Is Different

Here is what you need to understand before anything else: Oaxacan cuisine was not designed for gluten-free travelers. It was designed by people who had been feeding themselves from this land for thousands of years before wheat arrived with colonialism, and it simply never needed it.

Corn is the foundation — not as a preference, not as a trend, but as an ancestral fact that predates European contact by millennia. Tortillas, tlayudas, memelas, tamales, enfrijoladas: the architecture of this cuisine is corn-based because corn is what this land gives, and what these people have tended, and what carries their history in its husk. The moles are largely naturally gluten-free, though you do have to double check what was used to thicken the sauce. None of this is accommodation. None of it is adaptation. It is just what Oaxacan food is, which happens to align almost perfectly with what I can eat.

That doesn't mean you walk in without thinking. Cross-contamination is real. Not every kitchen distinguishes between celiac disease and a preference. But the baseline is genuinely different here. You're not fighting the cuisine. You're meeting it.

A significant portion of what I ate was also naturally dairy-free and incidentally vegan — organic market snacks, corn-based street food, the ancestral drinks, most of what came out of La Cosecha Mercado.

The City First

You can't understand the food without understanding the streets. In Oaxaca, they are the same thing.

Oaxaca's Centro is compact, walkable, and alive in the way that cities are alive when they haven't fully given themselves over to tourism yet — when the processions that move through it are happening because that's just what Tuesday is, not because someone scheduled a cultural experience for you. One evening we were walking and heard music ahead. By the time we reached it, a wedding procession was already flowing past. Someone we'd never met handed us a cup of mezcal. Not to sell it. Not to perform local color. Just because there was something worth celebrating and you happened to be standing there, and in Oaxaca that's reason enough.

The culture doesn't perform for you here. It has its own internal logic, its own relationship to ceremony and grief and celebration that predates tourism and will outlast it. The Día de los Muertos altars weren't staged for visitors. They were part of a living practice of speaking to the dead, of refusing the tidy separation between past and present that modernity keeps trying to enforce.

We caught a cultural festival early in the trip, attended parades, did yoga most mornings at Maka, a studio where locals and visitors mixed. Between all of it, Oaxaca kept offering invitations into something real. The rootedness in land and tradition that makes a tamale here taste different from a tamale anywhere else is the same rootedness that fills the streets with music on a Tuesday for no particular reason you can name.

Where We Ate

Morning Ritual: Amá Terraza

We found Amá Terraza early and came back almost every morning after that. Good light, strong coffee, fresh juice. The pace is unhurried in a way that matches the best version of how you want to start a day in a city like this. We're still using the beans we purchased there at home and get transported right back to that terrace every time.

For gluten-free travelers: the GF pancakes are genuinely good. But if you want something more rooted in local food culture, the egg dishes are where it's at. The huevos rancheros — egg over easy swimming in both red and green salsa, finished with avocado and cilantro — is the kind of dish that recalibrates what breakfast can be. We ordered it more times than I can count.

As a daily ritual, as a place to sit and let the city warm up around you, Amá Terraza earns everything.

The Markets: La Cosecha and El Pochote

La Cosecha Mercado Orgánico was the find of the trip for everyday navigation. An organic market in the north of Centro, with vendors who know their ingredients because they grow or make them — because the knowledge lives in their hands, not on a label.

A note for gluten-free and celiac travelers: if something is premade, they generally can't modify it. But what La Cosecha does better than almost anywhere is actually understand the question when you ask it. These vendors know what's in their food. They'll tell you how it was made, whether a shared surface is a concern.

We found a proper gluten-free empanada made with masa. Horchata that tasted the way horchata should. Tejate — a pre-Hispanic drink made from corn and maize flower, naturally gluten-free, naturally dairy-free, and carrying the specific weight of something people have been drinking in this valley for a very long time. My partner got to explore the cacao-based ancestral drinks while I watched with a very specific kind of envy. Dang cacao allergy.

El Pochote Rayón Mercado Orgánico is smaller, a bit further from Centro, and we only made it there once. Memelasfor breakfast — thick oval masa cakes, naturally gluten-free, topped with black bean paste and Oaxacan quesillo pulled apart in long strands — and agua fresca, and stalls selling locally grown goods. If you're in Oaxaca for more than a few days, give it a morning. It's usually open on weekends.

The Snack Haul

One of the quieter joys of this trip was building a snack collection from the organic market. Here's what made the cut, all of it gluten-free:

Lorikos Chapulines, Chili and Lemon. Dehydrated grasshoppers from Oaxaca, seasoned with chili and lemon, with 40 grams of protein per pack. They taste like a very good spiced snack that happens to also be an insect, and they're completely addictive. If you're hesitant, start here.

Deligero Taro Obleas de Amaranto. Thin wafers made with amaranth flour and taro. Light, slightly crispy, mild and nutty. This one surprised me — it didn't taste like a "free-from" product. It tasted like something they actually wanted to make.

Camote chips. Sweet potato chips in chili-lime seasoning, labeled clearly and clean-ingredient. A reliable snack when you're three hours into wandering and need something real.

Lavoura Guava Marmalade. Not technically a snack on its own, but paired with anything from the organic market it became a daily ritual. Rich, not too sweet, deeply fruity.

At the markets, you'll also find chapulines in bulk — one note if you're buying loose from market vendors: double check what they were fried in. Traditionally they're safe, but some vendors fry in soy sauce. When in doubt, order natural or stick with the bagged versions.

The full chapulines experience is at La Matatena Pizzería, where they top a gluten-free crust with whole grasshoppers, arugula, olives, and cheese. It sounds like a novelty. It is not a novelty. If you've been hesitant about trying chapulines, a pizza is your entry point.

The Pizza Place That Became Home: La Matatena Pizzería

The box they sent us home with on our last visit was stamped with a quote: "El dinero no compra la felicidad, pero con él puedes comprar pizza, que es prácticamente lo mismo." Money can't buy happiness, but with it you can buy pizza, which is practically the same thing. That's La Matatena in a sentence.

We went many times and by the second visit, the owners recognized us. There's a reason for the depth of care here: the owner's sister has celiac disease. That's not a marketing detail — it's the explanation for why every staff member understands the difference between a preference and a medical reality, why questions get answered with actual precision, why you don't spend the meal managing anxiety in the background. Someone loved a specific person, and built an entire system of care around that love. You can taste it.

They have a gluten-free pizza crust and a dedicated preparation area. They carry Ocho Reales, an artisanal ale from Monterrey that is certified gluten-free right on the bottle — a small detail that landed as a genuine gift the first time I saw it. The champiñones pizza was earthy and exactly right.

On our third visit, they brought out a gluten-free, dairy-free lasagna. A proper lasagna — layered, creamy, the kind of thing you genuinely don't expect to find in this form, let alone made safe for multiple allergens. It was outstanding. And yet the pizza still edges it out. I say that with full respect for the lasagna. The pizza is just that good.

The banana muffin, dusted with powdered sugar, on a blue and white rimmed plate: I'm still thinking about it.

García Vigil 212, Centro Oaxaca. Go more than once.

The Joy of Fresh Tortillas

Something happens when you eat a corn tortilla made a few minutes before you're holding it. It is not the same thing as a tortilla from a package, even a good package. The texture is different. The flavor is different — corn tastes like itself, like the specific place it was grown, like the hands that worked it.

Blue corn tortillas are deep grey-purple, pressed thick, almost impossibly dense with color. They appeared at the finest restaurants in Oaxaca, served in small clay bowls alongside stone molcajetes with salsa. You're eating a grain cultivated on this land for thousands of years, in a color bred by human hands across generations, served in a vessel made from the same clay earth beneath you.

Order them whenever they appear. The street version eaten standing up might be the best version. Just double check they are solo de maíz — only from corn.

The Best Meal: Levadura de Olla

There are meals you enjoy. There are meals you remember. And then there are meals that shift your reference point.

Levadura de Olla is Michelin-starred. What that label doesn't capture is what it's actually doing: anchoring itself in the ancestral food traditions of Oaxaca with genuine seriousness, and refusing to be anything other than that. When we made our reservation, they asked about dietary restrictions as part of the booking process. Not as an afterthought. By the time we sat down, the kitchen already knew.

Everything arrived in handmade vessels: clay bowls, wooden boards, a stone molcajete holding a deeply flavored salsa with a small pile of blue corn chips for scooping. The emblematic Levadura de Olla napkin, embroidered in burgundy, folded in a clay bowl. Nothing was there by accident. Nothing was there because it was pretty. It was there because this is how this food should be held.

The mole amarillo con pollo came in a wide clay bowl, the mole pooling around white hominy corn that had absorbed some of its color and all of its depth. The tamale arrived in its banana leaf, already darkened at the edges, and when it opened the mole inside was the color of deep amber, the masa golden.

Here is what still surprises me: the entire meal cost what an average dinner back home in Seattle costs. A Michelin-starred restaurant. The best meal of the trip. Priced like a Tuesday night out.

If you can get a reservation, make it.

Also Michelin: Las Quince Letras

Las Quince Letras represents something different from Levadura de Olla. A stack of handmade corn tortillas arrived wrapped in a vivid floral cloth, still steaming. The room was relaxed and serious in the way of places that trust what they're serving and don't need to explain it.

The black mole — mole negro — came pooled dark and glossy across the bowl, the kind of color that absorbs light rather than reflecting it. It took generations of hands to develop this mole. The recipe carries that accumulation in every bite.

I am allergic to cacao. Black mole is made with chocolate. And I made a deliberate decision: a few bites, carefully, paying attention. It was one of the best things I've eaten in recent memory. I don't recommend anyone take unnecessary risks with their allergies. But I'll be honest about what I did, because it was a real decision made consciously, not a mistake. Some food is worth the conversation you have with yourself first.

The Neighborhood Anchor: Santa Hierba Jalatlaco

We ate at Santa Hierba more times than anywhere else on the trip.

First afternoon in Oaxaca: avocado toast layered with lentils and microgreens, an açaí bowl with banana, blueberries, and coconut, a passion fruit mezcal drink that made us feel like the trip was starting exactly right.

Dinner another night: the gyro wrap. It arrives with greens peeking out the top, served on scalloped ceramic plates in warm amber light. The falafel inside is properly crispy and herby and substantial — not sad, afterthought falafel. Gluten-free, dairy-free, and genuinely delicious. I thought about it the next day.

Brunch near the end of the trip: waffles loaded with granola, strawberries, blackberries, and a berry compote in a small ceramic bowl on the side, scrambled eggs, fresh juice.

Santa Hierba Jalatlaco is in the most beautiful neighborhood in Oaxaca — cobblestones, painted buildings, streets narrow enough that the city feels intimate rather than managed. It's allergen-aware and consistent, and located somewhere you'd want to walk through whether or not you were eating.

Milagros: When the Café Is Also an Embroidery Studio

Milagros Café Creativo is connected to Milagros, and the experience goes well beyond a coffee stop. We got to sit down and actually participate in embroidery — not watch. Do. Oaxaca's embroidery traditions are carried largely by Zapotec communities and are the result of generations of people deciding that this knowledge was worth holding, worth passing, worth keeping alive. Being invited into even a small part of that process changes how you look at the textiles sold in the market. You understand what you're holding. You understand the hands it passed through.

The café itself is warm and cozy. Worth the visit on either front, and better for both together.

Café Rodríguez

I want to say something about Café Rodríguez that has nothing to do with the food. It's an unpretentious place where locals actually go. The owner, Eduardo, is one of those people who will talk to you with genuine interest and no performance of hospitality — just actual kindness. He knows his city. He knows his coffee. If you sit down and let the conversation happen, you'll leave knowing Oaxaca better than when you walked in. It is a very good place to be.

The Mezcal

Mezcal in Oaxaca is not a trend. That needs to be said plainly, because in the rest of the world right now mezcal is very much a trend — boutique bottles, cocktail menus, "terroir" deployed with intense seriousness. In Oaxaca, mezcal is something older: a ceremonial drink, a community ritual, a relationship between a plant and the people who have tended it for centuries. The mezcal handed to us at that wedding procession wasn't a pour from a curated selection. It was an act of including strangers in a celebration. The substance and the gesture were the same thing.

We went to Mezcalogia in Centro and worked through a proper education in what we were tasting. But the experience that actually changed something was the day we left the city entirely.

We found Aziz Cortez the way the best things happen when you travel: through a friend who'd been before, who passed along nothing but a screenshot of a phone number. We texted. He responded. We joined a small group of European bartenders already on an existing tour and drove about an hour outside Oaxaca to Santiago Matatlán — a village known internationally as the world capital of mezcal. Most of what reaches the rest of the world starts here.

The farm looked nothing like a commercial distillery. Large wooden fermentation barrels held mounds of spent agave fiber — the bagazo, the pulp left behind after the piñas are roasted and crushed. The work is physical and specific and unchanged in its fundamentals for generations. Standing at the edge of the property, looking out over the valley and the mountains beyond it, you understood immediately why the relationship between this plant and this particular land produces something that can't be replicated elsewhere.

Aziz is a third or fourth generation distiller from this place — someone who understood mezcal's role in his community before the international market arrived and turned it into something to curate. What he shared over a full day wasn't a tasting menu. It was a history. A spiritual geography. The role mezcal plays in ceremony and grief and collective ritual — in the marking of births and deaths and the invisible moments between. We tasted around thirty mezcals. The notes mattered far less than what was underneath them.

There is no shortage of mezcal experiences in Oaxaca. The pro tip is to look for the least commodified ones. Find the families who have been making mezcal for generations, for whom it is still a ceremony and not just a product. If you want to try the exact mezcal we tried, look for dixeebe or Origen raíz.

Practical Notes for Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, and Vegan Travelers

Corn is your foundation. Traditional Oaxacan cuisine is built on corn and always has been. At market stalls and traditional restaurants, corn-based dishes are your safest starting point — and often the most interesting thing on offer. Just double check tortillas are solo de maíz and that mole sauces haven't been thickened with flour.

Note your restrictions at booking. Restaurants like Levadura de Olla ask at reservation time. Use that. Kitchens that care will be prepared when you arrive.

Learn the phrases. "Soy celíaca/celíaco" (I have celiac disease), "sin gluten" (without gluten), "¿contiene trigo?" (does this contain wheat?), "sin lácteos" (without dairy). Centro-area restaurants understand at least the basics.

The organic markets are your safety net. La Cosecha especially. The vendors know their ingredients because the knowledge lives in their hands. See the snack haul section above for what to look for — the selection rotates, so keep your eyes open.

Try chapulines. At the market for the snack, packaged for the walk, full chapulines pizza at La Matatena for the complete experience. Naturally gluten-free, traditionally Oaxacan, genuinely good. If buying loose from market vendors, ask what they were fried in.

Two Michelin restaurants in one city, at prices that will surprise you. Levadura de Olla and Las Quince Letras are both accessible here in a way they wouldn't be elsewhere. Don't skip them based on an assumption about cost.

For vegan travelers: a significant portion of what I ate was incidentally vegan — market snacks, corn-based street food, tejate, the ancestral drinks. Traditional Oaxacan food culture will carry you further than you might expect, though cheese is ubiquitous and the trickiest thing to consistently avoid.

There's a version of traveling with food allergies where you manage and survive. You find the safe thing, nothing goes wrong, you go home. I've done that version. I know exactly what it tastes like — the relief of it, and the smallness of it.

Oaxaca wasn't that. Oaxaca was somewhere I wasn't just accommodated. I was met — by a cuisine built on the right foundations long before I arrived, by people whose knowledge of their food runs so deep that answering allergen questions is the easy part, by a city that has been feeding itself from this land for thousands of years and carries that in everything it makes.

I think about the mezcal from a stranger's hand in the middle of a wedding procession. The blue corn tortilla pressed by someone who's made ten thousand of them before this one. The grasshopper pizza that had no business being as good as it was. The embroidery studio where I felt the warp threads resist under my fingers and understood, suddenly, the weight of what I was holding. All of it made from this land, from this knowledge, offered as something that was never meant to be a product — and remains, even now, more than that.

The Christmas lights were up when we left. The processions were still moving. We had a flight to catch and I was already thinking about going back.

That's the trip. I hope it gets you there.

Have you been to Oaxaca with food allergies? Tell me where you ate. I'm building the list for next time.