Mexico City's best drink is a cocktail. Its best coffee isn't far behind.
Deep Dive · 4 min read
Licorería Limantour has been on the World's 50 Best Bars list every year since 2014. A bakery counter in Granada scores four tenths of a point behind it, on the same scale.
Licorería Limantour has been on the World's 50 Best Bars list every single year since 2014. Eleven consecutive years, on a list that turns over aggressively from one year to the next. It just won the Rémy Martin "Legend of the List" award for exactly that streak, and sits at No. 20 on North America's 50 Best Bars 2026. Ask anyone who tracks cocktail bars for a living and Roma Norte, the neighbourhood that holds it, is the first Mexico City address they will name.
None of that is the surprising part.
The surprising part is what happens when you put Limantour's drink score next to the rest of this city's catalogue, on the same ten-point scale this site uses for every cafe and bar it reviews, coffee and cocktails alike. The bar scores a 9.4. The best cafe in Mexico City, a bakery counter in Granada most visitors will never have heard of, scores a 9.0. Four tenths of a point separate a bar with an eleven-year World's 50 Best streak from an espresso machine behind a pastry case.
A streak, not a coincidence
Most bars that make a 50 Best list once never see it again. The list rewards novelty as much as quality, and staying power is rare enough that when Limantour hit its eleventh straight year, the organisers built an award around it. Its own review calls it "a genuinely world-class bar that doesn't feel like it's trying to remind you of that," which is the useful detail: nothing about the room performs its own reputation. The Mezcal Creyente, pineapple balanced against the fruit underneath it, is the one to order, and the staff read a room well enough that letting them steer the rest of the night is the right call, not a concession.
The bakery counter closing the gap
Signora Mariola doesn't trade on a global reputation. It is a bakery in Granada with limited seating and a queue that starts before the doors open, known mostly to the people who live near it. The espresso is precise and consistent, the pastries are good enough to buy on principle, and none of that shows up on any awards list, because bakery counters do not get invited to them.
It is also the highest-scoring drink in this city that is not Limantour, ahead of every other cafe reviewed here by at least two tenths of a point, some by more than two full points.
- Licorería Limantour Steep PickRoma Norte · Mexico City · Steep Index 8.7/10
A Roma Norte cocktail bar that's ranked among the world's best more than once, and the cocktails back up the reputation.
- Signora Mariola Steep PickGranada · Mexico City · Steep Index 8.5/10
An upscale Granada bakery cafe with excellent espresso and pastries worth the wait, if you can find a seat.
- Panadería RosettaRoma Norte · Mexico City · Steep Index 8.3/10
A justifiably popular Roma Norte bakery where the vanilla concha and cardamom bun are the real draw, the espresso is the one thing holding it back.
- Raku CaféRoma Norte · Mexico City · Steep Index 8.2/10
A Japanese-inspired cafe in Roma Norte with real coffee chops, come for the sando and the espresso, skip the matcha.
The honest splits
Most of the rest of Mexico City's cafe scene sits somewhere between those two extremes, and a few of the individual reviews spell out exactly where the gap opens. Panadería Rosetta's vanilla concha and cardamom bun are good enough to justify the queue on their own; the actual verdict on the review is "if the espresso matched the bake case, this would be an easy Steep Pick," and its 6.8 for the coffee is the lowest drink score in the city. Raku Café runs a smaller version of the same problem: the coffee is genuinely good, but the matcha, on a menu built around Japanese design, has "surprisingly little to say."
Even setting Signora Mariola aside as the clear outlier it is, the other seven cafes in this catalogue average 8.13 on the same axis Limantour scores 9.4 on. That is a strong scene by most cities' standards, not a weak one propped up by a single bar. It says something that fewer than half a point separates the city's best coffee from a bar that has spent over a decade among the most decorated on earth.
What to do with this
Order what each place is actually good at. At Panadería Rosetta that is the vanilla concha, not the espresso. At Raku, order the sando and the coffee, and skip the matcha. At Limantour, let the staff steer you toward the Mezcal Creyente and trust them.
Five of these nine venues sit inside Roma Norte itself, tight enough to walk in one afternoon. The Roma Norte route runs coffee to cocktails in the right order, starting in the early afternoon and ending at Limantour once it opens for the evening. The neighbourhood has its own page too, if you would rather browse the range on its own.