On Sunday morning, the dining room at Le Fu is dominated by the soft tapping of bamboo dim sum steamers being shuffled around by the server behind the food line. “Hottest ones on the bottom,” she says to me as we point out our selection. Inside each bamboo steamer, or zhēnglóng, there are char siu bao buns with savory pork filling and Chinese five spice; ngao yuk, or Cantonese steamed beef meatballs with green onion; and pork and ginger rice paper dumplings slightly crispy on one side, along with dozens of other options. As it turns out, Chinese food in Mexico is serious business.
There are also several mysterious soups bubbling away in chafing dishes and the bare ends of what look like meat skewers sticking out of a velvety dark brown sauce. A cacophony of voices come from the Chinese families serving tea from the metal kettles at each table as they deftly grasp slippery dumplings with chopsticks and pop them in their mouths.
My guide to the Chinese restaurants of Mexico City
I would have known nothing about Le Fu or dim sum in general without Nicholas Gilman. A friend and food writer in Mexico City, Nicholas has been writing about the city long before it was considered a world-class culinary destination. As a born and bred New Yorker, he had to go looking for Chinese food when he arrived 25 years ago, and he says the latest slew of restaurants far exceeds anything that he found once upon a time.
“There was zero for years,” Nicholas told me. “Out of desperation we would go to this place in the Zona Rosa — Golden something, maybe Dragon — that was just kind of okay. Coming from New York, we were just so used to good Asian food. Then [writer] David Lida discovered a place in Viaducto Piedad from a taxi driver who had a Chinese sister-in-law or something, and that was where the Chinese went to eat.”
Colonia Viaducto Piedad is where Le Fu is located, within a collection of blocks where you will find not only some of the city’s most authentic Chinese food, but also Chinese groceries, barbers and tea shops.
I sought Nicholas’ help because I am a Chinese food novice. Unlike him, I grew up in a tiny Midwestern U.S. town where the one Chinese restaurant no doubt catered to bland local tastes. When I decided to write about Mexico City’s Chinese options, it felt only right to seek his expert counsel.
New delights in Anzures
The first area Nicholas took me was Colonia Anzures, where a crop of new places has opened to serve the executives and tech workers who’ve come to Mexico City with Chinese companies like Hauwei and Xiaomi. We start at Lion Noodles, where we had the carne picada ramen with baby bok choy, carrots and hand-pulled noodles in a rich, cinnamony broth, washed down with a can of Chinese soda from the fridge. At Yiwei Ramen a few storefronts down we tried a collection of cold salads — tree ear mushrooms, pickled cabbage and onion — and some delicious fried dumplings with garlic and sesame salsa macha.
Our waitress at Xi Yang Yang was as excited to serve us as we were to eat, showing us every dish that came out of the kitchen, whether it was headed to our table or not. We tried a smoky eggplant dish with hints of lemongrass and garlic and a plate full of beef tripe, tiny in-bone pork ribs and lotus root that numbed our tongues with Sichuan peppers. One thing Nicholas has noticed in his years here is a growing regional diversity in the city’s Chinese cuisine
“Sichuan, Yunnan, Cantonese… you see a lot more diversity than you did, and people know a little more than they did before. And this new wave of immigrants… where are they coming from? Will there be more of a focus on their [regional] food? We hope so, because that’s what makes it interesting.”
An old community in Mexico
According to a 2024 Associated Press article, last year Mexico’s government issued 5,070 temporary residency visas to Chinese immigrants, twice as many as the previous year, making China third, behind the United States and Colombia, as the source of migrants granted permits. This is a spike from previous years, but Chinese immigration to Mexico City is not new. The first Chinese arrivals came during the colonial period on the Manila Galeon or Nao de China, the trans-Pacific trade route that connected Spain’s colonies in the Philippines with New Spain.
Historian José Luis Chong’s book “Hijo de un pais poderoso” explains that the California gold rush in the mid-19th century, as well as the building of the railroads on the west coast of the United States, brought thousands of Chinese to the Americas. Most were Cantonese, and both their passage and life after arrival in the United States was difficult: poverty, racism and extreme working conditions tested their will to survive.
While most Chinese immigrants of the time had in their mind an eventual return to China, the impossibility of paying for the return passage and the abusive terms of the “contracts” they were forced to sign before departing China meant that many had no choice but to stay in their new adoptive countries. Facing anti-Chinese laws passed in the United States, immigrants made their way south to Mexico, many to work on railroads, in mining and on farms along the northern border and Pacific coast. Some Chinese immigrants also came through the port of Veracruz from Cuba, where they had been brought in droves as indentured servants in the 1840s. They also faced racism in Mexico, including grim episodes like a 1911 massacre in Torreón and expulsion from Sonora and Sinaloa in the 1930s during so-called “anti-Chinese” campaigns.
Chinese restaurants, yesterday and today
In the first part of the 20th century those newly arrived Chinese immigrants slowly made their way to larger Mexican cities, setting up restaurants, laundries and shops. The “cafés chinos” of Mexico City — diners where inexpensive Mexican and Chinese food was served — became famous for their pan chino, pastries made by immigrants trained by French and English bakers in their country of origin. Many of those cafes have become little more than a trace in history, but two or three still remain, albeit, most without Chinese dishes on their menus.
Today, the restaurants of Colonia Viaducto Piedad are what those cafés chinos were to previous generations: gathering places offering a taste of home. Ka Won Seng even has a diner-like ambiance, with vertical venetian blinds that cast long shadows across the red and gold decorations of the dining room. You are likely to find very few non-Chinese customers there. On a quiet Saturday afternoon, we lingered over their delicately caramelized duck breast as we watched servers stack box after box of to-go food ready to be delivered.
The top stop for me on the entire tour was by far Le Fu, where I learned that dim sum, that vast collection of dumplings, buns and other little treats, is a morning tradition, something you have to arrive before noon to enjoy. At Le Fu there are no descriptions in English or Spanish, but the server was able to tell me in Spanish which were pork, shrimp or beef and she recommended the soy milk, a specialty there. I passed on the chicken feet and was too shy to order the lotus root soup, but we did try half a dozen dumplings and buns, marveling at each unique flavor. While I still feel like a beginner, my couple of outings with Nicholas have started me on my way to learning about Chinese food in Mexico City. Following his expert suggestions, I’m ready to continue my education on my own.
Lydia Carey is a freelance writer and translator based out of Mexico City. She has been published widely both online and in print, writing about Mexico for over a decade. She lives a double life as a local tour guide and is the author of Mexico City Streets: La Roma. Follow her urban adventures on Instagram and see more of her work at mexicocitystreets.com.
