San Miguel de Allende

Centro · Cuna de Allende 3, San Miguel de Allende

San Miguel has an entire rooftop industry dedicated to putting cocktails in front of the Parroquia. Atrio has the unfair advantage of being almost indecently close. From the terrace, the pink stone is not part of some distant skyline composition; it feels like the church has pulled up a chair. Sunset works, but night may be better, once the towers light up and stop looking entirely real.

Dinner holds its own against the view. The menu wanders freely through duck and short-rib tacos, dim sum, sweetbreads, suckling pig with hoisin, charcoal and truffle, with Asian references colliding with Mexico and Europe. Look at the church, then return to a menu worth paying attention to.

Centro · Canal 34, San Miguel de Allende

Casa Cent’anni contains a terrace with wood-fired pizza, a piano bar, a Music Hall with live bands, a Hi-Fi room built around serious analogue sound and a vinyl shop. The San Miguel house regularly books jazz, funk, blues, rock and tropical music.

Each room has an actual function, so use the schedule. Come for the band, the piano or the listening room and eat while you are there. Cent’anni put several different reasons to go out inside the same house.

La Aurora · Calzada de la Aurora s/n

A former textile factory now given over to art and design. Fábrica La Aurora brings galleries, working studios, antiques and interiors into the same industrial complex, with cafés and restaurants providing reasons to linger.

Come with time to wander. Moving between painting, sculpture, furniture and the workshops makes this a different kind of San Miguel afternoon, away from the succession of terraces around the main square.

Centro · Nemesio Diez 20

NUMU puts a boutique hotel and a rooftop table at the same address in the centre of San Miguel. Upstairs, NOIA pairs views across the city with a menu that draws on Mexican and Mediterranean cooking.

Treat the hotel and restaurant as one place with two rhythms: a base for the stay, then dinner and a drink above the streets. The rooftop is the natural focus of the entry, whether or not the evening ends in a room downstairs.

Centro · Diez de Sollano y Dávalos 14

La Única takes the Mexican cantina into a contemporary restaurant setting. The kitchen draws on the Pacific coast and northern Mexico, bringing seafood, meat and cooking over fire into the same meal.

It belongs to the more social side of dinner in San Miguel: a table for a group, food to share and a meal that can comfortably become the evening.

Centro · Mesones 99, San Miguel de Allende

Duke is an antro. It opens late, essentially lives for Friday and Saturday, has DJs, bottles, dancing, a door with opinions and the slightly ridiculous social friction required for a nightclub to feel like somewhere people are trying to get into. It has also experimented with rooftop house events and daytime-to-night parties.

San Miguel can spend the entire afternoon being cobblestones, churches, galleries, wine and tasteful terraces. At 1:30 a.m., go dance.

Carretera Querétaro–San Miguel de Allende km 6.2

Viñedos San Lucas is what happens when somebody takes the fantasy of owning a vineyard and removes the deeply inconvenient part where you have to operate a vineyard.

Ninety-nine hectares outside San Miguel have been assembled into vines, olive trees, lavender, a winery, olive and lavender workshops, two restaurants, a fourteen-room hotel, residences, tennis, paddle, an equestrian club and a polo field. Seventy-two private plots sit inside the agricultural estate, while the estate staff handle the difficult business of making the countryside behave beautifully around them. The property's own real-estate pitch is essentially: enjoy having a finca without having to devote the investment, effort and attention usually required to have a finca. Remarkably candid.

For a visitor, the absurdity works in your favor. Taste the wine, then the olive oil. Walk through lavender. Find horses. Lunch. Stay if you want. The place keeps revealing another version of country life.

It is less a winery than a complete simulation of rural aristocratic life forty minutes from lunch.

You only have to enjoy it.