With the U.S. dollar particularly strong in Mexico at the moment, visiting the Yucatán is both affordable and easy. While many of the pristine beaches have become overbuilt and touristy, Mérida, the state’s capital and largest city, is cosmopolitan yet still uncrowded, with stately colonial mansions and pleasant promenades, cultural and UNESCO World Heritage sites within close proximity, and exceptional food. In 2016, 1.9 million people visited Mérida, a 20 percent growth over the previous year.
      Mayan hunter-gatherers migrated into the Yucatán peninsula around 2,500 B.C. and between 300 and 1000 A.D., they built cities like Chichén Itzá and Uxmal. Another early city, T’hó (a reference to five nearby pyramids), was already abandoned when conquering Spaniards, led by Motejo y Léon, arrived in 1542 and renamed it Mérida.
    Much of the town’s colonial center was constructed during the golden era of the sisal barons—from the early 1800s to the end of WWI—when sailing ships relied on the pliable rope made from the indigenous henequen (sisal) plants able to withstand extreme weather conditions. Several henequeneros became immensely wealthy, and, by the beginning of the 20th century, Mérida was said to be the richest city in the world. European-inspired limestone mansions attested to a lavish life style.
     Many of these 19th century homes, in various states of repair, still line the cobblestone roads, several, in recent years, meticulously restored as banks, museums, office buildings and elegant boutique hotels. Two gracious examples of where you can feel like a magnate are the 8-bedroom, bright blue Casa Azul (left), with its tranquil courtyard, restored tiles, and period furniture collected from throughout Mexico, and the 7-bedroom Casa Lecanda, with tasteful antiques and French-Caribbean accents. Both award-winning hotels offer meals. Casa Lecanda also has cooking classes led by chef Christian Bravo of Crabster.
    Along Paseo Montejo, Mérida’s tree-lined main thoroughfare, the Anthropology and History Museum  is housed in an outsized early 20th century marble mansion built in the neoclassical and French baroque styles. Inside, bilingual descriptions of artifacts provide a thoughtful overview of life in Mérida and Mayan culture (below).
     There are striking contemporary structures in Mérida, as well. The new Gran Museo del Mundo Maya focuses exclusively on Mayan history. On Pasaje de la Revolución, MACAY (left), the contemporary art museum, is another popular destination, next to San Idelfonso, the oldest cathedral in the Americas, dating from 1562.
           There is great civic pride in Mérida, and it’s best shown off at night, when the municipal center is lighted up for visitors each evening. Mérida’s town center is an inviting place to stroll, especially during temperate evening hours. Along with casual bars at which to enjoy a drink, particularly mezcal—the local liquor made from smoked agave—there are family-oriented activities every evening. In Parque Santa Lucía there are performances of Jaranas Yucatecas, traditional dances where intricate lines of colorfully dressed performers sashay in and out of formations, accompanied by musicians.
          Pok Ta Pok is a reenactment of an ancient Mayan ball game, held in front of the Cathedral. Costumed warriors play with a ball on fire. Rather than seeming touristic, the spirit and professionalism of these activities make the events enjoyable for all ages.
Some top chefs, like David Cetina (right) at Tradicion, promote the Yucatecan culinary legacy and local ingredients. Since beginning his career in 1973, Cetina has used ancient cooking techniques in traditional dishes. His pork filling in a hollowed-out Edam cheese wheel is seasoned with sweet chiles, cinnamon, vinegar, olives, raisins, capers, tomatoes and hard cooked eggs. It’s then served with an epazote-scented white sauce and xcatik, a chile and tomato-based red sauce.
     Edam cheese is a mainstay of the cuisine because the red wax-coated balls kept well during the long sea voyage from Holland. Roberto Solís of Néctar (below) also uses the cheese as the puréed base for a contemporary cauliflower “steak” with pancetta-parsley vinaigrette. His blackened, smoke-charred onion served with chile mayonnaise incorporates ancient techniques in a modernist presentation. He calls his cuisine “New Yucatecan.”
    Solís, like other progressive chefs, has traveled the world representing local gastronomy and working with renowned chefs like René Redzepi of Denmark’s Noma. Recently, he and his partner, Luis Barocio, were the main promoters of “Kooben, Gastronomic Meeting of the Mayab,” a four-day festival in Mérida where 31 chefs from across Mexico came to cook and learn about the traditional and new Yucatecan cuisine.
    The menu at Apaola, (below) a lively eatery bordering el Parque de Santa Lucía, features Oaxacan and Yucatán cooking. Carlos Arnaud and his sister present tasty fare including Mezcal margaritas with tiny bowls of chapulines, fried grasshoppers, crunchy zucchini flowers stuffed with Oaxacan cheese and mole amarillo (made with guajillo chiles), seared top sirloin tacos with pickled cabbage, and aguachile white fish with cocoa. Have a look downstairs at their trendy speakeasy, Malahat, named for a 19th century ship that smuggled liquor from Canada into the U.S. Reservations are required.
     If you’re just off a cruise ship, or out for a day at the beach in Progreso, Crabster (below) is the place for minutes-fresh seafood with a playful twist. Chef Christian Bravo, a Puebla native who has cooked in stellar restaurants throughout Mexico and Spain, was a Top Chef Mexico finalist. (He’s also currently the chef at Casa Lecanda.) Christian’s riff on shrimp cocktail comes in a tall Bloody Mary glass complete with celery; his burgers are crammed with shrimp and/or crab, and seafood salads are all tasty and more than generous.
     The food at Oliva Kitchen (below), while not Mexican, is definitely noteworthy. Chef Stefano Lecanda, who also owns another restaurant in town and the nearby hotel Casa Lecanda, celebrates the food of his Roman father. He describes the intimate restaurant as “urban Italian: a comfortable place to have good food”—an understatement judging by impeccable ravioli alla romana and roman-style meatballs.
     And once your desire for haute cuisine is sated, there’s a lot of buzz about Mercado 60, a recently opened place near the el Parque Santa Lucía that’s got the feel of a hip food court. Along the perimeter, food vendors sell tasty small plates of international cuisines, drinks (including excellent Mexican craft beers), and desserts. Leave room for the ice cream, which you can’t miss. It’s a welcoming place, with communal tables at the center and frequent live music.
    To get a sense of life on a working estate, or hacienda, where sisal was grown and rope was spun, take a cab or rent a car to drive 20 miles south to Hacienda Yaxcopoil (left). At its height Yaxcopoil comprised about 22,000 acres and was considered one of the most important rural estates of the Yucatán. Today it is a parador and museum, with an atmosphere reminiscent of scenes in the movie Like Water for Chocolate. A nominal fee allows visitors to wander around the property, visit the chapel with its St. Geronimo statue, as well as rooms inside the hacienda.
     From here, it's a short distance to the Mayan temples at Uxmal. While smaller than Chichén Itzá, this archeological site is a manageable place to discover the region’s aesthetically exciting late-Mayan style of art and architecture (700 to 1000 A.D.). Several buildings include etched abstract symbols as well as serpents, turtles and birds. Climbing the 60+ steps of the Temple of the Magician, the imposing central pyramid, provides a mild cardio workout.
  Only a small part of the site has been unearthed. What is visible is in a very well preserved state, so visitors get a good sense of how the ceremonial center once looked. It’s worth hiring a well-informed, English-speaking guide.
     The Mayan ruins at Dzibilchaltún (right) include the Temple of the Seven Dolls and the Temple of the Sun, aligned so that during the fall and spring equinoxes, the rising sun shines through both windows, which was an event of significant religious importance. Even today, many people come to witness the event. Inside the archeological site is the cenote at Xlacah, a swimming hole that is home to small fish that nibble on calluses, a bonus for your tired feet.
 
IF YOU GO. . .    American Airlines now offers five nonstop flights a week from both Miami and Dallas-Fort Worth to nearby Manuel Crescencio Rejón International Airport. Flights also arrive from Milan and Toronto, and cruise ships dock in the port of Progresso, about 30 minutes away. 

    Few hotels in America are as storied as The Carlyle, which was built in 1930 but barely survived the Depression.  Through successive owners, now Rosewood, the hotel, which has prided itself as being “staid not ritzy,” has maintained a certain exclusivity through its high room rates and small number of rooms (190). Its management never fails to remind guests of the number of U.S. Presidents—not least JFK, whom Marilyn Monroe paid visits to by coming up to his suite via secret tunnels—and celebrities like the Beatles, Mick Jagger and Lady Diana (right) who have stayed at the art déco hotel. 
    Genteel is not a word much in favor these days, which unfortunately has too many connotations in the dictionary: “Having an aristocratic quality relating to the gentry class; elegant or graceful in manner; free from vulgarity, polite; middle-class respectability; and marked by false delicacy; conventionally or insipidly pretty.”  Depending on which one you prefer, it might be applied to the general tenor of The Carlyle Hotel.     Designed by the firm of Bien & Prince, the hotel was for some odd reason named after the wholly un-genteel Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle, of whom Samuel Butler said, “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four.”
    The entrance does not open onto a grand lobby but to a dark ground floor second entrance that leads you to the Bemelsman Bar (left), with its cherished Ludwig Bemelsman murals, or to the Café Carlyle (below), famous for the late Bobby Short’s long tenure as saloon singer par excellence, now host to the better remaining cabaret singers and musicians like Judy Collins, John Pizzarelli, and Christine Ebersole.  On Monday nights Woody Allen regularly plays Dixieland clarinet here. Or you may enter the two-tier Gallery for light food and tea after a grueling shopping spree along Madison Avenue.
    Beyond that is the Restaurant, two dining rooms that are indeed staid, in the most polite sense, without being ritzy in the garish sense.  Centered by four dark brown upholstered booths and a huge spray of flowers, the room would fit easily into a feature of any recent decade in House Beautiful. Mirrors, mantelpieces, patterned William Morris-like wallpaper, heavy draperies, a gorgeous patterned carpet, wall sconces with lampshades, and the requisite equestrian prints abound; a rear room for larger parties, done in Fortuny silk, has a light level kept funereally low, though that can be turned up on request.  The decibel level, thank heavens, will never be an issue for conversationalists.  So pick your definition of genteel and you’ll find it here.
    Surprisingly, the food has been quite good for a long time under successive chefs—currently, Vincent Raith, though you’d never know from the menu or website, an omission that suggests that the menu is intended to seem timeless, if uninspired, and there will be something for everyone.  The service staff is unlikely to win any medals in foot races and much of the evening they are nowhere to be found in the dining room. 
    The menu (which has  tasteless “V/GF” notes to indicate vegetarian and gluten-free items) has a page of very expensive “Carlyle Classics,” most, like Dover sole (a whopping $98) and escargots à la bourguignonne ($29), easily found elsewhere, but they do serve lobster Thermidor ($69) and, quite unusual for this kind of menu, a pork and foie gras pastry called tortière ($65).
    The other side of the menu is of sufficient interest to anyone not looking for innovation, and overall the cooking and presentation are of consistent quality.  Oven-dried Roma tomato and prosciutto with burrata, basil and aged balsamic ($27) is predictably satisfying, and seared octopus with a warm salad of kale, potato, olives, Bell pepper and Key lime aïoli ($28) is competently rendered. Hamachi tartare (below) with avocado, pink peppercorns and soy-truffle vinaigrette was a pleasing mound of Asian flavors ($29).  The stand-out appetizer on a recent visit was green French lentil soup with lardons, truffled crème fraȋche and brioche crouton ($19), which had depth in the balanced incorporation of salty vegetable and meat flavors.
    Roasted halibut, slightly overcooked, came with a lovely fennel gratin and eggplant caponata with rosemary sauce ($45).  I applauded the lusty flavors of slowly braised veal cheeks with pine nuts, well-made soft polenta, gremolata and baby leeks (a very pricey $57), and that Carlyle Classic tortière should definitely stay on the menu forever; it’s a terrific, rustic dish.   Disappointing, however, was a rack of lamb with salsify and gastrique ($48), because the lamb was not of the highest quality, lacking any rich fattiness. Its provenance is not listed on the menu.
    There are side dishes you do not need and a selection of artisanal cheeses from the well-regarded Murray’s Cheese ($23-$31).
    As you might guess, in a place that is known for its tea service and banquets, desserts here are very, very good, from a quickly baked apple tartine to dense but moist flourless chocolate cake as good as any in town.
    The Carlyle has had decades to build a first-rate wine list, so it’s currently 30 pages long and strong in every category, but prices can be steep, with next to nothing under $60.  A 2012 Ponzi Pinot Noir you can get in a NYC wine store for about $35 runs $120; the more expensive wines, however, are marked up less.
    À la carte prices are high—especially for appetizers—but a three-course meal can easily come in under $100 per person, and with that you’re getting an elegant dining room now rare in NYC.  True, the Carlyle is staid, though sometimes that can be a balm to the harried soul just out of work or just off the FDR Highway. It is not a place to find ill-dressed foodies ravenous for novelty.   If there still exists something called New York Society, you’ll find its remnants here, and if that’s genteel, then so be it.

The Carlyle Restaurant
35 East 76th Street (at Madison Avenue)
212--744-1600
Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily.