chantal martineau

Many a city gets compared to New York. Toronto is the Big Apple of the Great White North? Sorry, Canada. Not buying it. But Mexico City really can be likened to New York — it even hired ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani to consult on how to clean up its streets.

But is it safe? People kept asking me when I told them I’d be spending my birthday last month, alone, in Mexico City. Not that you’re ever alone in a city of 20 million people. Yes, I keep saying, it’s safe. As in, you can traipse from bar to bar at night without worrying about getting jumped (depending, like any big city, on the neighborhood). But the adventurous, borderline experimental, bars themselves — edgy and effortlessly cool — are anything but “safe”…