Costa Rica Guide by Paul Glassman
Costa Rica - Order FREE Travel Brochure!
How's the Food?
You can find excellent food in Costa Rica, prepared from the freshest ingredients. But Costa Rica is not France, fine cuisine is not appreciated by the run-of-the-mill Tico, and if pleasing your palate is part of the adventure of travel, you'll have to do some searching.
For the most part, Costa Rica's food holds few surprises. Restaurants in San José generally serve a bland fare called "international cuisine," which is no recognized cuisine at all, but rather an assortment of standard North American and European dishes. Bistec (beef), pollo (chicken) and pescado (fish) are most often encountered on the menu, usually in forms that need little explanation. They're generally accompanied by rice and cabbage. You might as well call this Tico-style food, rather than Tico specialties.
Comida Típica
Genuine Costa Rican specialties are generally enjoyed at home, in a very rare city restaurant that advertises its comida típica (native food), in simple country eateries, and as snacks. One of the most common plates in the countryside is casado, fish, meat or chicken married ("casado") to rice, beans, and chopped cabbage. Gallo pinto, rice and beans with herbs and spices, is the staple of poor people's diets, usually served with tortillas, flat cakes made of ground, lime-soaked corn. But you don't have to be poor to enjoy the taste of black beans and tortillas, or of olla de carne (a stew of beef, yucca and plantain), chiles rellenos (stuffed peppers), maduros, or plátanos fritos (fried plantains), chilasquiles (meat-filled tortillas), pozol (corn soup), tamales (corn dough with a filling of meat, rice and raisins, steamed in a banana leaf, and served at holiday times) or tayuyas (tortillas stuffed with cheese or beans, a Guanacastecan regional specialty). You merely have to search these dishes out, if you're not part of a Costa Rican household. The Cocina de Leña is one San José restaurant that challenges the prejudice against eating Costa Rica's soul food in public.
Snacks
Traditional snack foods are easier to find. Vendors sell pan de yuca (yucca bread), gallos (tortillas with fillings), arreglados (bread filled with meat and vegetables), empanadas (stuffed pastry), and various other starchy items at markets, on trains, and at bus terminals. Other favorite snacks are tropical fruits (papayas, bananas, passionfruit, pineapple and many others) sold from carts everywhere in the country, and pipas, young juice coconuts, as well as the juice of fruits and sugarcane (agua dulce). Pejivalle, a pasty palm fruit, and palmito, heart of palm, are enjoyed as hor d'oeuvres or in salad. Cajeta, a heavy milk fudge, is served sometimes as dessert, as it is in other Latin countries. Hot sauces and peppers—chiles—are condiments to be added as desired, and are rarely included in a dish before serving.
Those odd fruits and vegetables
Some of Costa Rica's vegetables and fruits will be only sketchily familiar. Rice is served at almost all meals, but a common vegetable is chayote (chay-YO-teh), known as huisquil in Guatemala, batata in the Dominican Republic, chocho in Jamaica, christophee in other parts, and vegetable pear in the dictionary. It's terrific when baked with butter or mashed like a potato, but when just boiled and plopped in front of you it can be, as a reader complains, "horrible in taste and texture." Yuca (manioc, or yucca) sometimes draws similar reactions. Fruits can be more pleasing. Cas and granadilla, full of seeds, are used to flavor fruit ices, and in preserves. The delicious zapote (the same as the Mexican mamey), brown on the outside, with a large pit and blood-red flesh, may be consumed directly, as can large mangos, but not cashew fruit (marañón).
When in doubt about whether you can peel and eat an unfamiliar fruit, or whether you'll be stuck with a squishy, seedy, tart-tasting mess, buy your fruit from a sidewalk stall in San José, or at least take a good look at one, to see what's in season and what the locals do with it.
Many cuisines
Gourmet restaurants in San José and nearby cook tender meats to order and serve them in delicate sauces along with crisp vegetables. Chinese, German, French, Italian, Swiss and even the better "international" restaurants produce superb results with foods that are fresh and abundant throughout the year. At the less expensive eateries in San José, and in the countryside, culinary arts and sciences are, unfortunately, not widely diffused. What you'll find can most generously be described as home-style cooking—wholesome, reasonably priced, but not finely prepared—comparable to the fare at Joe's Diner. A bistec (steak) will generally be a tough, nondescript slab of meat, served with some of the grease in which it was cooked. The fate of fresh seafood is often similar. Vegetables, other than rice, beans and cabbage, when they are served, will have been in the pot for too long. None of this will do you any harm, especially when you pay only three to four dollars for your meal.
Not that you won't find some pleasant surprises. At one anonymous roadside eatery near Cañas, I had the most exquisite gallo pinto, seasoned with fresh coriander and a hint of garlic, accompanied by a thin bistec smothered with onions. There, as elsewhere, the presence of truckers was a good sign. And at a few coastal resorts, standards are as high as in San José. But generally, when you leave the capital, you should lower your expectations.
Fortunately, almost every small town in Costa Rica has a Chinese restaurant, if not two or three, where chao mein (chow mein), chop suey and more elaborate plates tease bored palates. These restaurants are not gourmet-class, but they work interesting and edible combinations from Costa Rica's fresh vegetables and meats.
The Dining Style
Service in Costa Rican restaurants is relaxed. You'll never be presented with a bill and ushered toward the cash register in order to make way for the next customer. The pleasures of lingering over nothing more than a pastry and a cup of coffee can still be enjoyed. If leisurely dining isn't what you have in mind, you'll have to call the waiter over to place your order, and to ask for the bill (la cuenta). A thirteen-percent tax and a ten-percent service charge will be added on. No additional tip is required.
For a basic menu vocabulary, see page 455.
Mmmm . . . ¡Café!
Costa Rica's excellent coffee, of course, is enjoyed with all meals, and is often prepared by pouring hot water through grounds held in a sock-like device. Costa Ricans claim all kinds of special properties for their brew—it won't keep you up at night, nor jangle your nerves, but will stimulate you to overall better functioning. This is only understandable chauvinism. Sometimes coffee is served with sugar already added—specify without (sin azúcar) if you prefer it that way. Café con leche (coffee with milk) is at least half milk. The concept of coffee with cream is understood only in hotels and restaurants that have a foreign clientele.
Whiskey and Eggs
Costa Rican eating and drinking habits in restaurants can be disorienting. As you have your morning coffee and bacon and eggs, the Tico to the left of you will be starting the day with a whiskey and a chicken sandwich. The Tico to the right of you will be cutting into a steak, accompanied by a beer. The Tico in front of you enjoys a rum and Coke while he ponders the menu. You are too polite (or dumbfounded) to turn to the Tico behind you.
I have no explanations for these customs, except to state that restaurant food is not necessarily derived from what is traditionally eaten at home. You were taught that eggs are eaten at breakfast. Maybe they were not. Explaining an affection for liquor is a touchy thing, but there is no doubt that Costa Ricans enjoy their booze in large quantities and at varied hours.
Hootch and Beer
Much of what is consumed is guaro, which can be roughly translated as "hootch." Guaro is the cheapest liquor, distilled from sugarcane, and sold in bars by the shot. Sugarcane is also the base for rums of various qualities and maturities, some of them quite good. Most guaros and rums are distilled by a government-owned company, but other companies make quite drinkable vodkas and gins. Local whiskeys and liqueurs are also available, but their quality is not as high. The exception is Café Rica, a coffee liqueur, which costs more than other Costa Rican drinks. Imported alcoholic drinks are quite expensive (with the exception of whiskey, which is only moderately expensive), so if you have a favorite brand, bring a bottle or two or three with you, or shop at the duty-free store in the airport before you pass through customs. Rum and Coke (Cuba Libre) is Costa Rica's most popular mixed drink.
Local fruit wines are interesting for amusement, but are not taken seriously by anyone who has enjoyed wine elsewhere. Imported wines are quite a luxury. Wine drinkers will have to fork out the money (a few duty-free bottles won't go very far), or else switch to another drink for the duration.
An excellent alternative to wine is beer. Pilsen is a superb brand of beer (in my opinion), and Tropical and Bavaria (rubia in local slang) are almost as good. There are various others, such as Imperial ("águila") to suit different tastes, including a local version of Heineken, that is a ringer for the real thing, but for the health warning—tomar licor es nocivo para la salud (drinking liquor endangers health)—which all alcoholic beverages must carry. The alcohol content is four percent.
Bars are generally the cheapest places to drink, and they serve a dividend: bocas. These are hor d'oeuvres that range from cheese and crackers to little sandwiches that, over enough rounds, will constitute a meal in themselves. In classier joints, you pay for the bocas.
The easiest place to buy liquor, beer or wine is at a supermarket. In small towns with no supermarkets, try the bars themselves or small general stores (pulperías), though the selection will be more limited. The deposit on a beer or soda bottle is usually as much as the price of what's inside.
Paul Glassman's Home Page Table of Contents
