Food experience in Costa Rica

The highlight of our Costa Rican food experience was really the freshness and tastiness of the fruits that seemed to be abundant everywhere we went.  The last time I had a mango as sweet was in Vietnam, and it was not nearly as big as this one, which we bought from a fruit stand on the way back to San Jose from the Pacific coast.  It's not so much just the sweetness as the fragrance of the mango that penetrated the senses and left an indelible stamp on my mental palette.

We also tried something we haven't had before - the camito, or star apple, as you can see from the image below.  It's sweet although the texture is more persimmon than apple.

Our first meal was in downtown San Jose, in a 100 year house turned into a cafe restaurant called Chelles. It was recommended as a local food place by the hotel front desk staff and it was within walking distance.  We got our dinner in spite of language barriers and it was a really good deal, our plates heaped with food enough for two meals.  It was plain grilled beef and chicken with fries and a salad plus the wait staff put a bottle of what looked like pickled chopped vegetables in front of us.  We subsequently found out from our guide that this kind of chopped vegetables is very common in Costa Rica.  Since it was our first day in the country, we didn't eat anything uncooked - very good advice that we had learned from our guide in Peru several years ago.  We have to let our system get used to the local water before we start eating raw vegetables - makes perfect sense to me.

Pickled chopped vegetables

We stopped for lunch in a small town on the way to Arenal.  We followed our guide to a "soda", a typical Costa Rican eatery where they serve "casado", a set lunch Costa Rican style.  I ordered a highly recommended "Olle de Carne" - a beef stew with cassava yams, taro, squash and rice (they only had two left!).  I was so hungry I forgot to take a picture before the meal.  But it was delicious!

Seafood was excellent everywhere we went, not surprising given that the country has access to both the Pacific and the Caribbean.  I had "sea bass" many times in the eleven days that I was in the country and it was certainly not the same kind we had in North America or Europe.  I suspect from the thickness of the cut that it is Chilean sea bass - and not at the exorbitant price that we would have been charged had we been in North America.

"Sea bass"

At our last stop in Manuel Antonio, we had a taste of tapas at Lush Tapas & Lounge recommended by our guide.  We sipped our drinks in the open air restaurant atop the hill overlooking the Pacific as everything around us caught the glow from the sunset - what a great way to end our trip.

Chicken and mango tapas/mini tenderloin in red wine with roasted tomatoes