Lars, when are you going? DH and I are planning a 30th wedding anniversary trip and I just told my travel agent and BFF we are interested in Costa Rica! We are not big travelers so this will be a trip of a lifetime for us if that is where we end up going.

I will be interested in hearing about the food!

We going in early March, at the peak of the dry season. Easter and Semana Santa are the worst times to go, and Spring Break is also crowded there. We'll be going before that. We're not going for the food, although I expect to find good seafood in the beach areas. The last time I was in Oaxaca, it reminded me of Santa Fe NM, and so I'm wondering if it will be like that in Costa Rica as well. When I was in Guatemala and Belize, it was very low end, and those are the only two places I've been in Central America. If the food is like the Yucatan in Mexico, I will be very happy, as that is my favorite place in Mexico for food. I'm not sure how much of a Mayan influence there is in CR, and I'm pretty sure they do not have the Lebanese population that Yucatan has. Guatemala City had decent Chinese food when I was there.

I checked Tripadvisor.com for restaurant reviews, and I think the reviews there may help me choose where I want to go. I want to see waterfalls, especially ones where I can swim like we did on Maui.

How did you find a travel agent? There do not seem to be any left in my neighborhood.

Lars

Here is a link that might be useful: Costa Rica Restaurants

My best friend since high school has been a travel agent since graduating college. She is the only person I know who always knew exactly what she wanted to do as a career. Hearing from her, the travel business has really changed over the years but a good travel agent will always have customers and she is very busy.

We had hoped to go this fall on our trip but that seems to be the rainy season.

Having never been anywhere in that part of the world I will be leary of the food. I think I would be afraid to buy food from a street vendor.

Can't wait to hear about your trip and what other post about the food.

Costa Rica is not Paris, Italy or China. If food is your main reason for going, you may be disappointed. Beans for breakfast, beans for lunch, and beans for dinner.

Coffee beans? fantastic!

It has been a while since I was there, the food scene may have changed. Plus I was there for an environmental trip into the rain forest, I was not really looking for good places to eat.

A couple of years after my trip, I read on National Geographic, one tiny colorful endangered frog I saw with the group in the forest, went extinct.

dcarch

Ashley went there for 10 days in 2006, I think, it was the year she graduated high school and she went there with her Spanish club.

She did visit a coffee plantation and said it was the best coffee she'd ever had, but she didn't bring any back with her. She did eat street food, including some arroz con pollo which she took a picture of, so I think the food may be similar to that in parts of Mexico. She also ate guanabana, said it was the best thing she'd ever had.

She also brought home a lovely little cutting board made of various tropical woods, I understand Costa Rica is known for their handmade wood products, if you feel like shopping.

Have fun!

Annie

I haven't been to Costa Rica since 1980, so it may be different now. It wasn't a self driving trip; everything was set up for us. In San Jose for day #1, the traffic was very congested. The drivers were courteous by allowing gaps for cross traffic to drive, but the routes would be over sidewalks and median strips. lol Great fun, but I was happy to have a local driver! :D

The meals included a lot of fruit and vegetable options. Beans and rice were common sides, but at Montverde the side selections and condiments placed on the table were incredibly varied with even the lunch meals. Hearts of palm were recommended to me, but the restaurant was apparently out when I tried to order them (a bit of a language barrier that day left the problem unclear). Beef and pork are probably more often the main, but I remember requesting grilled chicken many times. It was delicious! Simple boneless chicken breasts, grilled---but so moist and flavorful at every destination. Sorry I cannot help with the stores and venders; our trip was rather whirlwind and structured. (And, best of all, free!)

The trip was such fun; we have always wanted to return. For such a scheduled trip, there were more than a few rather interesting and wild adventures along the way. Everyone was wonderful though (A large group of extremely drunk, young American business partiers excepted. Oh, and the family of vacationers that nail-bitingly pushed the load max of the little airplane with bags waaay over the 35lb/each limit.).

Have a wonderful time! Hope you will share your dining experiences when you return.

Costa Rica is called the Switzerland of Central America. It's as safe and sane there as are its neighbors to the north dangerous and wild.

You can drink the water. Food from roadside stands and small little restaurants is safe. Driving is mostly calm and polite, roads are pretty good. People are nice, education standards are high compared to the neighborhood and English is widely spoken. Restaurants in tourist areas serve food tourists look for, you won't have a problem finding choices you'll enjoy.

During our 10 day visit there, we enjoyed many meals of local food. They eat their share of plantains, beans, etc. Beef was ok, pork and chicken were better, and the seafood we had was really excellent. Food in restaurants was pretty consistently good or better, we experienced no major disappointments.

Have a great trip.

It's been a long time since we were there, and all I really remember is rice and black beans (gallo pinto) at every meal. They have a different flavor than anything you might expect...not cajun or mexican...cumin? ginger? I don't think I ever knew as it wasn't up my alley....but it was decent, if odd to my way of doing things, though certainly healthier than a lot of other american breakfasts.

The coffee is very good.

We spent three days in Costa Rica as a part of a month-long cruise on the Semester-at-Sea ship in 2011. We stayed on the Atlantic side of the country, since that was where our ship was docked.

In my experience the meals tended to be quite good, but fairly similar: with [fill in the blank meat] plus fried plantains, plus either rice and beans or rice-and-beans, plus a non-descript bland salad.

{{gwi:2134205}}

{{gwi:2134206}}

Plus ubiquitous, plentiful, delicious fresh fruit.

The country felt friendly and welcoming, and felt safe enough that on one day rather than go on one of the ship-organized trips I arranged a trip with a local tour operator. On another day while returning from a horse-back riding trip in the rain forest, we got off the ship-arranged bus, and visited a sloth sanctuary, and planned to catch a local bus back to the ship (and instead actually got a ride from a local)

I created a blog for the trip, largely to help preserve my memories of the trip. These are the blog entries from our three days in Costa Rica:

Day 1 in Costa Rica

Day 2 in Costa Rica

Day 3 in Costa Rica

Thanks for all the info! We will have to do some additional planning before we leave - I will definitely read the blogs.

Annie, I remember when Ashley went to CR - I probably will look for some wooden items to buy. I already have a large woven shopping bag that friend from Costa Rica gave me, but I do not expect to find the shopping as interesting as Guatemala or Mexico, which have more folk art. I also like Guanabana - especially the juice and the ice cream. I have a similar tree, Cherimoya, which is just now having ripe fruit. I actually like the Cherimoya better than Guanabana, but the flavor is similar. Cherimoya is sweeter.

So far, the best coffee I've had was on Maui and in Antigua, Guatemala, but what I had in Cordoba, Mexico was also very good. It's always better where they actually grow it, and so I will be having some coffee there, even though I do not normally drink it.

It looks like the meals will be like what I had in Guatemala and Belize, although in Belize there was a Caribbean Creole flair. Someone told me that Costa Rican food is similar to Cuban, and I've been to quite a few Cuban restaurants here. Kevin doesn't like them as much as I do, but they do tend to serve black beans and rice with every meal. There is a lot more variety to Mexican food, which varies greatly from region to region. I understand that the population in CR is mostly of European descent (except on the Caribbean coast), and so that may make the food a bit more bland. As I said before, I'm not going for the food, but I do have to eat while I'm there. I will definitely shop for unusual fruit and see what I find.

Now I'm wondering what they put in their black beans!

Lars

The first above pictured meal was in a restaurant in the small seaside town of Cahuita, the restaurant was nothing much to look at, but the meal was perhaps the second best of our entire month-long trip.

Exterior of the Restaurant:
{{gwi:2134207}}

The restaurant doesn't appear in the trip advisor sub-list for the Cahuita area at the link you posted. It does seem to be listed at this lonely planet site: Lonely Planet Restaurant Description

As you are researching you are sure to find information is incomplete, or maybe just wrong. The private tour operation in Cahuita that we used, Willie's Costa Rican Tours, I found based on an online travel guide, which described how the business was owned and run by Willie, a gruff but friendly German expatriate. I set up the snorkel trip and guided national park hike via email. Upon arriving I was met by Jorge, who introduced himself as our guide but also the owner of the business, which he had bought from Willie five years earlier.

Jorge was affable, knowledgeable, anxious to please, and honest. He brought us to the above pictured restaurant, saying that it was one of the best restaurants in town, and described the history of the chef/owner Walter, but also admitted that if he brought a group there Walter would comp his meal.

We won't be going to the Atlantic Coast, as we have selected an 8-day driving trip to the NW with a stop at a Pacific beach. We will go by the Volcano and stop at the Wildlife Park, probably a couple of days there.

It looks like we will have good restaurant options in San Jose, although I'm really not expecting much. I will definitely stop at fruit stands, if I see any on the way.

Have fun, and travel carefully, I'll be watching for all your reports and photos when you get back!

Annie

Have a great trip. When I was researching for our trip, I read frequent warnings of a flat tire scam, where disreputable locals would cause you to get a flat tire, and then direct you to their nearby tire shop for an expensive replacement. I don't know whether these warnings are well-founded, or if so how common the problem might be. Since the warnings seemed to focus on the San Jose area, and we weren't going there and weren't planning on driving in any case, I didn't look into it further.

Also everything I read said that if you could only choose one side to visit, go to the western coast.

We have been to Costa Rica numerous times. It's our favorite place. It is true that San Jose has a higher crime rate than other parts of Costa Rica. That said, my daughter spent her semester abroad in CR and lived in San Jose. No problems.

Yes, there is always rice and beans, but we had many wonderful meals of steak and seafood.

We usually stay in two or three different areas during our stay and we hire a driver. At our hotels, we use cabs when needed.

Hotels give good recommendations for restaurants, then you can double check them for reviews.

The Pacific side is the most popular. The Caribbean side is more true and has more locals. Our favorite excursion there was visiting an indigenous chocolate farm. We opted for lunch there and it was served in a banana leaf bowl and we used bananas placed on the floor as holding trays.

I know you are driving, but one of the interesting ways of seeing CR is to use their many ways of transportation. Their are local small planes, water taxis and ferries.

Sounds like you had a great trip.

You had good food and not so good coffee, opposite of my trip to Costa Rico,

dcarch