GOURMET TRAVELLER The way to San José
Forget Costa Rica’s glitzy coastal restaurants and make a beeline for the energetic district of Escalante in the capital San José – a barrio that has been taken over by a new breed of chefs intent on using indigenous produce and reviving authentic recipes
Philip Sweeney digs in
Mention you’re going to Costa Rica and acquaintances who know the place rave about jungle bordered beaches, world-class surfing, zip wired rainforests, charming people and amazing wildlife. Add that you’re staying in the capital to sample restaurants, and the congratulations change to commiseration. Sleepy little San José features on most radars solely for arrival and departure, and certainly not as a gastro-destination. The few restaurant recommendations you hear involve newly fashionable beach resorts like Santa Teresa on the Pacific coast, now a magnet for upwardly mobile chefs.
A restaurant backwater is not how it feels to the residents of Escalante, a barrio of broad streets, gardens and middle-class houses less than a kilometre from San José’s centre, where a full-scale catering boom is reaching its climax. Ever more ambitious food outlets open every week and hordes of foodie locals and tourists roam the streets seeking them out. “Four years ago there were six restaurants in Escalante, now there’s over a hundred. Actually it’s getting too much, rents are rocketing, it’s getting hard to make a living,” says Luis Cisneros, owner of Rávi Gastropub, one of the most successful of the brand-new category of Costa Rican vegetarians.
A few blocks from Rávi, the latest contender is spared the rental problem. Isolina is named after the property’s original owner, matriarch of the Escalante family, coffee growers who gave their name in the 1870s to the district – then a swathe of coffee plantations dotted with houses. The family also provided the land for the Atlantic railway whose elderly diesels still chug past the doorways of the new gastro-businesses on their way south from the old Escalante station. The latest generation of the family recently converted half of the rambling 1940s villa, discovering under layers of wallpaper old photos, which now form part of the very swish decor. An Argentinian chef produces the sophisticated menu, typical of modern Costa Rica, composed of local ingredients and internationally fashionable combinations: Pork Belly with Pickled Pineapple and Grilled Okra, Ceviche of Sea Bass with Passion Fruit and Roasted Chilli Sauce, lots of smoking and fermentation.
If Isolina represents the new high end Escalante, another 1940s house near the historic Customs House theatre typifies the district’s more alternative side. Manos en la Masa – literally ‘hands in the dough,’ figuratively ‘caught red-handed’ – is the creation of Adriana Sánchez, a former linguistician and writer turned baker and cook. The series of panelled rooms she now rents once belonged to another high bourgeois family. “This road was all politicians and landowners up to the 1970s,” she says. In the ’80s and ’90s, the coffee plantations disappeared and the old families left, and the area fell victim to classic inner
urban decay. “Around 2006, a movement started to reclaim the city,” says Sánchez, serving me a slice of her famous tres leches cake, “mass cycling groups, dances in the squares, little cafes and bars…” Much of the new crop of Escalante catering followed Euro-American trends – craft beers, sourdough bakers etc. – but importantly also, the movement, very prevalent in Latin America, to rediscover lost or overlooked indigenous foods. “You must try Tomillo, Pablo Bonilla’s, and Santiago Fernández’ Silvestre is amazing,” she says.
But first it’s time to look at San José’s food scene prior to the Escalante revolution. I’m staying bang in the centre, a block from the sedate grey cathedral, the exuberantly gilded Teatro Nacional and the few 1940s and ’50s department stores and office blocks, which complete the architectural heritage. My billet, the Presidente, forms part of this; originally a boutique, before conversion by the proprietor into a hotel in 1963, named after the famous visit that year by President Kennedy, and now renovated quirkily into the newest and flashiest in town.
From the rooftop bar of Hotel Presidente, Costa Rican mojito in hand – local guaro cane spirit replaces the rum – you can look out over a patchwork of corrugated rooftops up the green valley slopes towards the hills, from where the rain clouds roll down every afternoon. A dozen streets away, the murky hangar-like interior of the big central market complex contains all the food products of the country. In short, the corn, pumpkins, tubers, fish and fowl of the indigenous tribal inhabitants; the milk and cheese, beef, breads and rices of the Spanish; Afro-Caribbean touches from the Atlantic coast; and of course a huge variety of fruit, not least the bananas, which along with coffee, became Costa Rican emblems
under the production of the multinational Del Monte, bete noire of the ecologically correct new foodies of Escalante.
The market also contains dozens of examples of the ‘soda,’ the traditional cheap popular eating place of Costa Rica. Run by teams of labouring women in flowery aprons manipulating great steaming cauldrons and frying pans, the sodas’ little formica tables and bar counters provide big bowls of gallo pinto (rice and beans), olla de carne (a pot au feu style stew), ceviche, sometimes flavoured with coconut, and the ubiquitous casado, a composite dish of white rice, beans, fried plantain, salad, and some meat, maybe finely chopped and stewed as picadillo, or a fried egg. I head for the legendary Soda Tapia, a crowded little establishment, to scoff an excellent chifrijo, a layered bowl of beans, chicharron pork crackling, rice, fresh tomatoes and piquant chimichurri sauce.
Apart from the sodas, big cantina style popular bars also serve food. A handwritten notice on the counter of one announces ‘Hay huevos de tortuga’: turtle eggs, broken into a glass, topped with spicy tomato sauce and swallowed raw. In some of the bars, musicians entertain, elderly coastal marimba xylophone combos, or the Mexican mariachis who congregate in their silver embroidered charro costumes by Calle 9 waiting to be hired for a party.
“In some of the bars, musicians entertain, elderly coastal marimba xylophone combos, or the Mexican mariachis who congregate in their silver embroidered charro costumes waiting to be hired for a party.”
Though San José excels in rough drinking dives, it’s not a place of elegant cafe terraces. The nearest to a classic cafe is found within the newly renovated Grand Hotel, or amid the dark wood and marble interior of the buffet of the Teatro Nacional. Opposite the central post office, one of the city’s few monumental buildings, the Club Union is probably the last culinary outpost of conservative old money, with a separate glass kiosk cafe open to non-members.
In recent years, the old central municipal markets have acquired rivals. The huge and numerous US style shopping centres obviously, and also the alternative middle-class organic markets with their attendant clothes and jewellery vendors, yoga and massage stalls. In a grove of tall, flamboyant trees by Escalante, the Saturday Feria Verde market is a pleasant place to try artisan Turrialba, Palmito or Bagaces cheeses from the Valle Central, or odd finds like artisan smoked trout made by a retired German engineer. The best places of all though for quality, variety and teeming picturesque vitality, are the farmers’ markets. I spend an enjoyable Saturday morning at Zapote market, beside the Plaza de Toros (Costa Rican corridas nowadays don’t kill the bulls incidentally, as befits a country famous for the abolition of its army). There are rows of butchers, bakers, and fruit and veg sellers, but also terrific and genuine street food: lines of juice squeezers working flat out, griddlers and
fryers of gallos, bocas, pupusas, chalupas and all the other varieties of stuffed, topped or smothered flatbread, or of tacos chinos, the Creole spring rolls of Costa Rica’s Chinese community.
While many chefs enthusiastically patronise the farmers’ markets, some go further and grow their own. We drive out with a dynamic young Escalante entrepreneur named José González to his small farm in a valley on the edge of the city. Fields of vegetables, rows of greenhouses, groves of trees, all tended by a resident family, Nicaraguans, like many of Costa Rica’s agricultural workers. González, son of a Del Monte agronomist and once personal cook to a rich American in southwestern France, jumps from plot to plot, uprooting, sniffing, tasting, extolling the virtues of fine local produce simply cooked, in free flow exclamation commentary: ‘Wow, it’s so good man!’ should be the name of his restaurant, rather than Al Mercat. It is here that José proceeds to rustle up a delicious lunch, which completely supports his principles: gallo tacos with chunks of succulent avocado, chicken, chorizo-like Toulouse sausage, chicharron, corn cobs, ayote, wonderful avocado, all barred with dark griddle marks and enhanced with fresh piquant sauces.
The following day, it’s into deep ethno-gastronomy at Tomillo, a small pavement counter and shopfront cafe in a community cultural centre at the outer edge of Escalante, just within sight of the cream spire of Santa Teresita church. Pablo Bonilla, chef proprietor, tattoo of the Boruca god Sibú on bicep, talks of his mentor, Costa Rica’s pioneering indigenous food researcher Leila Garro and his own years studying remote communities. I hear of the ancient renown of Costa Rican foodstuffs – the Aztec emperor Montezuma used to import cacao from Talamanca in the 16th century – and the suppression of indigenous food practices by the Catholic Church, illustrated heartrendingly by the story of the green bread: taught by visiting priests that their native
bread was only fit for pigs, a jungle community sent members to trek for days to buy white bread to store ready for the next unpredictable priestly visit and, when it happened, proudly ate the white bread, now green with mould, to demonstrate their civilisation.
Pablo serves us Corn Gallos with Smoked Chicken, Corvina Fish in Pejibaye, a ceremonial dessert of plantain paste and a glass of pejibaye juice, which is so worthy I’m tempted to ask maliciously for a slosh of Pepsi and a little parasol in it. But I can only admire Pablo’s dedication, and sympathise when he points to the big new hamburger outlet just opened: “They can sell 5,000 burgers when there’s a street party in the barrio. Do you know how many dishes Dona Leila sold when she set up an indigenous food stall? One.”
Like many pioneers however, Leila Garro’s work has not been in vain. A new generation of polished caterers is emerging to carry on the now fashionable field of culinary ethnology. It’s time for dinner at Silvestre. With his first restaurant in the north already winning awards, Santiago Fernández’ new venture occupies a former wealthy home in Amón, a barrio adjacent to Escalante and next on the gentrification list. Fernández devours cookbooks, spends his weekends visiting indigenous communities with ethno-botanists, and turns out tasting menus of remarkable inventiveness and eclecticism. His current offering is a tour of Costa Rica in eight playful dishes, from the lamb reared on volcanic ash soil of Cartago Province with an aligot of Cartago potatoes and cheese, to a haute cuisine rendering of a Caribbean coast Churchill ice cone.
It’s no surprise that Fernández organises visits by high profile European chefs and follows keenly the careers of the culinary stars of Peru, Brazil and Mexico. If anyone’s going to take Costa Rica into this global coterie of glitzy events, expensive PR agencies, rich sponsors and publicity hungry governments, it’s Santiago Fernández. I reckon I may have got to sleepy little San José in the nick of time.
“Pablo serves us Corn Gallos with Smoked Chicken, Corvina Fish in Pejibaye, a ceremonial dessert of plantain paste and a glass of pejibaye juice, which is so worthy I’m tempted to ask maliciously for a slosh of Pepsi and a little parasol in it.”
Philip Sweeney and Ulf Svane travelled to Costa Rica courtesy the Costa Rica Tourism Board