Food guide
Eating in Costa Rica: Sodas, Casados and Two Coasts
Visitors who eat exclusively in restaurants aimed at visitors come home saying Costa Rican food is bland and expensive. Both halves of that are true of those restaurants and neither is true of the country. The national cuisine is genuinely modest — mild, unshowy, built on rice, beans and whatever is fresh — and it is served properly in an institution most tourists walk past: the soda, a small family-run diner with a short menu, a fixed-price plate and a queue of locals at lunchtime.
Updated 2026-08-15
The soda and the casado
A soda is a small, plain, family-run eating place, usually with a handful of tables, a counter and a menu written on a board. It is where most Costa Ricans eat lunch, and the thing to order is the casado — literally the married man, meaning the plate that comes with everything on it. Rice, black beans, a salad of shredded cabbage and tomato, fried sweet plantain, sometimes a slice of fresh cheese or a fried egg, and a protein of your choosing: chicken, fish, pork or beef. It arrives together on one plate, it is cooked to order, and it costs a fraction of what a comparable meal costs three hundred metres away on a tourist street.
The casado is the single most useful thing to know about eating here. It is balanced, it is quick, it is available everywhere including in the smallest towns, and the quality is generally reliable in a way that varies far less than the restaurants above it. If you eat one most days you will eat well and cheaply for a whole trip.
Breakfast has its own name and its own plate: gallo pinto, rice and black beans fried together with onion, pepper and coriander until the rice takes on the beans' colour, served with egg, plantain and sour cream. Costa Ricans eat it every morning and are quietly competitive with Nicaraguans about who invented it. It is the other dish to try in a soda rather than a hotel buffet, where it is usually a pale imitation.
What the cuisine is and is not
Being straightforward about this saves disappointment: Costa Rican cooking is not spicy. There is no chilli tradition to speak of, and the bottle of salsa lizano on every soda table — a mild, tangy, slightly sweet brown sauce — is as hot as the national palate goes. Visitors arriving from Mexico or Southeast Asia expecting heat find the food gentle, and if they were sold it as vibrant they feel let down.
What it is good at is freshness and technique in a narrow range. The rice-and-bean cooking is done properly and daily. The fruit is exceptional and cheap — pineapple, papaya, mango, and a long list of things with no English name that are worth trying at a market on trust. The fruit drinks made with them, called refrescos and blended with water or milk to order, are one of the genuine pleasures of the country. Seafood on both coasts is fresh and simply handled, ceviche in particular. And the beef and dairy from the highland farms are good.
The honest summary is that Costa Rica is a country to eat simply and well in rather than a destination for its cooking, and it does not pretend otherwise. Once that expectation is set correctly, the food is a pleasure rather than a letdown.
The Caribbean side is a different kitchen
Then the exception. The Caribbean coast around the province of Limón cooks nothing like the rest of the country, because the community that shaped it came from Jamaica and the wider Antilles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought its own food with it. Coconut milk goes into everything, Scotch bonnet appears, and the results are the most flavourful cooking in Costa Rica by a distance.
The dish to find is rice and beans — the same words as the mainland staple and a completely different thing, cooked in coconut milk with thyme and a whole chilli left in for perfume rather than heat. Alongside it, rondón, a slow coconut stew of fish or meat with root vegetables, named from a corruption of run down. Patí, a spiced meat pastry. Pan bon, a dark sweet bread. And genuine cocoa: the coast grows it, small producers process it, and a farm visit here is one of the better half-days on that side of the country.
The people and the history behind this kitchen belong to the Limón province guide rather than to a food page. What matters here is simply that a visitor who eats only on the Pacific side has not tasted the country's best cooking, and that it is a four-hour drive away.
Coffee, and how to drink it here
Costa Rica grows serious arabica on the volcanic slopes of the central highlands, and the industry is old, organised and export-oriented — for a long time the best beans left the country and what stayed behind was second grade. That has changed substantially, and good coffee is now easy to find in the growing regions and the cities, though a rural soda will still serve you something ordinary and sweeten it heavily.
The traditional method is worth seeking out: the chorreador, a cloth sock suspended on a wooden stand, through which hot water is poured slowly. It makes a clean, unhurried cup and it is still in daily use in homes and older places. Farm tours in the highland coffee districts run the full chain from picking through wet-milling to roasting and cupping, and unlike some agricultural tourism they are genuinely informative because the processing is complicated and the growers are proud of it.
Beyond coffee, the everyday drinks are the fruit refrescos, agua de sapo with ginger and raw sugar on the Caribbean coast, and horchata. Local beer is unremarkable and cold; the craft scene in the central valley is better than it was. Tap water is safe to drink across most of the country, which is unusual in the region and worth knowing — the practical exceptions are covered in the health and safety guide.