food in panama picture post
Arriving in Panama i really had no idea what to expect from the food. I didn't know anything about the country except for what i learned from the Pirate History Podcast and the Panama Papers investigation. I bought a ticket on a whim, and arrived in slightly sketchy corner of Panama City just after sunset. The first restaurant i visited was the one directly opposite my hotel.
The restaurant turned out to be a Colombian restaurant, and this bowl of soup was part of the $5 dinner special. It was some kind of chicken soup with yuca/cassava inside it, and a few other things. The chicken floating in the soup was a neck bone, i think - not very easy to get the meat off with a spoon. I'm not even sure if i was supposed to. It tasted fine, i suppose, but i pretty much hate chicken soup (and all soup) so i'm not the best judge. The best part was the yuca.
The main dish arrived, and it was much more familiar to me. Rice and beans - hooray! And a "maduro" (ripe) fried plantain. Coleslaw, for some reason. And fucking chicken with another bone in it. I was already sick of getting bones, but this wouldn't be the last one i had to deal with. The pitiful amount of sauce on the chicken was bell pepper and tomato, i think. It wasn't spicy. It was just there. The best thing on the plate was the plantain. The second best thing was the rice and beans.
After wandering around on my first full day in Panama City, i tried to find a place that served something besides "hunk of meat with either rice or plantain on the side". This proved very difficult. I found myself ducking into a little Cantonese restaurant in Chinatown that had 叉燒 char siu pork hanging in the window. I walked in and to my delight the owner spoke Putonghua (Mandarin), so i was able to order a plate without struggling in Spanish. This was a serving of char siu with steam rice, plus 炒麵 chow mein (or what they would call 拌麵 mixed noodle in mainland China hole-in-the-walls) and a vegetable mix that unexpectedly included winter melon but sadly not Chinese brocolli, just the western kind. Even still, this is the best plate of Chinese food i have had since leaving China. The char siu was really flavorful. It was all very subtlely spiced because it was Cantonese style cooking, but it tasted like proper back alley Guangdong, not some upper crust Hong Kong dim sum place or the American or Canadian version of Chinese food. I was impressed.
In the evening i went to a local bar, where the menu was basically... well, the same as the menu almost everywhere i have been in Panama so far. Burger, steak, pork cutlet, fried chicken, fried fish, french fries, patacones and occasionally ceviche. That's it, the menu is just variations on those ingredients. I decided that because i haven't had a ceviche before, i should probably try one. And i got patacones, which - as i mentioned on my last Florida food post ( part 3) - is the Panama name for mooshed-up, deep-fried plantain. The ceviche was better than i thought it was going to be. It's much more filling than sashimi or those little poke bowls i had in Key West. I think it's because they use a heavier fish called corvina, and they give you a fairly generous serving considering how cheap of a dish it is. It's also nice that there is a ton of lime and cilantro in it, so it actually has some flavor, even though the flavor is largely sour/acid. Not bad.
When i got to Bocas del Toro i had a double-whammy of a problem. First problem was trying to find a restaurant that seemed like it actually made local food and not tourist food, which in Bocas basically means American and European favorites (pizza, pasta, tacos, burgers). Second problem was finding a Panamanian place that actually made something other than fried chicken and patacones. I utterly failed. This was my first and last attempt to try to eat vegan in Panama. It's fucking hopeless. Patacones. Made by a lady in a kiosk on the side of the road, who thought i was nuts for not getting at least a drumstick to go with them.
My first morning in Bocas, one of the backpacking volunteers prepared pancakes with some fruit for breakfast. There was no choice of breakfast, this was just what you got (or you could skip it and make your own). Pancakes aren't vegan. And American-style pancakes like these aren't very interesting flavor-wise either. They're very bland, and depend on the topping to make them worth eating. But then syrup is the default topping, which is about the most uninspiring thing you could put on an already-bland dish. Hooray. A single fucking pancake with syrup. At least i got a few scraps of papaya and banana. And that's when i realized i was on the goddamn Banana Pancake Trail, gringo edition.
Oh fuck Bocas del Toro. So fucking touristy. So fucking depressing. I hated it there. And the food was a significant part of that. I was desperate for something to eat on my first day, but i just couldn't find anything. So i gave up and got a pork cutlet with fried yuca, just to mix things up. I didn't want to turn into a giant patacone. At least they gave a little salad with this one. Best thing on this table was the ass-burningly good local hot sauce, thanks to the Jamaican influence on Panama's Caribbean coast. Second best thing was the Panama brand beer, which after trying several local beers i like the best.
Oh. Fuck this shit. Fuck Bocas del Toro. I went to a different restaurant and ordered their vegetarian plate. What's the vegetarian plate? It's the same fucking plate as the normal plate, just without any meat on it. So i got white rice, coleslaw and patacones. Fucking hell.
On my way out of Bocas, i saw something in a steamer. A goddamn pork bun. I think this might have been in the bus station in David. I had seen these before in various little convenience stores and kiosks around the place in Panama City. Cantonese-style 叉燒包 pork buns and 燒賣 shumai (dumplings) are Panamanian junk food, almost as ubiquitous as the local style of empanadas (which resemble Jamaican patties more than the empanadas you find in Argentinian restaurants in Canada and the US). I was very hungry after missing lunch, so i went for the sure-fire bet. Can you make a bad pork bun? No, of course you can't. Even if it's just a production line one, kept warm in those little counter-top heaters, it still tastes like a comforting hug, a half-forgotten memory of being a child again. This wasn't the greatest pork bun in the world. But it cheered me up.
After spending a lot of time walking around David trying to find a restaurant that seemed interesting, i decided to go into a gimmicky local joint that specialized in chicharrones. Americans might recognize that as the word for the crispy pork rind snacks you can buy in the potato chip aisle in Mexico-adjacent states. They might even know it as a taco topping served at the kinds of taquería that also serve lengua (tongue), tripa (chitlins) and other weird bits of animal. In Panama it's something more appetizing - crispy-cooked chunks of pork belly. I didn't want to go whole hog (ha) and get a massive plate of them, so i got patacones rellenos - fried plantain cups with the chicharonnes inside. Pico de gallo on top. This was actually incredibly delicious. Really nice balance of salty, fatty, acid. It's probably the best Panamanian thing i've eaten.
I'm going to show you another Ursack picture here, lest you think i have totally given up on ever trying to eat vegan. It's almost impossible to do at the restaurants and cafés here, but when i prepare my own food, it's still oats, water, banana. These are Panamanian oat flakes, and they behave a bit differently to American quick oats. They take on a sort of creamy consistency when you add water, almost like semolina or something. I think they must roll the oats down even smaller and flakier. Also in the porridge aisle here you will find oat flour and cornmeal and other floury/mealy-type things to make a creamier breakfast than what Scots-blooded folks would expect from a porridge. I might try one of the other grains at some point, if i can find one that i know doesn't require me to heat the water.
Something i have been enjoying for breakfast here is all the Christmas cakes. I am pretty sure they're Christmas cakes, at least. All the bakeries have their standard set of stuff, which is either fairly similar to the Cuban pastelitos i was eating all over Florida (flaky pastry with some fruit jam in it) or fairly similar to Chinese buns (milky bread with coconut or custard inside). But then they also have a separate section with heavier cakes that tend to have dried fruits and nuts in them, which i suspect is the seasonal fare. This is a slice of fruit cake, and it was yummy. I could immediately tell that i wasn't in Bocas del Toro any more, because i could get a decent cup of black coffee made in an espresso machine for 50 cents, and a fresh slice of cake for another 70 cents. Breakfast of champions.
There are a bunch of Chinese restaurants in Panama, but unfortunately most of them just make junk food. Chow mein. Fried rice. Spring rolls. In fact, a lot of cafeterias serve those things as an option alongside "slab of meat with patacones" and other local fare. I'm glad that Chinese food is so accessible, but it's sad that it's the most boring kind. But, in this case, i got the boring food, because it was from a "Taiwanese style" (according to the sign) vegetarian restaurant. They didn't have many - if any - of the dishes you can normally find at vegetarian restaurants in Taiwan... but fuck, who cares? It was vegetarian! I got chow mein, a Panama Chinese version of a spring roll (which appears to always be battered and fried), steamed broccoli and a 獅子頭 "lion head" meatball. I think it was a lion head meatball. I will call it that, because it reminded me a bit of that, despite not having the sauce. It was all junk food, but it felt glorious to be able to get a proper vegetarian meal, and all for the price of a coffee in Bocas too.
I also got a raspado (shaved ice) from a street vendor in David. (For Spanish speakers: it's pronounced - and sometimes written - "raspao" here, because Panamanians drop the "d" like Andalusians.) It was the kind where the guy has a big block of ice and literally shaves it off with a knife when you order. He had a bunch of different fruity mixtures to put on it, but i went with coconut. While i was eating this, a massive iguana about the length of my arm started coming toward me, then climbed up the tree right next to me, where - after looking up - i realized there was a smaller but still very large iguana sitting right over my head. That was a bit scary. I moved away and then spilled shaved ice on my pants. Goddamnit.
Oh man, here we go. I was originally planning to check out a place that did pepitos for my last night in David - that's a local sandwich similar to a torta, i think - but i got sidetracked when i saw a Mexican place that did tacos al pastor. Unfortunately, most "Mexican" places in Panama take their cue from American Tex-Mex cuisine, so they have "tacos" but it's hard shell tacos with ground beef in them, or a wheat wrap with shredded chicken and a bunch of salad that should not be put into a taco. "Gringo tacos", as one Mexican restaurant i visited in the US put it. But then this place looked like it might be the real deal, and it was. These tacos cost a fortune - $15 for three - but it was worth it. The meat was turning on a spit out back. The al pastor actually came with pineapple, like it does in Mexico. The tortillas, i'm not 100% sure but it seemed like they had been hand-made. Onions, cilantro, and these weird orange-fleshed "limes" that appear to be in season here at the moment. And the hot sauce, man, it was good, spicy hot sauce. These were some solid tacos. Put a huge smile on my face.
Oh, hello, here is another Christmas cake. This is some kind of orange peel sponge thing with almonds on it. I wish i knew the names of these cakes. They are yummy. Merry Christmas. It's weird seeing Christmas trees everywhere when it's over 30 degrees (85F) every day. It's weirder hearing well-known Christmas songs translated to Spanish. But i don't care because the cakes are good. Thank you, Jesus.
Just as a point of comparison with Bocas, here are the pancakes i got at the B&B-ish hostel in Las Lajas. I'm still not a pancake fan, but these were pretty good pancakes. You could really taste the butter that they were presumably fried in, which made them feel more gluttonous than your average, boring, non-stick pan version of an American pancake. The other fantastic thing here was getting a whole banana's worth of banana, and a bunch of papaya and pineapple too. Not pictured - homemade jam. And a fantastic view. Pancakes probably do taste better when they are served to you in B&B style.
Las Lajas was a real village in the middle of nowhere. They had a pizza place, i think, and the place i went for dinner, which seemed to just be a guy with a BBQ cooking whatever meat you wanted, or burger and fries. I learned a new Spanish phrase here - "lo que sea", which was the name of this dish. It means "whatever". And that's what this dish was - a mix of everything they had in all the other dishes, on one plate. So: steak, chicken and chorizo, all cooked on the BBQ with some onions and bell pepper. Both french fries and patacones. Ketchup and mayonnaise. I spent a bunch of time talking to one of the guys who worked here, who seemed to want to practice his English. He suggested me several restaurants around Panama and good dishes to try, and he gave me a little cup of stonkingly good habanero hot sauce to dip my patacones in. It felt like i was sitting on the deck having a BBQ with my dad. Good eating. Simple. Tasty.
Here's the first time i had the famous Panamanian dish of "slab of meat with some rice and/or plantain on the side" where it tasted different from exactly what it sounds like. This was from a cafeteria in Aguadulce, their $5 lunch special. The pork cutlet was much more interesting than just a fried pork cutlet - it was glazed with some kind of pineapple sauce and then smoked, so it had a sweeter and smokier flavor. You can't tell because my phone is not very good at taking low-light photos, but the pork was red too, similar to char siu pork. Nice. The sides are potato salad, beans, rice and plantain. I think it was plantain. It might have been sweet potato. I couldn't quite place the flavor. Maybe it was a local kind of plátano maduro that was sweeter and more starchy than in other regions. Or maybe i just forgot what plantains tasted like when they aren't pataconed to within in an inch of their lives.
Okay, friends. I know you have been reading through all this going "man, food in Panama doesn't look all that great". Well here i present to you a ceviche that was like a fucking religious experience. The only other ceviche i had in my life - at the bar in Panama City a week earlier - was a bit like "yeah, it's alright, but i don't really get why food critics rave about raw fish with lime juice on it". This is why. Fucking, oh my God. This is a ceviche from a Peruvian restaurant in Aguadulce. It had red onions shaved on top. It had cilantro. It had soft hominy-like corn on the side. It had crispy half-puffed corn on top. This was like a fucking Michelin star ceviche preparation from a weird little restaurant on the edge of the Pan-American Highway in Nowheresville, Bumfuck Panama. It was so good. I can't even explain it. Ceviche is my new favorite. I will try it everywhere like tacos in Texas and compare it back to this one.
Also from the Peruvian restaurant, i got a preparation of potatoes with that famous yellow sauce that i forgot what the name of it is. I do remember from the previous (and first) time i ate Peruvian food in Wichita, Kansas, that this is a salsa made with cheese inside it, but it's not heavy like Tex-Mex queso sauce, it's sort of light and piquant, like you took the essence of cheese fondue, but somehow blended it with a pico de gallo. This is the second time in my life i have eaten Peruvian food, and by gods it's amazing. I never had the slightest interest in visiting Peru before, but now it might be nudging its way onto a bucket list destination for me. So good.
Just because i wanted to spoil myself, i got dessert as well. This is just a flan, same as flan anywhere. I also got a second bottle of expensive Peruvian beer that i didn't like the flavor near as much as the local cheap brand, and i tipped over 20%, which is a lot for Panama. Most expensive meal i've had here - by a long shot - but the cooks deserved every penny.
How could i follow that meal? I don't think anything would do it, but this Christmas cake was a pretty good effort. From a bakery in San Carlos, this is one of those dense cakes that probably has condensed milk in it to give it that springy, pudding-like texture. Can i just say fuck Bocas del Toro again, and their stupendously expensive (and shit) coffee? Because fuck that place.
Well, here i am, back in Panama City again, and it's Sunday, so half the places are closed. I took a walk toward one place that had pepitos on the menu, but there were a bunch of hookers and drug dealers on the two or three corners leading up to it, so i turned around to avoid getting myself into trouble and ended up at a "slab of meat with rice" cafeteria instead. I decided to get their tocino sandwich, hoping it would be something like a pork belly. But it wasn't, it was a BLT. Oh well. Fucking. Patacones. I am a pataconehead.
After the unexciting early dinner, i swung by the grocery store to pick up some fruit salad and popcorn for my hotel room feed. And that is what i am grazing on as i type this up. Tomorrow i will wander aimlessly around the city carrying two big bags while i wait to check in with my homestay, which will be part of my Spanish lessons over the next couple weeks.
I hope that i can find some more interesting food in the nooks and crannies of the city. So far my best experiences here have been in the smaller and less touristy country places that put a bit of their own spin on the fairly uninspiring staples ("slab of meat with patacones"). But also some of the "ethnic cuisines" have been pleasant surprises too, sometimes even better than the versions in the US or Canada. I think it'll take some digging to find the good stuff here, but i'll keep at it.
The restaurant turned out to be a Colombian restaurant, and this bowl of soup was part of the $5 dinner special. It was some kind of chicken soup with yuca/cassava inside it, and a few other things. The chicken floating in the soup was a neck bone, i think - not very easy to get the meat off with a spoon. I'm not even sure if i was supposed to. It tasted fine, i suppose, but i pretty much hate chicken soup (and all soup) so i'm not the best judge. The best part was the yuca.
The main dish arrived, and it was much more familiar to me. Rice and beans - hooray! And a "maduro" (ripe) fried plantain. Coleslaw, for some reason. And fucking chicken with another bone in it. I was already sick of getting bones, but this wouldn't be the last one i had to deal with. The pitiful amount of sauce on the chicken was bell pepper and tomato, i think. It wasn't spicy. It was just there. The best thing on the plate was the plantain. The second best thing was the rice and beans.
After wandering around on my first full day in Panama City, i tried to find a place that served something besides "hunk of meat with either rice or plantain on the side". This proved very difficult. I found myself ducking into a little Cantonese restaurant in Chinatown that had 叉燒 char siu pork hanging in the window. I walked in and to my delight the owner spoke Putonghua (Mandarin), so i was able to order a plate without struggling in Spanish. This was a serving of char siu with steam rice, plus 炒麵 chow mein (or what they would call 拌麵 mixed noodle in mainland China hole-in-the-walls) and a vegetable mix that unexpectedly included winter melon but sadly not Chinese brocolli, just the western kind. Even still, this is the best plate of Chinese food i have had since leaving China. The char siu was really flavorful. It was all very subtlely spiced because it was Cantonese style cooking, but it tasted like proper back alley Guangdong, not some upper crust Hong Kong dim sum place or the American or Canadian version of Chinese food. I was impressed.
In the evening i went to a local bar, where the menu was basically... well, the same as the menu almost everywhere i have been in Panama so far. Burger, steak, pork cutlet, fried chicken, fried fish, french fries, patacones and occasionally ceviche. That's it, the menu is just variations on those ingredients. I decided that because i haven't had a ceviche before, i should probably try one. And i got patacones, which - as i mentioned on my last Florida food post ( part 3) - is the Panama name for mooshed-up, deep-fried plantain. The ceviche was better than i thought it was going to be. It's much more filling than sashimi or those little poke bowls i had in Key West. I think it's because they use a heavier fish called corvina, and they give you a fairly generous serving considering how cheap of a dish it is. It's also nice that there is a ton of lime and cilantro in it, so it actually has some flavor, even though the flavor is largely sour/acid. Not bad.
When i got to Bocas del Toro i had a double-whammy of a problem. First problem was trying to find a restaurant that seemed like it actually made local food and not tourist food, which in Bocas basically means American and European favorites (pizza, pasta, tacos, burgers). Second problem was finding a Panamanian place that actually made something other than fried chicken and patacones. I utterly failed. This was my first and last attempt to try to eat vegan in Panama. It's fucking hopeless. Patacones. Made by a lady in a kiosk on the side of the road, who thought i was nuts for not getting at least a drumstick to go with them.
My first morning in Bocas, one of the backpacking volunteers prepared pancakes with some fruit for breakfast. There was no choice of breakfast, this was just what you got (or you could skip it and make your own). Pancakes aren't vegan. And American-style pancakes like these aren't very interesting flavor-wise either. They're very bland, and depend on the topping to make them worth eating. But then syrup is the default topping, which is about the most uninspiring thing you could put on an already-bland dish. Hooray. A single fucking pancake with syrup. At least i got a few scraps of papaya and banana. And that's when i realized i was on the goddamn Banana Pancake Trail, gringo edition.
Oh fuck Bocas del Toro. So fucking touristy. So fucking depressing. I hated it there. And the food was a significant part of that. I was desperate for something to eat on my first day, but i just couldn't find anything. So i gave up and got a pork cutlet with fried yuca, just to mix things up. I didn't want to turn into a giant patacone. At least they gave a little salad with this one. Best thing on this table was the ass-burningly good local hot sauce, thanks to the Jamaican influence on Panama's Caribbean coast. Second best thing was the Panama brand beer, which after trying several local beers i like the best.
Oh. Fuck this shit. Fuck Bocas del Toro. I went to a different restaurant and ordered their vegetarian plate. What's the vegetarian plate? It's the same fucking plate as the normal plate, just without any meat on it. So i got white rice, coleslaw and patacones. Fucking hell.
On my way out of Bocas, i saw something in a steamer. A goddamn pork bun. I think this might have been in the bus station in David. I had seen these before in various little convenience stores and kiosks around the place in Panama City. Cantonese-style 叉燒包 pork buns and 燒賣 shumai (dumplings) are Panamanian junk food, almost as ubiquitous as the local style of empanadas (which resemble Jamaican patties more than the empanadas you find in Argentinian restaurants in Canada and the US). I was very hungry after missing lunch, so i went for the sure-fire bet. Can you make a bad pork bun? No, of course you can't. Even if it's just a production line one, kept warm in those little counter-top heaters, it still tastes like a comforting hug, a half-forgotten memory of being a child again. This wasn't the greatest pork bun in the world. But it cheered me up.
After spending a lot of time walking around David trying to find a restaurant that seemed interesting, i decided to go into a gimmicky local joint that specialized in chicharrones. Americans might recognize that as the word for the crispy pork rind snacks you can buy in the potato chip aisle in Mexico-adjacent states. They might even know it as a taco topping served at the kinds of taquería that also serve lengua (tongue), tripa (chitlins) and other weird bits of animal. In Panama it's something more appetizing - crispy-cooked chunks of pork belly. I didn't want to go whole hog (ha) and get a massive plate of them, so i got patacones rellenos - fried plantain cups with the chicharonnes inside. Pico de gallo on top. This was actually incredibly delicious. Really nice balance of salty, fatty, acid. It's probably the best Panamanian thing i've eaten.
I'm going to show you another Ursack picture here, lest you think i have totally given up on ever trying to eat vegan. It's almost impossible to do at the restaurants and cafés here, but when i prepare my own food, it's still oats, water, banana. These are Panamanian oat flakes, and they behave a bit differently to American quick oats. They take on a sort of creamy consistency when you add water, almost like semolina or something. I think they must roll the oats down even smaller and flakier. Also in the porridge aisle here you will find oat flour and cornmeal and other floury/mealy-type things to make a creamier breakfast than what Scots-blooded folks would expect from a porridge. I might try one of the other grains at some point, if i can find one that i know doesn't require me to heat the water.
Something i have been enjoying for breakfast here is all the Christmas cakes. I am pretty sure they're Christmas cakes, at least. All the bakeries have their standard set of stuff, which is either fairly similar to the Cuban pastelitos i was eating all over Florida (flaky pastry with some fruit jam in it) or fairly similar to Chinese buns (milky bread with coconut or custard inside). But then they also have a separate section with heavier cakes that tend to have dried fruits and nuts in them, which i suspect is the seasonal fare. This is a slice of fruit cake, and it was yummy. I could immediately tell that i wasn't in Bocas del Toro any more, because i could get a decent cup of black coffee made in an espresso machine for 50 cents, and a fresh slice of cake for another 70 cents. Breakfast of champions.
There are a bunch of Chinese restaurants in Panama, but unfortunately most of them just make junk food. Chow mein. Fried rice. Spring rolls. In fact, a lot of cafeterias serve those things as an option alongside "slab of meat with patacones" and other local fare. I'm glad that Chinese food is so accessible, but it's sad that it's the most boring kind. But, in this case, i got the boring food, because it was from a "Taiwanese style" (according to the sign) vegetarian restaurant. They didn't have many - if any - of the dishes you can normally find at vegetarian restaurants in Taiwan... but fuck, who cares? It was vegetarian! I got chow mein, a Panama Chinese version of a spring roll (which appears to always be battered and fried), steamed broccoli and a 獅子頭 "lion head" meatball. I think it was a lion head meatball. I will call it that, because it reminded me a bit of that, despite not having the sauce. It was all junk food, but it felt glorious to be able to get a proper vegetarian meal, and all for the price of a coffee in Bocas too.
I also got a raspado (shaved ice) from a street vendor in David. (For Spanish speakers: it's pronounced - and sometimes written - "raspao" here, because Panamanians drop the "d" like Andalusians.) It was the kind where the guy has a big block of ice and literally shaves it off with a knife when you order. He had a bunch of different fruity mixtures to put on it, but i went with coconut. While i was eating this, a massive iguana about the length of my arm started coming toward me, then climbed up the tree right next to me, where - after looking up - i realized there was a smaller but still very large iguana sitting right over my head. That was a bit scary. I moved away and then spilled shaved ice on my pants. Goddamnit.
Oh man, here we go. I was originally planning to check out a place that did pepitos for my last night in David - that's a local sandwich similar to a torta, i think - but i got sidetracked when i saw a Mexican place that did tacos al pastor. Unfortunately, most "Mexican" places in Panama take their cue from American Tex-Mex cuisine, so they have "tacos" but it's hard shell tacos with ground beef in them, or a wheat wrap with shredded chicken and a bunch of salad that should not be put into a taco. "Gringo tacos", as one Mexican restaurant i visited in the US put it. But then this place looked like it might be the real deal, and it was. These tacos cost a fortune - $15 for three - but it was worth it. The meat was turning on a spit out back. The al pastor actually came with pineapple, like it does in Mexico. The tortillas, i'm not 100% sure but it seemed like they had been hand-made. Onions, cilantro, and these weird orange-fleshed "limes" that appear to be in season here at the moment. And the hot sauce, man, it was good, spicy hot sauce. These were some solid tacos. Put a huge smile on my face.
Oh, hello, here is another Christmas cake. This is some kind of orange peel sponge thing with almonds on it. I wish i knew the names of these cakes. They are yummy. Merry Christmas. It's weird seeing Christmas trees everywhere when it's over 30 degrees (85F) every day. It's weirder hearing well-known Christmas songs translated to Spanish. But i don't care because the cakes are good. Thank you, Jesus.
Just as a point of comparison with Bocas, here are the pancakes i got at the B&B-ish hostel in Las Lajas. I'm still not a pancake fan, but these were pretty good pancakes. You could really taste the butter that they were presumably fried in, which made them feel more gluttonous than your average, boring, non-stick pan version of an American pancake. The other fantastic thing here was getting a whole banana's worth of banana, and a bunch of papaya and pineapple too. Not pictured - homemade jam. And a fantastic view. Pancakes probably do taste better when they are served to you in B&B style.
Las Lajas was a real village in the middle of nowhere. They had a pizza place, i think, and the place i went for dinner, which seemed to just be a guy with a BBQ cooking whatever meat you wanted, or burger and fries. I learned a new Spanish phrase here - "lo que sea", which was the name of this dish. It means "whatever". And that's what this dish was - a mix of everything they had in all the other dishes, on one plate. So: steak, chicken and chorizo, all cooked on the BBQ with some onions and bell pepper. Both french fries and patacones. Ketchup and mayonnaise. I spent a bunch of time talking to one of the guys who worked here, who seemed to want to practice his English. He suggested me several restaurants around Panama and good dishes to try, and he gave me a little cup of stonkingly good habanero hot sauce to dip my patacones in. It felt like i was sitting on the deck having a BBQ with my dad. Good eating. Simple. Tasty.
Here's the first time i had the famous Panamanian dish of "slab of meat with some rice and/or plantain on the side" where it tasted different from exactly what it sounds like. This was from a cafeteria in Aguadulce, their $5 lunch special. The pork cutlet was much more interesting than just a fried pork cutlet - it was glazed with some kind of pineapple sauce and then smoked, so it had a sweeter and smokier flavor. You can't tell because my phone is not very good at taking low-light photos, but the pork was red too, similar to char siu pork. Nice. The sides are potato salad, beans, rice and plantain. I think it was plantain. It might have been sweet potato. I couldn't quite place the flavor. Maybe it was a local kind of plátano maduro that was sweeter and more starchy than in other regions. Or maybe i just forgot what plantains tasted like when they aren't pataconed to within in an inch of their lives.
Okay, friends. I know you have been reading through all this going "man, food in Panama doesn't look all that great". Well here i present to you a ceviche that was like a fucking religious experience. The only other ceviche i had in my life - at the bar in Panama City a week earlier - was a bit like "yeah, it's alright, but i don't really get why food critics rave about raw fish with lime juice on it". This is why. Fucking, oh my God. This is a ceviche from a Peruvian restaurant in Aguadulce. It had red onions shaved on top. It had cilantro. It had soft hominy-like corn on the side. It had crispy half-puffed corn on top. This was like a fucking Michelin star ceviche preparation from a weird little restaurant on the edge of the Pan-American Highway in Nowheresville, Bumfuck Panama. It was so good. I can't even explain it. Ceviche is my new favorite. I will try it everywhere like tacos in Texas and compare it back to this one.
Also from the Peruvian restaurant, i got a preparation of potatoes with that famous yellow sauce that i forgot what the name of it is. I do remember from the previous (and first) time i ate Peruvian food in Wichita, Kansas, that this is a salsa made with cheese inside it, but it's not heavy like Tex-Mex queso sauce, it's sort of light and piquant, like you took the essence of cheese fondue, but somehow blended it with a pico de gallo. This is the second time in my life i have eaten Peruvian food, and by gods it's amazing. I never had the slightest interest in visiting Peru before, but now it might be nudging its way onto a bucket list destination for me. So good.
Just because i wanted to spoil myself, i got dessert as well. This is just a flan, same as flan anywhere. I also got a second bottle of expensive Peruvian beer that i didn't like the flavor near as much as the local cheap brand, and i tipped over 20%, which is a lot for Panama. Most expensive meal i've had here - by a long shot - but the cooks deserved every penny.
How could i follow that meal? I don't think anything would do it, but this Christmas cake was a pretty good effort. From a bakery in San Carlos, this is one of those dense cakes that probably has condensed milk in it to give it that springy, pudding-like texture. Can i just say fuck Bocas del Toro again, and their stupendously expensive (and shit) coffee? Because fuck that place.
Well, here i am, back in Panama City again, and it's Sunday, so half the places are closed. I took a walk toward one place that had pepitos on the menu, but there were a bunch of hookers and drug dealers on the two or three corners leading up to it, so i turned around to avoid getting myself into trouble and ended up at a "slab of meat with rice" cafeteria instead. I decided to get their tocino sandwich, hoping it would be something like a pork belly. But it wasn't, it was a BLT. Oh well. Fucking. Patacones. I am a pataconehead.
After the unexciting early dinner, i swung by the grocery store to pick up some fruit salad and popcorn for my hotel room feed. And that is what i am grazing on as i type this up. Tomorrow i will wander aimlessly around the city carrying two big bags while i wait to check in with my homestay, which will be part of my Spanish lessons over the next couple weeks.
I hope that i can find some more interesting food in the nooks and crannies of the city. So far my best experiences here have been in the smaller and less touristy country places that put a bit of their own spin on the fairly uninspiring staples ("slab of meat with patacones"). But also some of the "ethnic cuisines" have been pleasant surprises too, sometimes even better than the versions in the US or Canada. I think it'll take some digging to find the good stuff here, but i'll keep at it.