"The Best Restaurant in Costa Rica"

You know what this is-- you're in a foreign country riding around with your head bobbing and avoiding potholes with a friend who has local knowledge, when he tells you he's got a great restaurant that nobody knows about, that's cheap, with large portions, that's free from "tourists" (as if tourist money is soaked in cat urine) with a waitresses that looks like a TV spokes model. You're thinking, "Here we go".

Situations like this always remind me of a joke in a movie where a guy tells another guy sitting next to him in a bar that he "knows a place where you can go..." and get all you can eat, all you can drink and have as much sex as you want for 2 dollars. When the guy asks him "where", in breathless anticipation, the first guy answers, "I don't know, but my sister goes there all the time." It's the joke I use every time some recommends a great place to eat cheap that sounds too good to be true. It always gets a laugh.

Nevertheless, there I am riding around San Jose, Coasta Rica griping to my driver, Carlito Morgan about the damned mall food we've been eating, and what else is available (Outback Steak-burgers, Hooter's wings, or Subway) when it dawns on him-- he recalls "the best restaurant in the country, and it's a hole in the wall that you could not find with a GPS if you had 20 years".

He doesn't know the name of the road, because the country never named the roads, but he knows how to get there by landmarks. So I expect to walk into a place that looks like the photos here, with no parking, with an alley entrance. No surprise there. But what follow was worth writing about, which is why your reading this.

If I were an Iron Chef, I'd have a lot of descriptive things to say about the best place to eat in San Jose, but I'm not, so I won't. I took pictures, and the food was grand.

I'll just say the food was extraordinary, fresh, tasty, beautiful, and under priced, but for the hard location. I started with Ceviche, and moved on to a soup, and I'll do it again-- every time I go to San Jose. It was all fresh and perfect, and the place was comfortable, friendly and busy enough to mean rapid turnover.

The hole lunch was about $18 dollars for both of us, and we drank beers. So, it's worth seeking out these places if you can get a tip. I don't know the name of this place because nobody I know who goes there bothers to get the name of the place, but if you email Palmmgt.com, where someone can help you find your way to it.


Here are photos of the ceviche, and the soup, and the beer.