Vacation from my Vacation
After 10 very full days in Cuba, I decided obviously to step away from the computer for a brief break. My apologies for the unannounced hiatus. But after a few weeks off, I’m back and hungry.
I’m now back in Guanacaste, Costa Rica with just enough time for everyone to get geared up for the Winter. It’s absolutely amazing to see the fields, parched from the long and dry Summer go from drab and dusty browns to explosive emerald greens virtually over night.
Yesterday morning, I piled into the car with a friend of mine to drive to the nearby Santa Cruz, the seemingly forgotten Tico hub laying a bumpy forty-five minutes to the southeast. Far from any prominent position in international guide books, Santa Cruz is a long sip of Costa Rican life, streets choked with slow moving bikes, passengers hitching rides on the handlebars, street side vegetable stands, and women chatting sitting low in their laced rocking chairs on their immaculate front porches.
Locals come here to take care of their day to day business: affordable groceries, impossibly slow banking, auto repairs. As they wrap up their affairs, wait for the bus or take a break from replacing transmissions, everyone seems to pass through Co-op Tortilla, in my opinion, the greatest restaurant in the history of ever. In an effort to scrape up a few extra Colones years ago, a group of Santacruzanas began selling hand pressed tortillas door to door. Their efforts, wildly successful inspired them to set up their own little restaurant, located in a sun stained barn at the very back of town. Furnished with two 40 foot long picnic tables, this restaurant is standing room only come mid-day as anyone worth their weight in rice and beans slips in for a lunch you only wish your grandmother was capable of.
There are only a few options every day so the menu, rapidly recited by your server, is always changing. The more times you eat here the more you realize the waitresses don’t divulge all of their offerings seemingly keeping a few of their best plates a secret just for the guests in the know. Sopa Albondigas, rich chicken and vegetable soup with fist sized corn and chicken dumplings peeking through achiote tinged broth and Puerco en Salsa, salty sliced pork loin bathed in a glossy tomato sauce with chunks of carrot and onion, two plates among many, remain unmentioned only to tease us after we’ve ordered our lunch.
Arriving before the big lunch push we shared our enormous picnic table with a young couple more intent on cooing at each other than eating their quickly cooling food. As we waited on our lunch we swatted at lazy panhandling flies and watched families slurping up bowls of Caldo de Pollo and plates of scrambled eggs. Our waitress slid by laying out a jumbled pile of mismatched silver, a plate of steaming hot tortilla fresh off the wood fired comal and my little juice glass of tamarind juice saving or overloaded plastic plates for her second trip.
And then it was upon us: A quarter chicken poached in cilantro and onion broth resting on a pile of Gallo Pinto, Tico rice studded with black beans and sweet peppers and a jar of fiery pickled Panamanian chiles. I laughed as I noticed that in between each bit I would exclaim “oh this is sooo good” before jamming another bite of rice and chile in my mouth. These little local smoke filled corners always end up my personal reminders that life, despite all of our efforts, is simple and best enjoyed with a crispy tortilla.
