I love to sample new foods and I'd like to try out local foods. Hojaldres For example, Panama is equivalent to deep-fried dough and when you serve breakfast you can feel like you are getting eggs at the fair.
In a place that looks beautiful and has a nice atmosphere, travelers tend to eat. Naturally, it is a pleasant place to visit because it offers high-end foods that appeal to tourists' tongues. However, they are usually expensive and not always provide the best food in all honesty.
Most local joints usually do not look cleanest from the outside, in some cases overlooking horrible things. I am afraid of trying to eat new places, but sometimes I paid a very valuable price for my courage.
Once I stopped at a small restaurant in Riberamaya, Mexico just south of Cancun. It consists of two plastic tables sitting outside a small cement house. They were sitting there, but they seemed to be family. I thought it was the best way to meet people and at the same time try local things, so I sat on a red plastic table and ordered a bowl of seafood soup.
Great mistake.
The soup looked very interesting. It has fish, squid, shrimp and shellfish, yucca, carrots and potatoes, and in the middle of the bowl still seashell oysters. Soup in Central America often requires some work. Corn ears are picked up and nippled, or parts of the pig still remain in the bones. So I gladly attacked the big sea shell and ingested the content.
Until today I do not know the fact that it is oyster in the shell or potentially washed shell in my soup and it has been carried to the toilet for the next two weeks. In either case, the result was not desirable.
So, how can you locate local food so that you can be sure that you will not have similar results to you?
Please look for the crowd.
Local people do not want to get sick more than you are doing.
It is not an ideal situation and it is not an ideal situation in places that have not undergone significant change from customers. Local people know where to find the best food with the best food. But they also know where to find foods that are not sick.
Central America is a wonderful free place without regulations and regulations to keep people from opening their own small business. It is wonderful as it allows small families to open the dining room with minimal disturbance. That means that the kitchen is not sanitary or the food is not fresh.
So please follow local people. Please go to where you see the crowd. You can stop by someone's table and even hear what they are recommending in the menu. They will gladly ask you to express your opinion and thank you.
When I lived in Mexico, I went to a small seafood place in La Colonia (a poor part of a famous and adorable fishing village). Most of the time was packed. Again, there was a red plastic table. But this time people were going out, talking, laughing and throwing the soup everywhere.
When I first sat down for the first time I tilted up and there was the best on the menu or a nice Mexican man wore a nice button and asked. He recommended seafood soup. As I mentioned earlier, I already had seafood soup experience.
But I was not afraid (because I ordered the bowl). Again, I found a bowl of shrimp, fish, squid and shellfish. I think that I also had an octopus. This time, it was hung on top of the huge cereals and got a fresh slice of avocado and lime. I added a little hot sauce (I kill the bacteria, Mexicans thought that the food became hot) and I dig.
Great!
That small restaurant became my favorite La Colonia joint and in the middle of next year I was able to know the owner, brothers and many people who lived in the town by piercing the soup bowl down.
I learned the lesson.
Please follow the crowd.
