Review: La Concina de Leña, San Jose, Costa Rica

After a little interruption from Argentina I'm reverting back to the journey I have taken from Central America!  San Jose is not one of my favourite cities.  In fact I don’t really enjoy spending time there….however, you tend to find yourself there for the odd night in between going to different places in Costa Rica.  We followed the Lonely Planet’s advise for a good restaurant and were not let down.

La Concina de Leña is part of a small complex of shops, restaurants and bars called El Pueblo, so it did take a bit of searching for.  When we arrived we checked and double checked that this was the same fairly ‘budget’ restaurant from the Lonely Planet as it looked very upmarket!  However, it was so we went ahead and took a table.  The decor is quite cute and very homey and if you go on the right night there is live marimba playing.

The restaurant is cute and the staff are incredibly friendly and clearly love food which is always great.  the menu is packed full of typical dishes to try but after much debate I decided to order the casado tipico as we have discovered that you can rarely go wrong with ordering a casado and they are always a little different which keeps it an interesting order.

We were first given pita bread with a variety of dips which were yummy!  This was a really nice extra touch that we had not been expecting.

Then the casado came – wow, it was beautifully presented and tasted really good.  The meat – pork, was cooked perfectly and marinated with lime.  The plantain was really soft and sweet, and the fried egg perfectly runny.  There was an extra touch on this dish which I’ve not had before on a casdao which was a potato salad – similar to Bombay potatoes.  Great restaurant!