panama nyt resto guide

7/26/2019 Panama NYT Resto guide

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11/2/2014 In Panama City, Mixing Global and Local Flavors - NYTimes.com

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TRAVEL | HEADS UP

In Panama City, Mixing Global and LocalFlavors

By NICHOLAS GILL MARCH 18, 2014

One hundred years after the opening of the Panama Canal — which

continues to bring in immigrants of different ethnicities whose foods

dominate Panama City’s culinary scene — a new Panamanian cuisine is

emerging, one that looks inward while embracing its diversity. Panama

City, admittedly, has very few original dishes. You are more likely to dine

on spanakopita or chow mein than saus, pickled pig’s feet or the chicken

stew called sancocho. That’s changing. Everywhere you look, ambitious

young chefs and entrepreneurs are adapting local ingredients to global

trends, ranging from Southern barbecue to Japanese-Peruvian fusion.

The movement is being pushed along by Panama Gastronomica, an

annual event since 2010 that brings in foreign chefs to Panama City to

lecture culinary students. The late August conference is set within a

larger, public festival that showcases Panamanian restaurants and

products, ranging from food trucks like La Tapa de Coco selling Afro-

Panamanian dishes to Proyecto Paila, a forward thinking culinary

collective, selling hot sauces made from the native ají chombo pepper.

“We have all the elements to inspire us: products, a beautiful country

with history, a group of restless chefs from diverse backgrounds,” said

Elena Hernández, president of Panama Gastronomica, who runs a

cooking school. “It’s a historical moment in which cuisine has become

very important.”

AtHumo (Calle 70 Este, at Avenida 5C Sur; 507-203-7313;

humopanama.com) in the San Francisco neighborhood, the owner and

the executive chef Mario Castrellón adapts American barbecue to





Panamanian ingredients. You’ll find brisket that has been smoked with

nance wood ($17) and farm-raised octopus with sugar cane syrup ($11).

Much of the produce comes from Mr. Castrellón’s four-year-old

restaurant Maito (Calle 50E and Calle 79E; 507-391-4657;

maitopanama.com) nearby, which has an organic garden of more than

1,000 square feet, growing culantro, ají chombo, ñame (a root vegetable)

and micro sprouts. The restaurant offers 10-course-tasting menus ($50)

reflecting the history of the canal, incorporating the different ethnicities

involved in its creation and the plants and animals around it, in dishes

like Ta-Bien, a banana-leaf-wrapped Afro-Antillean seafood stew-filled

tamal, and won ton soup flavored with achiote.

“All of the people that passed through left us with a bit of their

culture,” Mr. Castrellón said. “The Chinese gave us bistec picado.

Antilleans gave us our tasty octopus with coconut. The Spanish our

sancochado.”

The Spanish chef Andrés Madrigal once helmed various Madrid

restaurants such as Balzac and Alboroque. Last August, he opened

Madrigal (Avenida A at Calle Fifth Oeste; 507-211-1956) in a beautifully

renovated two-level building in the Casco Viejo historic district.Surprisingly 90 percent of the ingredients are Panamanian, like the little-

known root vegetable otoe, but he’s putting his own spin on them, like

stuffing canelones with ropa vieja ($14) or creating an inverse cheese tart

inspired by the Valle de Antón, a town in the crater of an inactive volcano

($8), with chocolate crumbles standing in for volcanic soil that’s topped

with edible flowers.

Aided by prize money from a competition at Panama Gastronomica2012, Hernán Correa Riesen opened Riesen (Calle D, Casa 16; 507-264-

0473; riesenpanama.com) in January 2013 in a small space in El

Cangrejo. There are fewer than a dozen plates driven by what he can get

that day from local farmers and fishermen, like hojaldre con lechona

($9), a sort of Panamanian fry bread topped like a taco with tender pork

and culantro cream, and yucca churros ($9), served with shredded beef

and a guava barbecue sauce.The most eclectic menu can be found at La Trona on the second floor





of the former residence of a queen of the traditional folkloric pollera

costume, known for her over-the-top style. La Trona (Calle 48, Bella

Vista; 507-396-9230) is decorated with coffered ceilings, red curtains,

wrought-iron windows and gaudy Renaissance-style oil paintings. In this

two-year-old restaurant, the young chef Alfonso de la Espriella’s menu

jumps around from the Mediterranean to South America, not shying

away from pairing Peruvian huancaina sauce ($17.75) with locally caught

grouper or sriracha mayonnaise with crab cakes ($14).

In the posh Bristol boutique hotel at Salsipuedes (Avenida

Aquilino de la Guardia, 507-264-0000; salsipuedespanama.com), named

after a landmark street of Chinese and Panamanian merchants that dates

to the 17th century, the celebrity chef Cuquita Arias de Calvo

contemporizes regional dishes and ingredients. A Panamanian sampler

board ($14) lays out artisanal chorizos, smoked beef pâté, cassava fritters,

ají chombo hot pepper jelly and michita, a traditional egg bread baked in

a wood fired oven. Her most popular dish? A degustation of arroz con

leche ($13.50): rum raisin, key lime pie, pineapple rice and eggnog.

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2014, on page TR4 of the New York

edition with the headline: Panama City Brings the World’s Flavors to Its Tables.

© 2014 The New York Times Company

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