PRICE:
Frommer's Recommended

Located in the El Pueblo shopping, dining, and entertainment center, La Cocina de Leña ("The Wood Stove") is designed to invoke the ambience and vibe of a rustic rural Costa Rican home. There are stacks of firewood on shelves above the booths, long stalks of bananas hanging from pillars, tables suspended from the ceiling by heavy ropes, and, most unusual of all, menus printed on paper bags. If you're adventurous, you could try some of the more unusual dishes -- perhaps oxtail stew served with yuca and plátano might appeal to you. If not, there are plenty of steaks and seafood dishes on the menu. Chilasuilas are delicious tortillas filled with fried meat. Black-bean soup with egg is a Costa Rican standard and is mighty fine here; the corn soup with pork is equally satisfying. For dessert, there's tres leches cake as well as the more unusual sweetened chiverre, which is a type of squash that looks remarkably like a watermelon.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's Costa Rica 2009, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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