Dining in Cochabamba

Street Food

At the cheapest end of the spectrum, was street food from the market.  I ordered a Meal Completo for lunch, which basically includes a soup and a main dish.

There were many stores at the market that served food, and I could hardly understand what to order as the menu was in Spanish and some dishes are rather local.  I finally settled into a street store, where the guy was a little more patient in explaining to me about some of the dishes.

So I ordered a Soup Mani, which is a soup with some pasta pieces and some potato chips in it.  Funny combination, but it tasted fairly good.

For main I had the option of deciding between Albondigas (according to my phrasebook it means meatball) or Saice.  As I didn’t know what Saice was, I decided to be adventurous and give it a try.  When the dish came, I made it out to be minced meat cooked in a sauce and served with rice.  Rather tasty!  And all this for just 10 Pesos (less than S$2)!

Casa de Campo

I usually don’t follow recommendations from Lonely Planet, but a couple other people also recommended this place, and so decided to check it out.  It is definitely on the other opposite end of the price spectrum as compared to the street food. 

In the menu, Casa de Campo was promoted to be the 1st touristic restaurant in Bolivia, and offers a wide range of local cuisine.  It is set in a rather modern setting in the northern part of the city, which seems to be the more wealthier part of Cochabamba, with dishes averaging between Peso 48 to Peso 60 per main (more than 5 times more expensive than food in the streets)

Even though the food menu here was both in Bolivian and English, the diverse offerings in the menu made choosing an item difficult.  I finally decided on a dish which comprised of pork ribs cooked in an orange flavoured based sauce served with vegetables and potato chips. 

When the dish came, it was HUGE, and extremely tasty!

As I looked around the crowd that patronise the restaurant seems to be businessmen and tend to dress more up class, compared to the scenes I had seen earlier in the streets.

The interesting thing about the crowd was that this place seems to be popular among the locals for playing cancha (dice game), and drinking some bottled liquor. 

A couple of tables around me were playing it, and the general gist I get was that each person takes their turn to throw a total of 5 dice.  I am assuming that there is a certain amount of number that they should try to throw at each turn, but anything more than that I do not have any indications. 

The King is in town

I haven’t seen any international fast food chain since I arrived into Bolivia, so to see a Burger King here in Cochabamba grew some interest from me.  1stly it is the 1st time I see a fast food chain in a small town, which was not a McDonald’s, and 2ndly, I was also interested to find out how much they would charge in a 3rd world country like Bolivia. 

I didn’t eat here, but comparing prices it seems fairly similar, if not just slightly cheaper than Singapore, and considering the wages that is earned by Bolivians as well as the standard of living, I doubt this is a place which the low class actually patronise. 

But there sure was quite a fair bit of crowd at Burger King!